So my mind touches the lotus feet of Ranga’s Lord,
Delights in his fine calves, clings
To his twin thighs and, slowly,
Rising, reaches
The navel.
It stops for a while on his chest,
Then, after climbing
His broad shoulders,
Drinks the nectar of his lovely face.
Hinduism has always held that there are many paths to God. Yet for many centuries there has been a central tension between the ascetic and the sensual. The poet-prince Bhartrihari of Ujjain, who probably lived in the fourth century AD, oscillated no fewer than seven times between the rigours of monastic renunciation and the abandon of the courtly sensualist. “There are two paths,” he wrote. “The devotion of the sage, which is lovely because it overflows with the nectarous waters of the knowledge of truth” and “the lusty undertaking of touching with one’s palm that hidden part in the firm laps of lovely limbed women, with great expanses of breasts and thighs.”
“Tell us decisively which we ought to attend upon?” he asks in the Shringarashataka: “The sloping sides of the mountains in the wilderness? Or the buttocks of a woman abounding in passion?”
In the sculpture of the Cholas, and those like Srikanda who have kept its flame alive in the Kaveri Delta ever since, this tension is at least partially resolved. More than in any other Indian artistic tradition, the gods here are both intensely physical and physically gorgeous. The sensuality of a god was understood as an aspect of his formless perfection and divine inner beauty. Celebrating and revelling in the sensuality of a god was therefore central to the devotee’s expression of love for that deity.
In this conception of theology, it was not considered necessary to renounce the world to gain Enlightenment in the manner of the Jains or the Buddhists or the Hindu sadhus; nor was it necessary to perform the bloody animal sacrifices or fire ceremonies laid down in the Vedas. Instead, intensely loving devotion and regular pujas to images were believed to bring salvation just as effectively. For if the gods were universal, ranging through time and space, they were also forcefully present in certain holy places and most especially in the idols of the great temples. Here the final climax of worship is still to have darshan: to actually see the beauty of the divine image, and to meet the eyes of the god. The gaze of the bronze deity meets the eyes of the worshipper, and it this exchange of vision—the seeing and the seen—that acts as a focus for bhakti, the passionate devotion of the devotee.
The idea of the bronzes as the devotional focus for a religious rapture in which God is often envisaged as a lover is something that would have been entirely familiar to the ancient Babylonians, Greeks and Romans, but which is as far as it is possible to go, theologically, from the three Abrahamic religions, with their scriptural suspicion of idols and graven images, and their deep misgivings about sexual pleasure.
As Srikanda later put it to me, “What is so strange about the statues being beautiful and attractive? The erotic is part of human life—the secret part—and the idol is the human form of God, God in the form of man. If it was unattractive and ugly, would anyone pray to it? The Shilpa Shastras that guide us as sculptors lay down certain norms about the correct proportions for each god. We believe that unless these proportions are exactly perfect, the god cannot live in the idol. As sculptors, we struggle to become master craftsmen just so that we can begin to convey the beauty of the deity.
“Only then,” he said, “will a deity attract devotees. And it is only then that we as sculptors begin to do justice to the tradition we have inherited from our forefathers.”
Swamimalai, where the Chola tradition of idol making has survived in the workshops of Srikanda Stpathy’s family, lies a couple of hours’ drive from the small airstrip at Trichinopoly, which itself lies a bumpy forty-minute flight in an old-fashioned twin-prop from Madras.
Returning to the area two months after my first visit, as the plane banked and emerged below the monsoon clouds, I could see for the first time the rich soils of the Kaveri Delta spread out below: a flat plain, the essence of green, broken into a mirrored patchwork of flooded paddy fields, each square glinting with a slightly different refraction in the light of the late afternoon sun. Through the middle ran the thin silver ribbon of the Kaveri, winding its way slowly through an avenue of palms that line the banks of this rich delta, before looping itself around the island temple of Srirangam and the great smooth rock of Trichinopoly.
Other parts of India may be leaping aggressively forward into the new millennium, but for a visitor at least, rural Tamil Nadu still seems deceptively innocent and timeless. On the way from Trichy airport, the villagers spread their newly harvested grain on the road to be winnowed and threshed by the wheels of passing cars. The villages appear like those in R.K. Narayan stories, with roadside shops full of sacks of dried red chilli and freshly cut stalks of green bananas. Buffaloes are wallowing on the sandbanks of the Kaveri, and bullock carts trundle along red dirt roads, past village duck ponds and the tall, rain-wet fans of banana trees. Old women in blue saris sit out on their verandas, while their granddaughters troop along the roads with jasmine flowers in their hair. The cattle are strong and white, and their long horns are painted blue.