Tamil Nadu

Madurai is among the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth — it appears in Greek accounts from the third century BCE and hosted the Sangam literary academies that produced classical Tamil poetry — and it remains the state's spiritual centre. The Meenakshi Amman temple is the reason to come: a complex of some six hectares with fourteen gopurams, the tallest over fifty metres, tens of thousands of painted sculptures, a golden lotus tank, and corridors functioning as a self-contained city of shops, halls and shrines. The thousand-pillar hall is nearer nine hundred and eighty-five, each carved from a single granite block, several of them producing musical notes when struck. The evening ceremony, in which the god is carried in procession to the goddess's chamber before the temple closes, is the thing to time a visit around. Non-Hindus may enter most of the complex but not the inner sanctums. In town, the seventeenth-century Nayak palace shows the Dravidian-Islamic hybrid style at its most confident, and the Gandhi Memorial Museum, in a former palace pavilion, is a serious account of the independence movement.

The Brihadeeswara temple at Thanjavur, completed by Rajaraja I in 1010, is the high point of South Indian temple building and a UNESCO site. Its tower rises sixty-six metres, the tallest of its era, capped by a granite block weighing some eighty tonnes that was hauled to the summit up an earthen ramp kilometres long — the engineering still invites explanation. The Nandi bull at the entrance is carved from a single rock, and inside the circumambulatory passage are eleventh-century Chola frescoes found beneath later overpainting, among the finest surviving Chola painting anywhere. Entry is free and the temple is in active worship. Two more UNESCO Chola temples sit within a short drive: Gangaikondacholapuram, built by Rajendra Chola to mark his campaign to the Ganges, with the same ambition and a fraction of the visitors, and Darasuram near Kumbakonam, the most finely carved of the three. Thanjavur's palace and its Saraswathi Mahal library — palm-leaf manuscripts and illustrated medical texts, one of the oldest libraries in Asia — round out the town. Kumbakonam itself, temple-dense and largely untouristed, is the delta's best base.

Mamallapuram's seventh- and eighth-century monuments belong to the Pallava dynasty, and they are a different proposition from the Chola temples inland: rock-cut rather than built, experimental rather than perfected, and carved directly from the granite outcrops of the shore. The open-air bas-relief usually called Arjuna's Penance is the masterpiece — a granite face some twenty-seven metres across worked with over a hundred figures of gods, sages, animals and celestial beings around a natural cleft that once carried water. The Five Rathas are monolithic temples each cut from a single boulder in a different architectural idiom, effectively a set of full-scale sketches for what South Indian temples would become. Kanchipuram, inland, is the other Pallava centre and one of Hinduism's seven sacred cities: a town of major temples across several dynasties, and the source of the silk saris that carry its name, still woven on handlooms in the surrounding streets. Mamallapuram's own stone-carving trade never stopped — workshops along the main road still cut granite by hand using Pallava methods, which is worth an hour on its own. As a day trip from the capital, the site is covered on the Chennai city guide.

Pondicherry was French until 1954, and its seafront quarter still shows it: ochre and grey colonial buildings behind bougainvillea, French street names, a promenade closed to traffic in the evenings, and a genuine café culture. The interest is in the join — the old French town and the Tamil town beside it are two distinct urban grammars a street apart, and walking between them is the point rather than photographing either. The Aurobindo Ashram in town and the experimental township of Auroville outside it, built around a golden meditation sphere, give the place a long association with spiritual seekers of various seriousness. The cooking is a real hybrid rather than a marketing one, and the town is small enough to cover by bicycle. South of it, Arikamedu was a Roman trading post two thousand years ago, and beads excavated there match finds at Pompeii — a reminder that this coast was connected to the Mediterranean long before any European colony. Further down, Tranquebar was Danish, with a fort on the beach, and is one of the quietest and strangest colonial remnants in India.

The Nilgiri hills in the Western Ghats hold the state's hill stations, established by the British to escape the plains. Ooty is the best known and the busiest, at over two thousand metres, and the way to arrive is the Nilgiri Mountain Railway — a UNESCO-listed rack-and-pinion line from Mettupalayam that climbs through sixteen tunnels and more than two hundred bridges in about five hours, through tea gardens and eucalyptus forest. The journey is the attraction; the town at the end is a busy hill resort with botanical gardens and a lake. Coonoor, lower and quieter, is the better base for tea country and walking, and Kotagiri quieter still. Kodaikanal, in the Palani hills further south, is the more atmospheric of the two big hill stations: a lake ringed by forest, a cliff walk with long views over the plains, and a slower pace. All of them fill with domestic visitors at weekends and holidays, so midweek is a different place. April to June is the escape-the-heat season and September to November brings the clearest post-monsoon air; midwinter nights get genuinely cold.

The Chettinad region, a cluster of villages south of Madurai, is one of India's more extraordinary cultural landscapes. The Nattukottai Chettiars made fortunes trading across Southeast Asia through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and brought the money home to build mansions in their ancestral villages — houses of fifty rooms and more, with Italian marble floors, Burmese teak pillars, Belgian chandeliers and hand-painted tiles, arranged around long open courtyards. The community dispersed and many of the houses are now decaying, which gives the villages around Kanadukathan and Karaikudi their particular atmosphere: astonishing craftsmanship, gently collapsing. Several have become heritage hotels, and a stay is the easiest way to see the interiors properly. The cuisine that came out of the same trading history is the state's most famous — pepper-forward and aromatic, using star anise and the lichen called kalpasi, with a strong non-vegetarian repertoire that most Tamil cooking does not have. The handmade Athangudi tiles that floor these houses are still produced locally, and the workshops take visitors.

Where the southern canon sits within Indian cooking as a whole is set out in the India food guide; what the state adds is range and rigour. The everyday form is the banana-leaf meal — rice with a sequence of vegetable dishes, sambar, rasam and curd, served and replenished by hand, eaten by hand, ending with the leaf folded towards you. Breakfast is its own institution: idli and dosa with sambar and chutney, and filter coffee poured between tumbler and dabara. Beyond that the state divides: Chettinad's peppery, aromatic non-vegetarian cooking in the south-east, the Kongunadu food of the western districts, temple kitchens producing prasadam at enormous scale, and the coast's fish preparations. Madurai has its own late-night eating culture around the temple. Two practical notes: many restaurants are pure vegetarian and say so plainly on the sign, and the state's alcohol retail is restricted to government-run shops and licensed premises, with dry days on certain holidays — which is worth knowing rather than discovering.

The capital anchors the state's transport and has its own guide; from there the classic route runs down the coast to Pondicherry and Mamallapuram, inland to the Chola delta around Thanjavur and Kumbakonam, on to Madurai, and either south-east into Chettinad or west up into the Nilgiris. The state bus network is among the best in India — frequent, cheap and reaching everywhere — and the trains are comfortable on the main lines, while a car with a driver is what most visitors use for the temple circuit, since the sites are spread across small towns. On climate: the plains are hot year-round and the coast takes its heaviest rain from the north-east monsoon between October and December, which is the opposite of most of India; the hills are cool and follow their own pattern. On temples, four rules cover almost everything: dress modestly with shoulders and knees covered, remove shoes at the entrance, expect non-Hindus to be welcome in the complex but not the inner sanctum, and check the hours, because most temples close through the middle of the day and reopen in the late afternoon.