You won't find a mention of Nagore in most guidebooks, let alone any details about what there is to see in this town. Even the guide who accompanied us had never been here (- we had visited a number of other places earlier in the day and at this stage were giving him a lift to shorten his journey home).
Nagore lies on India's Coromandel Coast, around 150km south of Puducherry. What had attracted us here was a small picture of a group of white towers that we had come across. It looked intriguing and, as the town was not too far away from the route we had planned, we decided to take a closer look.
We found one tall tower quite easily - right in the centre of town.
However, the picture had shown several of them next to some body of water and we could see neither water nor any other towers from where we were. It took our driver and the guide quite a while to elicit meaningful directions from the locals, but we gathered that there was a (temple) tank a few hundred metres down some narrow lanes. So off we went - without being too hopeful that we would actually find our elusive viewpoint.
However, we did find the tank - and, as you will have gathered from the photos at the beginning of this piece, we also discovered the other towers (which had simply been hidden from view by the buildings around us).
They are the impressive minarets of the 'Dargah' ('shrine') built over the tomb of Shahul Hameed, a 16th-century Sufi saint. The centre of the Dargah is shown in the close-up below.
We did not enter the shrine itself, largely because it was already getting quite late. We were also aware that our two companions were not completely at ease being here. In fact our driver had clearly picked up some negative vibes and returned to the car to make sure that our belongings were safe. I have since looked at some online reviews in relation to the Dargah and scams/con-artists appear to be a recurrent theme.
Be that as it may, I am still glad that we went to see it. It was very different from the other sights we encountered on our trip through southern India. We found the view across the water quite mesmerising and spent a lot of time taking (too many) photos. Unfortunately, the light was far from perfect.
Below is a link to a Wikipedia page with more details about the shrine and its history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagore_Dargah
Comments (1)