I had arrived in Tamil Nadu only a couple of days before. It was the week of Tamil New Year, and I had come to see one of the many temple chariot processions which each year mark the occasion. The monsoon had not yet broken, yet already the humidity was high, and the rains which fell late each afternoon were heavy and insistent. Sheet lightning quaked sourceless beyond the distant thunderheads. For an hour each day, the dark archipelagos of cloud bank massing over the Kaveri Delta let loose a great white waterfall that flooded the rice fields and washed clean the dusty fronds of the palm trees, ran down the tumbling eaves of the temple gopuras and soaked the palm thatch of the village huts.
The village, when I finally found it, did not look as if it was about to celebrate its annual festival. It was true that an improvised rath, or chariot, constructed from a farm cart topped with a brightly coloured wooden canopy, was parked outside the temple, under a makeshift rain shelter of bamboo and palm leaves, and that inside the chariot were the dressed, anointed and garlanded images of the village’s deities. But although the procession was due to set off at 5 p.m., when I arrived only half an hour earlier no crowds had assembled in the wet village street, and there was no Brahmin there to supervise. Instead, the area outside the temple was deserted except for a kneeling calf, a pair of wet black goats drinking from puddles and several roosters who strutted around, eyeing up a nearby gaggle of hens. Farther up the road, a group of barefoot children were playing cricket in the rain, with a broken stool for a wicket.
Mr. Krishnamurthy, however, was confident that, despite the downpour, the festival would go ahead and the procession would take place: “No problem,” he said. “Pundit will come. Time is there.”
As we waited for the rain to end, we talked about Srikanda’s business, and he told me the story of his family. The Stpathys, he explained, had been sculptors of stone idols in Vellore before being called to Tanjore to learn the art of bronze casting at the time of Rajaraja I (AD 985–1014), one of the great kings of the Chola empire. After assisting in the construction of the two greatest Chola temples, at Tanjore and Gangakondacholapuram, they settled in Swamimalai in the thirteenth century. This happened after one of his ancestors discovered by accident that clay made from the especially fine silt at the bend in the Kaveri on the edge of the town was uniquely well suited to making the moulds in which the bronzes were cast. The bronze idol business had now kept them in work for nearly 700 years. “It is with the blessings of the Almighty,” he said proudly, “that we have taken this birth, and are able to make our living in this way, creating gods in the form of man.”
In fact, added Srikanda, business was very good at the moment, and the workshop had a backlog of orders that would take at least a year to clear. There was a growing market for what he called “show pieces” for tourists and collectors, but the family’s main work was idols created in exactly the manner laid down by the ancient Hindu religious texts, the Shilpa Shastras, and specifically designed for temple worship. These days, he said, most of the orders were no longer from the Kaveri Delta, their traditional market, nor even from Tamil Nadu, so much as from the new temples springing up wherever the Indian—and especially Tamil—diaspora had settled around the world, from Neasden to New Jersey. Their largest order ever had been from Iskcon, the Hari Krishna headquarters in California.
As we sat sipping a cup of hot, sweet south Indian coffee brought by Mrs. Krishnamurthy, I asked Srikanda what it was like to forge the idols that other men worshipped.
“When I see one of the idols that I have made used in a temple, or in a procession,” replied Srikanda, “I try not to think that this is something made by me, or even something made by man. I don’t even think this is a good or bad statue. I think: this is a deity.
“Of course I do feel very proud,” he added. He smiled, and slowly wobbled his head from side to side. “That is only human.
“God is inside us,” he said. “It is from our hearts, our minds and our hands that god is formed, and revealed in the form of a metal statue. My statues are like my children. As we say, silpi matha, pitha shastra: the sculptor is the mother and the sacred shastras are the father. Usually I want to keep them, but this is my profession, so sooner or later they must leave me, just as a daughter leaves her father when she is married. Once the eyes are opened by having their pupils chiselled in with a gold chisel, once the deity takes on the form of the idol and it becomes alive, it is no longer mine. It is full of divine power, and I can no longer even touch it. Then it is no longer the creation of man, but a god only.”