Tamil Nadu: A Land of Temples, Tides, and the Long View

There is a stretch of track that runs out across the sea between Mandapam, on the southern tip of mainland India, and the small pilgrimage island of Rameswaram. For most of the last century, trains crossed it on a cantilever bridge built in 1914, a piece of British colonial engineering whose middle section opened sideways to let ships pass beneath. In April 2025, Indian Railways replaced it with the New Pamban Bridge, the country’s first vertical-lift railway sea bridge: just over two kilometres long, with a central span that rises seventeen metres in the air to let vessels through. Photographs of the new bridge made their way around the internet earlier this year, and they are the kind of photographs that explain why people fall for Tamil Nadu without ever having been there. A train, a flat sheet of pale blue water, a structure that looks like it belongs to a more optimistic century than the one we have.

Tamil Nadu, the state at the southeastern tip of the Indian peninsula, is a place where this kind of juxtaposition is the rule rather than the exception. Six hundred miles of coastline on the Bay of Bengal. Inland, the granite shoulders of the Western Ghats. Three thousand years of continuous civilisation in between, and a state animal (the Nilgiri tahr, an endangered mountain ungulate that lives nowhere else on earth) that you can find on the same trip as a coral reef. For a magazine readership that cares about the ocean and the people who live near it, it is hard to think of a destination that rewards the effort more.

Three thousand years of continuous civilisation in between, and a state animal you can find on the same trip as a coral reef.

A long civilisation, lightly worn

Tamil is one of the world’s oldest classical languages, with a literary tradition that runs more or less continuously from the Sangam period, conventionally dated between roughly 300 BCE and 300 CE, down to the present. The Sangam poems are still studied and still read aloud, and they are the reason Tamil Nadu carries itself with a particular kind of cultural confidence. Most of the rest of South Asia inherited its high culture from somewhere; Tamil culture, in many respects, is the inheritance.

You feel this most clearly in the temples. The state has been called the land of temples for good reason. The Pallava, Chola, and Pandya dynasties built across more than a millennium, and the Brihadeeswarar Temple at Thanjavur, completed under the Chola king Rajaraja I around 1010 CE, still has one of the tallest temple towers in southern India, its central vimana rising roughly sixty-six metres over a granite courtyard. The Meenakshi Temple at Madurai, with its painted gopurams crowded with figures, is perhaps the more photographed of the two, and for good reason: there is something about a wall that has been continuously painted and repainted for centuries that you cannot really fake.

A small note on geography that confuses first-time visitors: Pondicherry, the former French colonial enclave on the Coromandel Coast, is administratively a Union Territory rather than part of Tamil Nadu, but it is surrounded by Tamil Nadu on three sides and shares the same culture and language. If you are flying into the region, you can move between French-colonial Pondicherry and the Tamil heartland in an afternoon, and most travellers do.

The food, briefly, because the food is not brief

Tamil food is mostly the food of rice, lentils, coconut, tamarind, and curry leaves, served on a banana leaf when the meal warrants it. Idli and dosa, the steamed cakes and fermented crêpes that have become breakfast across the world, both come from this part of India; sambar, the lentil stew that accompanies them, is the workhorse of the cuisine. The Chettinad region in the south of the state has its own distinct tradition of black-pepper-forward meat curries, and Tirunelveli is famous for a halwa made of wheat flour, ghee, and sugar that is sticky in a way that defeats description. If you eat vegetarian, Tamil Nadu is one of the easiest places in the world to do so. If you don’t, the seafood along the coast is excellent and largely uncomplicated: fresh fish, simply spiced, on rice.

The marine bit, where things get interesting

If you read this magazine, the part of Tamil Nadu you probably want to know about is the Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park. It sits along the southeastern coast between Thoothukudi and Dhanushkodi, a chain of twenty-one small islands ringed by coral reefs, seagrass meadows, and mangrove fringes. It was designated a national park in 1986 and became the first marine biosphere reserve in South Asia in 1989. The park itself covers roughly 560 square kilometres; the surrounding biosphere reserve takes in considerably more.

The species lists are the kind of thing that justify a trip on their own. The Gulf of Mannar is one of the last refuges in Indian waters of the dugong (Dugong dugon), classified as Vulnerable by the IUCN, and it supports olive ridley turtles (Lepidochelys olivacea) along with significant areas of seagrass that make the dugongs possible in the first place. The reef communities include over a hundred species of hard coral and around eleven species of seagrass, and the islands are important stopovers for migratory shorebirds. Greater flamingos (Phoenicopterus roseus) winter on the mudflats in large numbers, and the area sits along the migration corridor for waders moving between Central Asia and the Indian Ocean. Glass-bottomed boats run from the mainland during the calmer season, and the snorkelling, when conditions allow, is the closest thing in mainland India to a Maldivian reef experience.

Inland and slightly to the west, the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, the first biosphere reserve declared in India, in 1986, climbs into the Western Ghats. It is shared with Karnataka and Kerala, but the Tamil Nadu portion is substantial, and it contains the largest known population of the endangered Nilgiri tahr (Nilgiritragus hylocrius), the only mountain ungulate in southern India. The Ghats are one of the eight hottest biodiversity hotspots in the world, and the Nilgiri sub-cluster alone holds more than three thousand species of flowering plants, of which more than a hundred are endemic. For anyone who has spent time in a tropical Asian montane forest, the smell of these hills is the smell of the place: wet moss, eucalyptus from colonial-era plantations, woodsmoke from villages tucked into ravines.

On Pride, and on Koovagam

This issue is our Pride issue, and Tamil Nadu was an obvious choice for reasons that go beyond the bridge and the reef. Every spring, in the small village of Koovagam in Villupuram district, the eighteen-day Koothandavar festival draws thousands of trans women (Aravanis, or Thirunangais) from across India for one of the largest gatherings of its kind anywhere in the world. The festival has its roots in an episode of the Mahabharata, and it is a story of marriage and mourning that the community has made its own for centuries. We have a dedicated piece on Koovagam elsewhere in this issue, so I won’t preempt it here; suffice it to say that Tamil Nadu has held space for a kind of gender and devotional life that much of the world is only beginning to catch up with, and it has done so for a very long time.

Tamil Nadu has held space for a kind of gender and devotional life that much of the world is only beginning to catch up with, and it has done so for a very long time.

If you go

You will not see Tamil Nadu in a week. You probably will not see it in a month. But a sensible first trip might combine Chennai (the state capital, with one of the longest urban beaches in the world), Pondicherry next door for the French-colonial architecture and the slower pace, the inland temple cities of Madurai and Thanjavur, the hill station of Ooty in the Nilgiris if you want cool air and tea estates, and a few days down on the coast at Rameswaram and the Gulf of Mannar. The new Pamban Bridge is now part of that itinerary whether you mean it to be or not. The train crosses the sea, and you take the photograph that everyone else has taken, and then you take it again because it is genuinely that good.

The cuisine alone is worth the airfare. The temples alone are worth the airfare. The reef and the tahr together would be worth the airfare to anyone who reads this magazine. That Tamil Nadu happens to have all of them, plus a literary tradition older than most countries and a festival that has been quietly making room for the marginalised for a thousand years, is one of those facts about the world that does not require commentary.

So: are you ready to visit?

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Note from the editor: this piece is part of our June destination series. The full Koovagam festival feature appears separately in this issue.