Sunday, March 04, 2007

India pics: Pushkar

I spent my last two days in the the little holy city of Pushkar, little more than a few hundred temples in various styles around a sacred lake until the tourists showed up. The holiest temples were off limits to non-Hindus (unless, I was told later, the non-Hindus are bearing baksheesh) so my pictures are only from the gates, except for the Brahma mandir (the red one), my visits to which I described at the time.
These are all pretty grand, but after a while you notice that practically every building houses a temple of some kind, grand or shabby (or shabby-grand, an Indian specialty), spilling well beyond the 52 ghats (one built by each maharaja of Rajasthan) and up into the surrounding hills. It would have been more representative to have shown you one of the unassuming temples, but I foolishly forgot to take a picture of one of them - how would you decide which one to choose? None of them stands out...! Most of the buildings - even the grand ones - are not very old, since Aurangzeb, the last and most iconoclastic of the Mughal emperors, took the occasion of a visit to the Dargah in Ajmer to pop over to Pushkar to smash some idols.
The lake is especially nice at sunset and at sunrise. The place to got for sunset, however, is the temple of Savitri.
From it (even if you don't make it to the summit...!) you get a nice view of Pushkar
and can see why this little spot of clear blue in the midst of a dry rugged landscape will have demanded supernatural explanation and celebration.
To close, here's a picture of the water on the lake just as the sun rises above the mountains to the east, taken just after the one I posted at the time.