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Look down over the Tamil temple town of Madurai in the pre-dawn glimmer of a summer's festival morning, and you will see an extraordinary sight.

The city sits in a broad, flat plain, as level and as green as a ripe paddy field at harvest time. Out of this flat tropical planisphere rises a series of four man-made mountain peaks, each echoed by a ripple of lesser man-made hillocks. These are the gopuras or ceremonial gateways of Madurai's great temple to Menakshi, the Fish-eyed Goddess-Queen, a town within a town and one of the most sacred places in India.

The gopuras - these sudden vertical intrusions into the great horizontal plain- dominate the city as completely as the cathedrals of the Middle Ages must once have dominated the landscape of Europe. They rise in great tapering, wedge-shaped pyramids- each layer swarming with brightly coloured images of Gods and demons, heroes and yakshis- until three quarters of the way to its apex, the pyramid terminates in a crown of cobra heads tipped with a pair of cats-ear demon finials; below, the astonishing complexity and the elaboration of the gopuras' decoration is something you can see from far away, long before you are able to perceive even the beginnings of its detail.

To the Tamils, this is a sacred landscape, and the origins of every feature are elaborately catalogued in the myths of Madurai. This hillock here was a demon in the form of a giant snake who tried to devour the temple; that rock was an evil elephant who attempted to trample the town's Brahmins to death before being turned to stone by Lord Shiva; the river there, the Vaigai, was created by Lord Sundareshvara, the husband of Menakshi, to quench the thirst of one of his wedding guests, a dwarf named Pot Belly, who had developed an unbearable thirst after eating three hundred pounds of rice.

At the very centre of the plain lies the temple itself, the most sacred place of all. For the temple, so the Brahmins will tell you, is a tirtha, a crossing place, linking the profane to the sacred. The pious pilgrim who steps within the temple enters a zone of transition, a ford between different states of perception, where the celestial can become suddenly imminent, manifest; it is a doorway to the divine where you can cross from the world of men to the world of the Gods as easily as you might cross a slow-flowing stream at the height of the dry season.

Though the sun had yet to rise, from my vantage point on the edge of town, I could see the beginnings of frenzied activity around the temple. The gopuras were spot lit and all around, in the streets which circled the temple, flames and lights were heading towards the sacred enclosure, like a cloud of moths circling a lamp in the darkness of a summer's night.

As I walked further into the labyrinth of streets, the crowds thickened: groups of women with flowers in their hair were hurrying in the direction of the temple, all carrying offerings in their hands: packages of milk and ewers of coconut oil, pots of ghee and bags of prasad. In one place a huddle of old buses had parked in a side street, and from them lines of shaven-headed pilgrims, all dressed in matching yellow lungis- devotees of Lord Venkateshwara, who had shaven their heads then offered their hair as gifts to the great temple at Tirupati- spilled out and set off into the slipstream of bicycles and rickshaws. A few stalls had already opened, selling marigold garlands, glass bangles, sandalwood and incense sticks, and around these too the pilgrims collected, haggling with the vendors for charms and offerings, before setting off again into the melée.

By the time I got to the temple, it was first light and the enclosure was already humming with life. Ranks of beggars had begun assembling under the eves of the gopuras, hands outstretched, and between them the pilgrims were prostrating themselves before the entrance gate. Some were lighting small camphor flames on the stone slabs under the gateway and commencing with their puja, utterly unconcerned by the passing throng of mendicants and festival-goers, many of whom only narrowly avoided stepping on the praying figures. From inside came the sound of drums and with it, the soft beating of wings of startled pigeons.

I walked slowly under the Gate of Eight Goddesses and into the long arcaded passage beyond. Inside, it was dark and magnificent. A forest of carved pillars- on closer inspection lines of heavy-breasted Hindu caryatids: yakshis, courtesans, Goddesses and dancing girls- flanked me on either side. Everything about the architecture was deeply, and consciously, feminine: heading towards the innermost sanctuary of the presiding Goddess, one sunk deeper, and deeper, into the darkness down a long, straight, womb-like passage.

There is a reason for this all-pervading femininity. The temple at Madurai is one of the few temples in India containing both male and female deities where the Goddess is always worshipped before the Gods. As far as most of the pilgrims are concerned, this is the Temple of Menakshi; to them, her husband Lord Sundareshvara, 'the Beautiful Lord', is a thoroughly secondary deity, only to be worshipped when joined to his wife, even though he is technically a form of the most powerful of all the Gods, the great Shiva himself. For it is because of Menakshi, not her consort, that the temple is famous throughout India. She has a reputation as a uniquely generous Goddess who invariably gives boons to those who honour her, particularly in the matter of children. Pray before the shrine of Menakshi- or amman, the mother, as the pilgrims call her- then tie a twine around the banyan tree in the courtyard, and in nine months time a child will surely be born, or so they say.

The conscious fecundity of the temple is evident in every aspect of the temple's decoration. Spiralling out over the cornices and the finials of the arcades are a great anarchic cavalcade of mask heads, demons, demi-gods and godlings, peeping out from the angles, coming to roost under the pendetives, a great spiralling pantheon of Hindu deities that is repeated with even greater vigour over the towering gopuras. It is as if Menakshi's fertility is such that every inch of the stonework is organically sprouting with supernatural forms, just as the bare desert sprouts with camel-thorn after the rains.

Then, quite suddenly, from a side passage, a carved wooden temple rath appeared in the centre of the principal ceremonial avenue, pushed by a swarm of half-naked figures; their progress was lit by a succession of temple priests and acolytes holding brightly burning yellow splints dipped in camphor oil. In a silken tabernacle at the top of the rath lay the golden image of the Goddess herself, garlanded and draped in cloth-of-gold, her nose-jewel flashing in the flames of the priests' burning splints. This was followed by another temple cart, containing an image of both Menakshi and Lord Sundareshvara, with their son, the six-headed war god Murugan, standing between them. Then came a pair of brahminy cows led by two priests and hung with drapes and drums and anointed with dots of saffron and turmeric. As the cavalcade began lining up in the main axis, with a ringing of gongs and bells, a caparisoned temple elephant and a third rath carrying a huge golden horse joined the procession. From another passage emerged a temple band, banging cymbals and drums and blowing a succession of fanfares on the nagashwaram, the giant Tamil oboe whose rasping, raucous notes fills the air with the noise like a screech of peacocks at dawn.

Pilgrims clustered around the raths handing their offerings to the priest who stood on the platforms below the idols. Coconuts were cracked on the side of the rath, and the milk washed over the chariot.

Then, with a last great fanfare from the nagashwaram, they were off, with the whole procession moving slowly up the ramps, out of the temple and into the streets, cheered on by the crowds of waiting pilgrims.

"Where are they going?" I asked a passer-by, a dark-skinned Keralan in a green lungi.

"To the tank," he replied. "Once a year the Gods are taken from here for a boat ride on the Holy waters." He paused, then added: "Every year my friends and I walk here from our village in Kerala just to see this sight."

"You must have sore feet," I said. "It’s a long way."

"We feel happy to come," he replied. "The Goddess gives us strength. Sometimes it takes us only nine days to walk here."

"To see the Teppam festival brings many boons," said the man's friend, another wiry Keralan. "Every year we feel the benefit."

"And is that why all these people come?"

"Of course," said the first pilgrim. "This temple is one of the most Holy places in India, and this is one of the most auspicious days. On this day if you ask anything of the Goddess you are sure to get success."

"Is there anything in particular that you will be asking for?"

"We all want children," said the first pilgrim. "And for this we look to Menakshi. She has much energy, much power."

"You have no children?" I asked.

"I have three sons. But I want six."

"How many does your wife want?"

"She wants only three. So she has stayed in Kerala. Also I have two sisters. One has no son and the other has no children at all. So I will pray for them too."

"Menakshi Devi looks after her devotees," said the second pilgrim. "She is like a mother to us. She gives us energy and strength. She clears obstacles from our path. Just to see her, to have darshan, is enough."

We had left the temple behind us and were now heading through the middle of Madurai. The sun had risen and the shop keepers were beginning to open their stalls: Durga's Veg and Tiffin and Anand Vests and Briefs, the Bell Brand Umbrella Shop and the Raj Lucky Metal Store. As the streets began to fill with people, so the procession began to make slower and slower progress. An escort of four fat policemen now led the way, lazily waving their lathis at cyclists who were trying to head against the flow. Every hundred metres or so the raths would pull to a halt and the priests would accept the offerings given to them by the devotees who lined the way, anointing the pilgrims' heads with vibhuti (ash-powder) and kunkuma (the red powder symbolising the sexuality of the Goddess), and lighting the lamps on the pilgrims' outstretched trays of offerings. Those who gave money were blessed by the temple elephant, who first took the rupee notes in its trunk, gave the money to its priestly mahout, then blessed the donor by momentarily cupping the tip of its trunk over the devotees head.

In some places little temporary wayside temples had been erected along the route- often little more than trestle tables full of lamps and framed and garlanded lithographs of Gods, Goddesses and saints. These were easily confused with the roadside booths set up by the different political parties for the forthcoming election, for both were covered with almost identical sets of images of heroes, political bosses and Gods. After all, in India the division between religion and politics is notoriously porous; and with so many Gods being played by film stars, and so many film stars entering politics (particularly in the South), there is an easy drift of roadside iconography between temple, silver screen and election rally. Moreover, Menakshi and Sundareshvara are both believed by the people of Madurai to have jointly ruled their town as king and queen in ancient times, and so are themselves in some sense politicians as well as Gods. Certainly, at both sets of stalls the procession would halt, garlands would be draped over the Brahmins and political candidates, and more coconuts cracked over the rath.

It was nearly ten o'clock before the procession reached the sacred tank at the edge of town, an open expanse of water with an island temple standing in its middle. Here the golden idols were decanted onto the temple rafts for ferrying around the lake.

"The Goddess is having her bath now," explained one of the elderly Brahmins as I watched the boat set off around the tank. "We should leave her to her privacy. Come back at ten o'clock tonight if you wish to see the climax of the festival."

"This is our custom," said his son, also a temple priest. He was a handsome boy and, but for the sacred thread hanging over his shoulder, was naked from his white lungi upwards. His oiled hair was arranged into a top knot at the back of his head. "You see this is a very ancient ceremony," he continued. "This festival is over two thousand years old."

"I am the 63rd generation of priests in my family," said the father, "and my son is the 64th. These traditions about our Goddess have been handed down to us from the most ancient times. The same festivals, the same holidays, are celebrated just as they were at that time.

"Nothing, not one detail," he said, "has been changed."

What the Brahmin said was quite true. The temple at Madurai is contemporary with the temples of ancient Greece and Egypt, yet while the Gods of Thebes and the Parthenon have both been dead and forgotten for millennia, the Gods and temples of Hindu India are still as alive and as active as ever.

For Hindu civilisation is the only great classical culture to survive from the ancient world intact, and at temples such as Madurai one can still catch glimpses of festivals and practices that were seen by Greek or Egyptian ambassadors to India long before the rise of ancient Rome. Indeed it is only when you grasp the astonishing antiquity, and continuity, of Hinduism that then you realise quite how miraculous its survival has been.

Madurai is one of the most holy ancient towns in India, a Benares of the South, and long before its existence was first noted in the West in the 4th century B.C, it was already an important centre of Hindu civilisation. For from the very earliest period, Madurai appears to have been a major terminus of the Spice Route, linking the pepper groves of India with the groaning tables of the Mediterranean. Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador who visited India in 302 B.C, recorded its legendary riches, while the town is given pride of place in the earliest document detailing the Spice Trade, the Periplus Maris Erythraei, written by an anonymous Alexandrian Greek in the first century A.D.

The Periplus gives a wonderful picture of the courtly lifestyle of the time when it records that the area around Madurai imported Mediterranean eye-shadow, perfume, silverware, fine Italian wine and beautiful slave girl musicians for concubinage; in turn the town exported silk, ivory, pearls and, crucially, pepper. Both Strabo and Ptolemy mention the town, the former in the same breath as complaining about the drain of Roman silver from the Imperial Treasury that the trade with India was causing- an image graphically confirmed by the recent find of several huge Roman coin hoards around Madurai and the discovery of a Roman coastal trading post near Pondicherry, where the goods destined for the town were unloaded. At the peak of the trade, during the reign of Nero, a Pandyan Embassy from Madurai was received in Rome and there is even a reference to a Temple of Augustus being erected on the Indian coast, presumably for the use of Roman traders permanently settled in the Carnatic. Even today, the English 'pepper' and 'ginger' are loan words from Tamil- from 'pippali' and 'singabera' respectively- which entered our language via Byzantine Greek.

This picture of Madurai's cosmopolitan connections is also backed-up by Tamil sources which records that the Pandyan Kings of Madurai used to keep Yavana [Greek or Roman] mercenaries, alongside a regiment of Tamil Amazons, as their personal bodyguards. We know this for around the temple at Madurai there grew up a flourishing literary culture based, according to tradition, at the Sangam or Academy of Tamil Poets.

The surviving work is wonderful stuff, and gives a picture of a heroic society that would not have been altogether strange to Homer or Virgil, a world of chariots and cavalry where the refusal of one king to give his daughter in marriage to another was the most common cause of war, and where soldiers and even their mothers welcomed death in battle for such an end led the hero straight to nirvana.

The wiles of dancing girls and courtesans is another popular theme. The Shilappadikaram, one of the most famous Sangam works, tells the tragedy of a Prince Kovalan who neglects his wife Kannagi and loses his fortune because of his love for the celebrated courtesan Madhavi of Puhar; in the end, penniless, Kovalan is accused of theft and cut down in the streets of Madurai, while his faithful wife wreaks revenge by consigning the city to flames.

Arguably the most beautiful of the poems to emerge from the Sangam is the Garland of Madurai, a celebration of the city's festivals probably written in the second century A.D, a section of which almost exactly described the scene I saw one thousand seven hundred years later: "[For Madurai was] a city gay with flags, waving over homes and shops selling food and drink; the streets are broad rivers of people, folk of every race, buying and selling in the bazaars, or singing to the music of wandering bands and musicians... [Around the temple], amid the perfume of ghee and incense, [are stalls] selling sweet cakes, garlands of flowers, scented powder and betel paan... [while nearby are] men making bangles of conch shells, goldsmiths, cloth dealers, tailors making up clothes, coppersmiths, flower sellers, vendors of sandalwood, painters and weavers."

Moreover both the city and temple you walk through today retain the plan of the city described in the Garland, with the streets forming a series of concentric circles around the temple. Although both town and temple have been burned down and rebuilt many times over, and little of the city's fabric pre-dates the seventeenth century, the plan of Madurai's centre still corresponds fairly closely to its original classical Hindu design of the mandala, a geometric diagram oriented to the four cardinal directions and symbolising the ideal cosmos, a street plan that in Madurai's case probably dates from no later than the first century A.D.

Yet perhaps the most extraordinary example of the city's astonishing continuity is the fact that the Sangam poem, The Sacred Games of Shiva, which tells the legend of Sundareshvara's marriage to Menakshi, is still current in the city; indeed its myths are known to every shopkeeper and rickshaw driver. Moreover, the events described in the stories of the Sacred Games remain the basis of the city's calender, inspiring both the cycle of festivals around which the Madurai's civic life still revolves, and the details of the daily worship inside the temple precincts.

For Menakshi, then as now, is the city's great fertility Goddess and the focus of her cult lies the fact of her union with Sundareshvara. Every night in the temple the images of Menakshi and Sundareshvara are brought together in the latter's bedchamber. The last act of the priests, before they close the doors, is to remove Menakshi's nose jewel lest the rubbing of it irritate her husband when they make love- an act, so the priests will tell you, that ensures the preservation and regeneration of the universe.

Indeed so spectacular and addictive is the sex between the two deities that Sundareshvara- uniquely for a form of that most adulterous God Shiva- remains strictly faithful to his Goddess. Once a year, an image of the lovely Tamil Goddess Cellattamman is brought to the God 'to have her powers renewed by Sundareshvara'. But Sundareshvara refuses her, and the spurned Goddess returns to her temple in such a fury that she can only be propitiated by a buffalo sacrifice. The teppam festival which I attended is also related to the Goddesses' irresistible sexuality. For Menakshi's boat trip with Sundareshvara is understood by the faithful to be part of the Goddess's seduction of her Lord, a seduction which she finally achieves later that night.

All this, of course, makes the festival one of the most fecund and auspicious times in the year to get married. On the eve of the festival, as I was wondering through the temple precincts, I suddenly found myself in a queue of competing marriage parties as village after village queued up to marry off its young. The parties waited, excited and expectant, in the principal ceremonial passage leading to the shrine of Menakshi, then after the rites had been celebrated they retired to the southern range of the cloister surrounding the temple tank to relax and to remove the most encumbering of their marriage clothes.

As I watched a pretty Tamil bride of no more than 17 entered the cloister surrounded by a gaggle of ten of her girlfriends. They surrounded her on all sides and holding up an unwound sari allowed her to remove her garlands and change in privacy from her formal red silk marriage sari to a less formal cotton one. Other guests appeared carrying the accumulated wedding presents, while to one side, on his own, stood the groom, if anything even younger than his bride and looking profoundly dazed and uncertain about the days events.

Then some of the older villagers came up and blessed the couple by touching their feet. The girls then led the bride purposefully off, and intrigued, I followed at a discrete distance to see what they were taking her to see.

The girls led the bride through the temple's labyrinth of halls and passages and eventually came to rest before a carved pillar. The girls bowed before the image and then anointed it with powder from a small pot carried by one the brides' friends. After they had gone I went up to see which God or Goddess they had dedicated themselves to. In fact the image was not a deity, but some sort of fertility yakshi, a naked, heavy-breasted and heavily-pregnant sprite shown bent-legged in the act of giving birth. The entire image glistened with oil where devotees wishing for a child or an easy delivery had covered the image with ghee, while around her breasts and navel the image was stained with bright red vermilion and kunkuma powder.

Around the image, among the caryatids carved on each of the temple's ten thousand pillars, I found many other images of fecundity: one for example showed a Tamil village woman with a coir shopping basket and a baby strapped to her breast; the woman is shown head turned sideways to see the second baby she is carrying in her back-pack, while beside her walks a third child, a little boy eating an apple; the women's hand rests gently on her son's head. It is an image of startling humanity and modernity- the same sight can be seen today in any bazaar in Tamil Nadu- yet the statue dates from long before the British even dreamed of setting foot in India.

"Just to enter the Goddesses' temple brings great good fortune," explained K.R Bhaskar, a dhoti-clad devotee who had come up and introduced himself as I wandered around. "Menakshi certainly amman blessed my family: we now have two children after coming to pray here."

"And the villagers believe this? That you only have to come here and children just miraculously appear?"

"Not just the villagers," replied Mr. Bhaskar, "the educated class too. I myself am a financial consultant in Bangalore. I have a post-graduate MSc in biochem from Mysore university. But I believe in Menakshi. This is my sincere feeling. I know she exists. I myself have seen her, in the mist, in shadows. She comes in my dreams, my subconscious. What is going on here is 100% truth."

"When you say you can see the Gods do you actually believe that they look like they do in temples: with three faces and six arms and so on."

"No, no," said Mr. Bhaskar, patiently. "These things are symbols only. Not all devotees have the same level of spiritual achievement. Some people can see God in a flame when they meditate, but most others need something more concrete, something on which they can focus their devotion. These images here are just indications of the different moods of the Gods, mere reflections. They are paths to reach the infinite, not an end in themselves."

"And do many educated people feel like you?" I asked.

"Many," said Mr. Bhaskar. "At one time maybe the educated stayed away from the temples, thinking they were backward, but these days educated people are coming back in ever-increasing numbers. You see this is not superstition. This is our culture. It is in our blood, in our veins. It is not so much a religion as a way of life. It is not something that will stop when our people are educated. Hinduism will never die. Already it is beginning to make a comeback in our India."

"And why do you think that is?" I asked.

"When you come to the temple you feel total peace of mind," said Mr. Bhaskar. "You feel total involvement in the spiritual powers of God. In Bangalore many people have made much money, but they found that this did not satisfy them. It was not enough.

"Only with faith in God, " said Mr. Bhaskar, "can they have full satisfaction."

That evening at ten o'clock I made my way through the dusty, pilgrim-clogged streets of Madurai, and through the labyrinth of horn-hooting, rickshaw-squealing lanes leading up to the great sacred tank.

Everything had been transformed since the morning. Temple bells rang out over a hot, thick blanket of darkness, lit here and there by the naked electric lights of the tea stalls and the flickering camphor flames of the pilgrims lamps. Around the side of the tank the crowds were massing, all dressed up in their new neatly-pressed lungis and their best silk saris. Some sat up on the parapet, nibbling from cones of chickpeas and roasted dhal, while all around them balloon-sellers and ice cream wallahs, peanut-roasters and sweet-meat vendors sold their wares. Here and there, among the sea of milling pilgrims and townsfolk, stood crowded bullock carts full of families who had driven in from their villages to see the festival: burly, mustachioed farmers and their womenfolk and children; from their eminence they peered eagerly over the heads of the crowd towards the illuminated spire of the island temple rising into the sky, its image perfectly reflected in the still waters of the tank.

"We come for every festival," said Pandyan, a farmer sitting in the front of one especially-heavily laden cart, bearing no less than 15 women and children from his extended family. "Our village is only twenty kilometres away so if all goes well we can get back home before dawn without problem."

"In our village we have a small temple to Menakshi," said Pandyan's wife, Kasi Ama. "But it is better to come and give our offerings to here her.

"On a festival day," said Pandyan, "Amman cannot refuse anything, if you ask her with a clean mind."

It was now well after eleven, an hour after the ceremony should have begun, and the brahmins still were waiting for the exact moment, determined by the astrologers, for the Menakshi and Sundareshvara to begin their journey around the lake. But as we spoke a ripple of expectation passed through the crowd. From the small Maryamman temple by the lakeside, the Brahmins were now emerging in a file, their oiled bodies glistening in the light of their flickering camphor torches. As they processed out, the crowd parted before them, and the priests made their way slowly to the ghat steps leading down to the waters of the tank. There waited the raft. In the morning it had looked a rather flimsy and makeshift object, with its crude woodwork and naively painted papier maché; but now ablaze with lamps in the burnished darkness it was transformed into something gilded and magnificent: a huge floating temple, suspended on the dark waters of the tank. In the centre of the raft, reclining back in their silken palkis amid their robes and garlands, stood the golden images of Menakshi and Sundareshvara.

Then, with a beating of drums, forty or fifty well-built villagers filed out of the temple and took up their stations along the side of the tank parapet.

"These are villagers from Antonedi," said Mohan Pundit, a temple priest I had met earlier that morning. Mohan had just helped me manoeuvre me through the police cordon to a spot on the edge of the ghat from where I was now watching proceedings. "It has been the privilege of these people to pull rope since the time of our king Tirumala Nayyak, four hundred years ago."

At a signal from the head priest they picked up a great thick rope several hundred feet long that was attached to the raft, and with a great fanfare from the temple band- all wailing nagashwarams and dancing drums- they shouldered the burden and began to pull.

Slowly the raft begun to move around the tank, followed by a small flotilla of brahmins in overloaded dinghies, some of which contained as many as twenty people and were listing dangerously. As the villagers pulled, and the boat slowly circled the tank, the over-excited crowd surged around the tank with the raft, cheering and clapping and singing bhajans.

For an hour the raft circled and the crowd sang and cheered. Children giggled on the shoulders of their fathers, licking ice creams and begging their parents to buy them more chick peas or some milky ladoos from the mithai-wallah. The band played and the crowd clapped. This, I thought, not for the first time that day, is what one of the great medieval festivals must have been like.

Then, as midnight drew near, it was time to bring the Goddess ashore and prepare her for her final seduction of Lord Sundareshvara. The raft pulled into the ghat and the idols, still on their palanquin, were raised onto the shoulders of the priests and carried ashore. It was a heavy burden and as the priests staggered to the top of the steps, bowed under the weight, the crowd let out one last great cheer.

"I've never seen a crowd enjoying themselves so much," I said to Mohan Pundit.

"The people come here," he replied, "and for one day they forget that they are hungry and poor. The Goddess takes them away from themselves. Amman does this for them, and for this reason they love her and are happy."

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