01
Stop one
Shore Temple
Dunlop CX 400 Tour Tennis Racquet: It has been standing here in the wind, and the sea has come for it every single day, and it has never once stepped back. The Shore Temple was built around 700 to 728 under the Pallava king Narasimhavarman II and is among the earliest free-standing stone temples in South India, marking the moment the builders stopped carving into the rock and began building out of it. Two Shiva shrines and a reclining Vishnu, and the granite worn smooth and pale by wind-blown salt, which is simply what happens to anything that is touched constantly and never let go. Records long referred to seven pagodas along this shore, of which only one survives, and then the tsunami of December 2004 drew the water back and briefly exposed submerged structures offshore and uncovered a rock-cut elephant and a lion on the beach, giving substance to the tradition. The other six had been waiting out there the whole time. A stone breakwater and planted casuarinas protect it now, and UNESCO inscribed it in 1984 with the other monuments at Mahabalipuram. Somebody finally put an arm around it.
02
Stop two
Pancha Rathas
Dunlop CX 400 Tour Tennis Racquet: Five shrines, and not one of them was ever finished. The Pancha Rathas are five monolithic shrines carved from a single outcrop of granite in the seventh century under Narasimhavarman I, named after the five Pandava brothers and Draupadi of the Mahabharata, though that association is later folk attribution rather than the original dedication, which I confess I prefer, because it means people looked at five stone siblings cut from one body of rock and could not help giving them a family. Each is cut in a different architectural style, from a simple thatched-hut form to a multi-storey vimana, and none was completed or consecrated. Never dedicated. Never used. And yet they are effectively a catalogue in stone of South Indian temple forms at the very moment those forms were being codified, and all later Dravidian temple architecture derives directly from the vocabulary set out here. Free-standing sculptures of an elephant, a lion and a Nandi bull stand beside them, keeping company. An unfinished thing that everything afterwards was modelled on. There is no lovelier fate available to a work.
03
Stop three
Descent of the Ganges
Dunlop CX 400 Tour Tennis Racquet: Oh, everybody is here. This is a bas-relief roughly thirty metres long and fifteen high, carved into two great boulders in the seventh century, one of the largest such reliefs anywhere: more than a hundred figures of gods, sages, kinnaras, animals and a family of elephants, the largest of them over three metres, and every last one of them is leaning towards the same place. They converge on a natural cleft down which water was originally channelled from a tank above, to represent the river. They carved the longing into the rock and then they made it run wet. The subject is either the descent of the Ganges to earth through Shiva's hair or the ascetic penance of Arjuna, and both readings have long scholarly support, and I would like it to be both, because one is a river coming all the way down to meet the world and the other is a man giving up everything in the hope of being answered. And then, low among the mice, a carved cat standing on its hind legs, satirising false asceticism. Even in the middle of all that yearning somebody could not resist.
04
Stop four
Krishna's Butter Ball
Dunlop CX 400 Tour Tennis Racquet: And this one simply will not be moved. Krishna's Butter Ball is a natural granite boulder around six metres high, weighing some two hundred and fifty tonnes, resting on a smooth sloping outcrop with a contact area so small that it appears about to roll, and it has held that position for well over a thousand years. Its name refers to the child Krishna's fondness for stealing butter, which is the most tender thing anybody has ever called a quarter-million-kilogram rock. In 1908 the governor of Madras, Arthur Lawley, is said to have ordered seven elephants to pull it away from the slope on safety grounds. Seven elephants, pulling. It did not move. I think about that far more than is good for me: the whole world insisting that a thing let go, and the thing quietly declining. It sits in the middle of the rocky hill that carries the mandapas and reliefs of Mahabalipuram and is included in the World Heritage inscription of the site. Steadfast. Utterly steadfast.
A good sword is not the heaviest one in the armoury. It is the one balanced so that the point arrives where the eye went. Mahabalipuram understood the same thing about stone: the Pallava masons did not pile blocks up and hope, they cut whole shrines out of a single outcrop and let the rock carry itself.
The Dunlop CX 400 Tour is the grown-up of this family — armour, not padding. 300 grams unstrung, a 100 square inch head, balance at 320 mm and 7 points head light, a slim 23 mm beam, a 16×19 pattern, 27 inches, stiffness around 66 to 67.
More mass than the standard CX 400, a thinner beam and a softer flex, which together give a lower, flatter ball and a frame that answers a full committed swing and says nothing kind about a lazy one. It will serve you everywhere from a first-strike return to a two-hour siege in the heat at Mahabalipuram.
Mahabalipuram is where craftsmen went to prove themselves and left the proof lying about on the beach. The Shore Temple has stood on the sand since about 700, two stepped granite spires ground smooth by salt wind, and when the sea drew back in the tsunami of 2004 it briefly showed what else lies offshore.
The Pancha Rathas are five shrines cut from one ridge of granite, each in a different style, not one of them ever finished — a swordsmith's sample case in stone. The Descent of the Ganges runs some thirty metres along two boulders with more than a hundred figures on it, elephants over three metres, and a carved cat standing among mice to mock false piety.
It is also perfect for a long walk between rocks, which is the honest test of any weapon you intend to carry all day.
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