Was I ten or was I twenty-two when I fell in love with Madurai? I am not sure. Loves are like that, scrunching and compressing precise timelines into irrelevancy.
I’ve visited Madurai nearly every year. It’s a city that almost never sleeps, has been lived in for more than two thousand years, has food to die for and arresting architecture, once you go past the usual traffic-jammed modern bits.
And for the past thousand or so years, the centre of the city has been the magnificent Meenakshi Temple. Four huge gopurams act as lodestars for the area and with set a of interlocking, directional streets, each with their own set of characteristics, life teems here.
It’s the first time in a while I haven’t been able to visit, so I’ve been busying myself in reprocessing photos I’ve taken over the years. Most of these were shot on a Zenit E with Kodak Tri-X and Ilford film.
What’s a temple without intense devotion and detailed, larger than life sculpture?
The vaulted outer arcades, full of shops selling everything.
The ring of streets around have brilliant food, not always healthy, but so good.