Pilliarpatty, Murugan, Balaji, Laxmi, Saraswathi—these are the Hindu gods gleaming on a sticker attached to the passenger-side dashboard of the car. The metallic reds and greens catch the early morning sunlight as my driver, Michael, a Roman Catholic, plunges into the swirling traffic near the hotel that has provided our car. We converse in halting English as we head for the site of the martyrdom of Thomas the Apostle, “Doubting Thomas,” who brought Christianity to India during the first century AD.

Chennai (formerly known as Madras), South India’s largest city and the capital of the state of Tamil Nadu, lies on the southeastern coast along the Bay of Bengal. It’s a dynamic city with an easygoing cosmopolitan appeal, unlike Mumbai (the former Bombay), which is fast and flashy in its urbanity. Chennai boasts one of the longest urban beaches in the world, a very active and quarrelsome political culture, some good universities, and a thriving film industry. The city is also home to important Christian pilgrimage sites and serves as the entry point for Mahabalipuram, a town some 58 kilometers south, which is renowned for its sculpted Hindu temples. With structures that date from 600 AD, Mahabalipuram has been designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

Thanks to these Christian and Hindu cultural treasures, and the general appeal of the city, Chennai is home to one of India’s most significant tourist corridors—the East Coast Road, which stretches south from the city to Mahabalipuram. The route is important thanks in large part to pilgrimage tourism, which represents about 30 percent of the state’s total tourist arrivals. The state government estimates that nearly 6.9 million tourists visit religious sites and attend festivals. Chennai highlights India’s Christian heritage, serves as a jumping-off point for temples elsewhere in the state, and offers vast stretches of unspoiled coastline. To capitalize on the influx of pilgrims and other tourists, the East Coast Road was developed with funds from the World Bank.

Michael is a good guide and he knows the area well. He is in his 50s, graying a little, with razor stubble suggesting that he probably slept in the car last night, as Indian drivers often do when they are on call. But his uniform is crisp and clean. We are a few days from Easter, and Michael will have a long weekend holiday to spend at church and with his family. India is officially a secular republic, though considerable energies are spent on religious matters—Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Sikh. Everyone takes everyone else’s holidays. The upcoming holiday weekend will also be a boon for the tourist industry, as Easter falls in mid-April when the schools are between terms.

Two sites sacred to St. Thomas lie in southern Chennai, near the start of the East Coast Road. Thomas Mount is a small hill with 134 steps leading to the summit where St. Thomas was martyred. According to tradition, as the Apostles set out from the holy lands to spread the gospel to the world, Thomas sailed to India, landing on the southwest coast in 52 AD. He ventured eastward, teaching and baptizing until he arrived here on the Bay of Bengal, at the small fishing settlements that eventually became the city of Chennai. His performing of miracles angered some of the local leaders, and he was killed in 68 AD—run through with a lance. A small church was built later, and the area has been an important pilgrimage site for Christians, who are a strong minority in the state, and others from abroad.

At nearby Mylapore, also called Little Mount, where Thomas called forth water from a rock (the spring still flows today), there is a series of statues showing the key events of the Way of the Cross—Jesus forced to wear the crown of thorns, Simon taking the cross to carry after Jesus stumbled, the nails being hammered into Jesus’s wrists. If the scenes are graphic, they seem intentionally so. Indian culture is very visual. Temples are intricately sculpted and often brightly colored, with statues, paintings, and scenes to tell the stories of the gods. The scene here shows Thomas kneeling before Jesus (see below, at left). The pedestal reads, “My Lord and my God.” These are the words Doubting Thomas utters after he has touched Jesus’s wounds, his condition for believing that his teacher has risen from the dead. To the right, another set of figures shows Thomas preaching to Indians with great fervor, gesticulating and pointing upward. Behind it, on another property, lies a satellite dish.

Michael and I go back to the car and head south on the East Coast Road. It seems much like the highways in Florida in the 1950s and ’60s, when the new interstate system and a growing economy encouraged families to travel for their vacations. Along the East Coast Road, vast expanses of open seafront and scrub are interrupted by tourist resorts (posh and budget), amusements parks, wildlife attractions, and roadside stalls selling coconuts and shells.

“The road is good,” Michael points out. The last time I was here, some seven years ago, this was a narrow two-lane. Today it is a beautiful ribbon of black asphalt, with wide shoulders and a new multilane tollbooth, where we pay our 45 rupees (about a dollar, which is high for a toll in India). When the attendant does not have change for my 50 rupee note, he hands me a fresh newspaper, the business section, instead. Signs caution, “Avoid Over Speed.”

We stop at VGP Universal Kingdom, an amusement park that offers beach access, seaside villas, and a large handicraft emporium in a separate facility. The name comes from Mr. V. G. Panneerdas, chairman and founder of the business group that began in 1955 and is currently involved in retailing, real estate, the leisure industry, and other concerns. The collection of facilities here draws some 2 million visitors per year.

The first sight in Universal Kingdom is Statue Man, a gentleman dressed as a maharaja, an Indian prince, frozen in his pose like a street performer in New York. Behind him, the park is laid out broadly, with a fort at the center—a large colonnade with red Hindu temple-styled columns, with elephants and warriors jutting out of the upper sections. One end of the colonnade opens to an enclosure with spotted deer.

It’s still early in the day, so the school groups have not yet arrived. Most of the rides (a roller coaster with a splashdown, go-carts, the swinging ship) are idle. Some families are enjoying picnics on the lush grass. Some are wandering out to the beach. U2’s “Beautiful Day” plays over the loudspeakers.

By the time we get to MGM Dizzee World, several kilometers down the road, the kids have arrived. Busloads of schoolgirls, all in identical green jumpers and with white or orange jasmine in their braided ponytails, are bursting through the turnstiles. Beneath a tilting Ferris wheel, I meet a group of seventh graders, led by a girl named Aishwarya. When I note that she shares a name with India’s most beautiful film star, they all burst into giggles and scatter away.


Dizzee World is decked out in a pan-cultural theme. In addition to a generous assortment of rides and games, guests may stroll along a colorful Paris street or stop off at the sheriff’s office in Western Land, a Dodge City-looking place with plenty of high and low vantage points for a shootout. Other rides have Indian themes. Kuttralam, a water slide, pays homage to South India’s largest waterfall and popular tourist destination, and the girls who climb aboard the Niligri Express (a tilt-a-whirl) have probably also felt their stomachs in their throats as its real-life counterpart—a train—wound its way through the Western Ghats, India’s highest mountains south of the Himalayas. If you can think of a popular ride, it’s probably here, from roller coasters, bumper cars and boats, to the simulated journey through space in the hydraulic car that jostles and dives while the people inside watch the video screen.

Down the East Coast Road from Dizzee World is the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust Centre for Herpetology, a nonprofit education and research center. There is plenty of information about the center and its activities, but because I grew up in Florida, I recognize this place right away—it’s a gator farm. The park has dozens of sunken brick enclosures for the lizards to enjoy the Indian sunshine filtering through lush trees before they retire to the murky shallows of the pool. The center tank is a train wreck of marsh crocs, called muggers, piled on top of each other, some with their jaws cocked open. Like Statue Man, they appear frozen in tableau, though every minute or so a few will shift to optimize the sunlight or take a dip. A sign on the wire fence above the brick warns that crocodiles can jump.

I am intrigued by the monitor lizards, having seen them on Animal Planet back at the hotel the night before. The program followed the trials of a hatchling, the lone survivor of another monitor’s raid on the nest to eat the eggs. Fully grown, they are the length of a medium-sized gator, though faster and more lethal. The smaller ones can climb trees. I step back when this monitor comes over to the brick wall (no fence), trailing behind its two-foot forked tongue.

Things are calmer in the adjacent tank. There in all his understated glory is the ol’ gator himself (alligator mississippiensis) in his rightful posture as Lord of the Swamp—just two eyes and snout above water, unlike his tacky cousins, the muggers, letting it all hang out a few doors down.

If gators enjoy a glamorous reputation in Florida, it’s turtles that have a following in India. No Hindu temple tank is without one. Turtles are believed to be one of the vehicles of the goddess Yamuna and one of the incarnations of Vishnu. Indeed, turtles are also popular at shrines and temples in Burma and Malaysia, where the faithful believe that bringing them to the temples will ensure good fortune in the next life. The Crocodile Bank Trust has a nice display of Indian soft-shell turtles and the dangers they face as their natural habitats are destroyed.

The Crocodile Bank Trust is more than a gator farm, of course. It supports research in India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands and provides crocodiles, gharials, gators, snakes, and other animals to zoos in Singapore, Denmark, Bangladesh, Israel, and throughout India.

Back at the car, Michael is ready for lunch, so we continue down the road. Mahabalipuram is only a few kilometers away, and he knows a good place to stop. We dine at a good middle-class hotel on omelettes, lentils, and rice. There is a power cut, quite common in India, so when it comes time to pay the bill, the staff crank up a generator to power the cash register.

Mahabalipuram, which is also called Mamallapuram, marks the end of the tourist corridor south from Chennai along the East Coast Road. Its collection of temples and pavilions is world renowned. They are not structures built with mortar and stone but are carved monoliths of granite, which protrude from the ground like the backs of whales. With ornate figures of the gods and delicate columns, the shrines are thus works of sculpture, not architecture. Research suggests that Mahabalipuram in 600 AD was not a religious site but a showcase for the talents of local sculptors, who were then commissioned to work in other parts of India. Mahabalipuram was supported by the Pallava dynasty that ruled much of the South and whose influence in art and architecture was widespread. Today there is still a large community of sculptors and stone cutters, whose expertise is often sought for temple projects throughout the country.

My favorite thing at Mahabalipuram is not a temple at all but the enormous round boulder resting precipitously on an outcrop of granite. “Krishna’s Butter Ball” looks like the raw material for one of the sculpted temples, so it’s easy to imagine what this area must have looked like some 1,400 years ago when the Pallava dynasty began to commission the stonework. The area still retains its charm, though it’s becoming crowded with budget hotels, Internet cafes, and shops.

I wander to the beach and meet two young brothers, whose names translate from Tamil as Sam Wisdom and Sam Quality. They are tourists from Coimbatore, a medium-sized city in the western part of the state. Sam Wisdom is a Christian evangelist and Sam Quality a computer programmer. They are good company here in a town that has welcomed tourists for more than a thousand years. At a stall, we all order green coconuts. The salesman punctures them and inserts straws. In the ancient evening, we sip coconut water and listen to the distant hammers of the stone masons, the rolling waves, and the kids at their games.