MANSIONS OF CHETTINAD HB.

Twenty years ago, I took my first journey down the Coromandel Coast to the Shore Temple at Mahabalipuram and then inland to a region I'd heard of called Chettinad. It was largely impulse that led me along routes trafficked mainly then by bullock carts to detour into a semi-arid region where palm-lined lanes traced vectors through the Tamil heartland. Each led further into a place that seemed, upon first encounter, to have been slumbering in prolonged hibernation. In a time before mobile communication became ubiquitous, the villages of Chettinad felt moated by a distance as much temporal as physical. It was dreamlike to happen upon villages that arose from a placid landscape like places in fable -mansions neatly arrayed along dirt lanes, row upon row of them, in what then seemed the back of beyond ....

Binding Hardbound, Language English ....