
A temple sanctum door in Nepal in which deity, devotee and pandit come together in a single frame. (All photos by Meenakshi J)
During a visit to Bhaktapur, an open-air museum and UNESCO World Heritage Site in Nepal, deities, mythical creatures and Himalayan fauna stared back at me with an uncanny sense of familiarity. While I recognized some of the images from the Hindu pantheon, others remained elusive. Their significance was lost on me because of my limited knowledge of the local Newari folklore. Yet they felt connected, effortlessly carved into the ornate doors and windows.
On a later visit to Nepal, I decided to buy an ornate miniature Newari door as a keepsake of the craftsmanship that had so captivated me. That led me to a local collector who shared my passion for these exquisite architectural pieces and helped me to discover the philanthropic contributions to Nepal’s evolving urban landscape made by Marwari settlers from the Indian state of Rajasthan.
I was instantly transported to the northern Rajasthan region of Shekhawat, where a similar quest for intricate doors once led me deep into its hinterland, all the way to Jhunjhunu — a quiet town of grand but forgotten havelis (mansions). I wrote about these architectural gems on my blog, and in a serendipitous twist that piece eventually found its way to a businessman who turned out to be the long-lost owner of one of the havelis.
Doors have never disappointed me. On a recent trip to Kochi, a port city in India’s Kerala state formerly known as Cochin, I found myself stepping into the Thirumala Devaswom temple. A striking blue door, weathered and full of quiet stories, caught my eye. As I lingered, camera in hand, I asked the man distributing prasadam, the edible divine offering, if I could take a few photographs.
He turned out to be the priest’s son. In the relaxed, unhurried way that conversations often unfold in such sacred spaces, he shared snippets of the temple’s history and spoke of the Gowda Saraswat Brahmins who had built it. When I mentioned that I was visiting from the northern state of Punjab, his face lit up with a kind of joy that felt almost personal. The builders, he said, traced their ancient roots to Punjab. I was momentarily stunned and ashamed about how little I knew of this shared past.
The blue door, though still firmly shut, seemed to open a little wider at that moment, inviting me into a story waiting to be told. The priest’s son called over an elderly gentleman and exchanged a few words with him in Konkani, the language of many in the Konkan region on the west coast of India. The man introduced himself as a retired bank employee who now spent his days writing.
When he learned that I was also a writer, he smiled with quiet delight and insisted I join him and his wife for coffee at their home, where we could talk about the Brahmins and their flight from the north to the region now occupied by the states of Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka and Kerala. Right there in front of the blue door, as though stepping across a forgotten threshold, I found myself being led into another story — written through the eyes of those who had lived it.
After an hourlong conversation, he handed me a collection of old books on the Brahmin community, pressing them into my hands with a quiet, almost reverent plea. “Take our stories forward,” he said, his voice carrying a touch of sorrow. The couple had no children to pass them on, and in me he saw a way to ensure their memories were not lost.
What stayed with me was the revelation that some of the Gowda Saraswat Brahmins had fled from Punjab to Goa, seeking refuge from Muslim invasions and forced conversions, only to face persecution by the Christian rulers of the Portuguese-ruled colony, from which some fled further south. It unsettled the neat, familiar narratives I had internalized, which suggested that Brahmins — the caste traditionally associated with priesthood and learning in Hinduism — were always privileged and powerful.
The history of the Gowda Saraswat Brahmins in the south shows that this was never wholly true. Today, it is also untrue of the Kashmiri Pandits, another part of the Saraswat Brahmin community, who were the original Hindu inhabitants of the Kashmir Valley, before widespread conversions to Islam in medieval times.
The Pandits are a minority among the predominantly Muslim population of the region, now part of the Indian union territory of Jammu and Kashmir, which is claimed by neighboring Pakistan. Many live in refugee camps, while others have been resettled across India, and their plight is widely referenced in Indian social media and other alternative spaces for storytelling.
Countless other histories — fragile, painful, barely whispered — remain hidden in the cracks of our collective view of India’s past. The stories of these Brahmin groups are a quiet reminder that the history we inherit is often incomplete, and the real stories lie in what has been left unsaid.
Looking back, every place I visit seems to turn into a quiet hunt for doors, these beautiful portals to the past. In the alleys of old towns and cities, I often seek them out — from the vividly painted to the elaborately carved, from the timeworn to the immaculately polished. Each has a tale to tell. Some wear their scars proudly, while others guard theirs beneath layers of time. But speak, they surely do.
The article appeared in the asia.nikkei