Blog 3 – Festivities

This blog post will be a touch shorter, yet I couldn’t resist dedicating an entire entry to the Wooden Chariot Festival—it’s unlike anything I’ve ever witnessed.

To give you some background, Kanchipuram is renowned for three primary attractions: its sarees, its temples, and its idlis. And today, it was the temples’ moment in the spotlight.

In Kanchipuram, the two most celebrated temples are the Perumal (Vishnu) temple and the Shiva temple. The exact nature of the relationship between these two is unclear to me, but there’s definitely a sense of friendly rivalry. During the festival, an idol from the Perumal temple was grandly paraded in a towering chariot six or seven stories high. It was hauled through the streets by hundreds of dedicated devotees, all while tens of thousands of spectators gathered to watch. I snagged an excellent view from a relative’s balcony.

The streets were filled with music, laughter, excitement, as the hundreds of devotees pulled the chariot by rope as if a game of tug of war. The chariot was carried from the perumal temple to the shiva temple and back, a total of ~10 km. I wish I could share my own videos, but these pictures will have to do – it was truly a sight to see.