Nine Lives(77)
Overlooking this landscape for miles in every direction is the vimana pyramid-spire of the great Tanjore temple. It rises 216 feet tall above the horizontal plain, dominating the flat-roofed village houses and the farmland round about as completely as the cathedrals of the Middle Ages must once have dominated the landscape of Europe: like Chartres or Cologne, this was the tallest building in the country when it was built. The temple was created by the great Rajaraja I, whose rule was in many ways the Golden Age of Tamil culture, and the occasion for a renaissance of Tamil literature, scholarship, philosophy and poetry. He sent embassies to China and war fleets as far as Bali; conquered Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Kerala and the Deccan, exerted hegemony over Java and made Tanjore the capital of southern India.
Only at the end of his reign did Rajaraja erect his magnificent temple to commemorate his glory. A massively self-confident and imperial statement, it was five times the size of any previous Chola shrine, yet built entirely without mortar. The top finial at the apex of the pyramid is of solid stone and weighs eighty tons; it was hoisted into place by the erection of a ramp four miles long and pulled up to its socket at the very top by thousands of bullocks.
Entering the great temple today, and passing over the warm flagstones through two magnificent courtyards, each reached through a monumental gateway, you see on every side oiled black stone images of gods and demons, saints and hermits, and in particular of Lord Shiva and his consorts. In front of some, pilgrims prostrate themselves full-length; in front of others, small offerings of flowers are placed, or the flames of small camphor lamps are lit.
The Cholas fell from power in the thirteenth century, yet the classical Tamil Hindu civilisation that they cultivated in the south still survives partly intact. Some of the rituals you see today in the Tanjore temple are described in the Rig Veda, written when both the Pyramids and Stonehenge were still in use. Yet Sanskrit, the language of the Vedas, is still alive, and while Zeus, Jupiter and Isis are all dead and forgotten, Lord Shiva is now more revered than ever, and the great Chola temples at Chidambaram and Tanjore are still thriving and bustling.
Moreover, the devotional world which brought the Chola bronzes into being is still, just, intact. On my way from the airport to see Srikanda’s workshop in Swamimalai, I arranged to meet in the temple courtyard Shankara Narayana, one of the last professional singers of Thevaram devotional songs. These are the seven volumes of devotional hymns written by Appar, Sambandar and the other great Tamil saints, and first performed in this temple over a thousand years ago. I asked Shankara Narayana what it was like to sing in front of one of the temple’s great bronzes. “As singers, we try to lose ourselves in the beauty of Lord Shiva,” he replied. “The bronzes allow us access to his beauty, and in turn our words help give life to the idol.”
It was these Thevaram hymns—the widespread oral memory of which is only now beginning to be endangered—that created the intense, mystical and often sensual bhakti world which needed the Chola bronzes as focuses for devotion. The direct family link between the Chola bronze casters and Srikanda’s family workshop in Swamimalai is only one aspect of a much wider continuity of Tamil theology and devotion.
On arrival at Swamimalai, I found Srikanda hard at work in his small family factory on the main street of the temple town.
No longer was he wearing the smart laundered lungi I had seen him wearing on my previous trip. Now he sat in an old stained vest and waist-wrap, unshaven yet with a smear of ash and sandalwood paste at the centre of his forehead. He was concentrating fixedly on a small idol of Mariamman, the mother goddess and principal deity of many of the villages of the region, gently chipping away at her with a hammer and chisel. While he finished his work, I looked around the workshop.
The smartest rooms were those closest to the street. Here, two air-conditioned offices contained piles of order books and a huge old-fashioned typewriter out of which sprouted several sheaves of carbon paper. It was manned by a matron in a stiff white sari who tap-tapped away at it with the regularity of a metronome. A few cuttings from newspapers were framed on the walls, as was a large photograph of Srikanda with his father and two brothers, receiving some award from Mr. Karunanidhi, the sunglasses-wearing former screenwriter who was now Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu.
The next room was the workshop proper. On one desk was the abandoned arm of a goddess, moulded in fresh beeswax and tree resin; beside it was a small basin of wax warming on a brazier, along with a knife, a scalpel and a litter of pellets and shavings which some craftsman had left lying there while taking a tea break. A second basin, filled with water, contained a collection of finished but detached body parts, as if from the casualty unit of a Victorian field hospital.