Chasing the Shadow, Part 2
Memoirs of a sometime eclipse watcher: Konarak, Orissa
I n Part 1 of this series, I recalled seeing my first total solar eclipse in The Dalles, Oregon, in 1979. As exhilarating an experience as that was, viewing the eclipse from the air instead of the ground still left a nagging feeling of unfulfillment, like an appetite unsatisfied or an itch unscratched. So imagine my surprise when, a few months later, it was my wife—who had initially been lukewarm to the whole idea and had to be cajoled into coming on the expedition at all—who now came home from work one day with a travel brochure to go see the next eclipse the following year. In India.
Neither of us had ever set foot out of North America. My total experience of foreign travel consisted of a childhood family vacation in Québec. It became a running joke in our house, “next year in India.” Until somehow we found ourselves actually putting down deposits and applying for passports and visas and getting vaccinated against various tropical diseases, and getting on a plane for the exhausting journey from San Francisco to New York (to meet up with our departing tour group) to London to Delhi to Bombay (not yet changed to Mumbai back then).
The tour package was a standard twelve-day tourist itinerary of northern India and Nepal: Bombay, Delhi, Jaipur, Agra (the Taj Mahal), Katmandu, Calcutta (not yet Kolkata), with a side trip to the viewing site on Eclipse Day. As this was an astronomy-themed tour, the itinerary had been specially enriched in that direction. Our tour leader was an astronomy professor from UC Berkeley. Our brief stopover in London included a tour of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. In Jaipur we visited its counterpart, the Jantar Mantar observatory built by Maharajah Jai Singh II in the eighteenth century, whose non-optical, gnomon-and-shadow-based instruments rivaled those of Greenwich for accuracy:
Even without the eclipse, those two weeks in India were a transformative experience, forever changing my view and understanding of the wider world beyond our borders. For someone who had never stepped off of North American soil, it was a dizzying whirl of new sights, sounds, scents, and experiences. The Taj Mahal was breathtaking beyond imagining. But all that is a subject for another article; for now, we’re talking about eclipses.
The viewing site chosen for us was the temple of the sun god, Surya, at Konarak in the state of Orissa (now called Odisha), south of Calcutta:
The temple building depicts the chariot in which the fiery god rides daily across the sky, on twelve pairs of wheels representing the twelve lunar months of the solar year. What better site could be imagined for viewing a solar eclipse?
Misinformation was rampant in the days leading up to the eclipse. Everywhere we went, we were hailed as a party of visiting astrologers come to study the event. People were warned (falsely) to stay indoors, as the sun’s rays were particularly harmful during an eclipse: food left outside would spoil; pregnant women would miscarry. The bus driver who drove us to the temple from our hotel that morning stayed cowering in his vehicle for the duration of the eclipse, afraid to come out and expose himself to it. Newspaper photos the next day showed Chowringhee Road, one of the main arterials of central Calcutta, deserted of humanity, an unimaginable thought to anyone who’s been there. Nevertheless, a crowd of a few hundred fearless souls braved the danger and joined us in the temple courtyard to watch the show.
We had brought a makeshift viewing device made of a couple of sheets of Mylar stretched over one of my wife’s embroidery hoops. We would hand it to someone in the crowd, where it would get passed from hand to hand until someone ran up and handed it back to us for a look of our own. One of the priests from the temple came out and sat on the ground blowing a horn and beating a drum to frighten away the demon devouring the sun. (It worked; the demon did eventually depart and return the sun to its normal state.)
When totality arrived, a hush fell over the crowd. The temperature (sweltering hot in India, even in February) dropped about 15 degrees. The birds hushed in the trees. The sky darkened and the planets came out, surrounding the sun on both sides; a rare glimpse of the Solar System with the sun at the center where it belongs. And then it was over; we boarded the bus back to the hotel and our flight back to Calcutta. We’d seen our second eclipse.
For the previous installment of this series, see Part 1: The Dalles, Oregon. Coming soon: Part 3: Waikoloa, Hawaii. For more on eclipses and other related arcana, see my treatise on the motions of the moon:
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“Chasing the Shadow” by Stephen Chernicoff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
