by Michael Wood
But in truth these events were very far from heroic. Neither side had any scruples about desecrating temples or oppressing the native population. The poor and the pious had no defence. Well over a million Tamils died of famine and war. Massacres were commonplace on both sides. In one horrendous incident, four hundred wounded and exhausted Tamil women were stripped of their possessions and raped by rioting British soldiers; many committed suicide. In the Cavery delta the French general, Lally, shot Brahmins from his guns when they refused to reveal the whereabouts of their temple treasure. Eventually, British arms triumphed and the son of Hyder Ali, Tippoo Sultan, was trapped and killed on the island of Seringapatam in the Cavery river, a story immortalized in Wilkie Collins’ novel The Moonstone. (Tippoo’s relics, incidentally, are still to be seen in England: his dream book in the India Office Library; his green velvet quiver and poisoned arrows in Windsor Castle, along with the splendid quilted helmet which had been dipped in the holy well of Zum Zum.) It was not the most honourable phase in the imperial history of either French or British. The south Indians, though, bore surprisingly few grudges.
THE BRONZE CASTER
On the way back to Kumbakonam is Swamimalai; this is where the sthapathis live, the hereditary bronze casters who make the temple idols. Their workshop is near the Murugan temple behind an unprepossessing modern shop front. The head of the firm sits at his chair in the tiny reception behind a desk with a little Ganesh and a big pad of order forms. On a display shelf to one side are specimens of his work. White ash on the forehead: deep, narrowed eyes always staring at a distant horizon even when in a little room. He has made idols for temples in the United States and England as well as all over south Asia: on his wall is a framed letter from a Murugan temple in East London thanking him for the quality of his work and ‘the divine expression on the Lord’s face; your efforts were surely guided by a higher hand’.
‘We follow the old patterns,’ said the proprietor. ‘We are not allowed by the government to do exact replicas the same size as some of the ancient masterpieces because there is so much theft of bronzes from temples these days, with the substitution of modern copies. But we follow the traditional patterns. Sometimes we are asked to do statues of mythological themes that do not exist in earlier bronzes and we improvise on the theme as we see fit.’
He picked up his brochure, which illustrated about a. hundred patterns: mostly famous ones, the kind you see in Tanjore museum, and some variations on a theme to suit modern taste.
‘Mostly we follow tried and tested time-honoured formula; this is what people like for their living-rooms. People like the old ways and of course for a temple this must be so.
‘We still make by the lost wax process, called in Sanskrit madhuchchishtavidhana. Come, come.’
He led the way from the foyer to a grimy darkened storeroom heaped with half-worked material, stuff waiting to be worked, and partly stripped rough casts. Behind that room was a thatched workshop which opened on to gardens at the back. Here under a rattan and palm roof were heaps of slag, broken moulds, tools and the earth pits where they bury the moulds. Two workmen were digging a hole. It took no effort of the imagination to see in these people the descendants of the creators of the brilliant pieces in Tanjore.
‘The model is made of bees’ wax, according to the classical proportions, the nine measurements; it should be light yellow in colour and pleasing to the eye. Into it we cut some of the detailed modelling. They can be very big: we have done a six-foot-high Nataraja. We then attach long tubes to the back, each with a flared mouth like a kasa flower. Then we apply the clay mould; again the proportions must be right, as the masters decreed it and as it has been handed down. The clay is prepared by adding charred husk, tiny bits of cotton and salt all ground up. This is done three times, each layer left to dry in the shade for two days. Twice thinly, the last layer thickest. The bronze too is made according to the old texts; the proportions must be correct to ensure the best finish. The amount is according to the weight of the wax: bronze eight times, silver twelve, gold sixteen. The mould is sunk in the earth here at the back of our workshops, in a crucible of clay. Mould is heated, wax runs out. Then bronze is heated in three stages: mild embers, flaming embers, then blazing. The bronze is poured in up to the mouths of the tubes and then we wait.’
His eyes stared through the ground as if he could see it.
‘After twenty-four hours the mould is hauled out. Here is a half-broken mould.’
He showed me a shapeless charred lump out of which, rather like Michelangelo’s giants emerging from their prisons of stone, the legs and front arm of a dancing Siva could be seen pushing their way from the hardened mould. One of the workmen, a thin, wiry man with watery eyes and a roasted nose, deftly hacked the top off a coconut with a machete, and offered it to me with a straw. I drank gratefully while the proprietor continued, absorbed in a tale he must have told a hundred times.
‘When we have cleared the mould from the bronze, then the hard work begins. We have to model the rough cast; sometimes there are blemishes, but we pride ourselves that this does not happen often. Now these days our practice is to make the model rough and do a lot of carving later – eyes, face, details of clothes and so on. In ancient times the wax model carried all the detail and what followed was just finishing. Of course even the ancient masters could make a mistake; look carefully when you go into temples and sometimes you will see masks welded on to a face to cover a failure in the casting.
‘When we are making idols for temples, all this procedure has to be done according to the correct rules and astrological rites: the auspicious day for the casting, the necessary puja to consecrate the image for religious use; open its eyes for darshan. But most now we make for middle-class living-rooms. Many rich people in Madras like a replica of a Cholan bronze on their cabinet, even movie stars. But we still make many for new Hindu temples here and abroad; we have a whole book of recommendations from satisfied customers in USA, Malaysia, Singapore, in Britain also.’
Back in the office he opened a cupboard and showed some finished images gleaming disconcertingly like chrome on a new car; quite unlike the soft browns, blue-greens and lead greys shading to a kind of gunmetal black, which you find in the patina of old works.
‘Swamimalai has always been a centre for the making of fine idols and bell casting. It was an ancient home of Cholan craftsmen. And of course has very good fine clay from the Cavery river. I am the seventh generation of our family of whom we have record as sthapathis.’
‘Who were the best old masters?’
‘Standard was very high. When you think even today there must be thousands of ancient bronzes surviving. Sometimes when I have puja in at temples, I make a mental note of very great work: Konierirajapuram sthapathi near here was very fine. But best were at Tiruvengadu. They were great artists who had a vision which added something to received religion. They were a family like ours: they were two or three generations, maybe just fathers and sons. For some reason they made the greatest masterpieces, like Rishabhavanmurti in Tanjore Museum, Siva as herdsman; and the Bhikshatanamurti, Siva as the divine mendicant. The best of all in my opinion is the half-man, half-woman Ardhanarisvara, also from Tiruvengadu. It is a unique image: impossible to copy. We have tried. Point is not so much a technical one. Though their technical ability was top quality. It has gone beyond matter of technique. Point is spiritual essence of art. Even if we could make exact copy in every detail, it would be inferior. Spiritual conditions no longer apply.’
SURYANARCOIL
I started back from Kumbakonam to Chidambaram by road. The driver was a kindly old gentleman I had found at the cab rank by the big tank. He had an antiquated Ambassador with squeaking wipers and a rattling asthmatic engine which had needed a push start from both of us in the middle of the street. In the sagging back seat the springs had gone, which made me feel as if I was sitting in a hole. Slowly we bumped and jarred along the country roads, stopping now and then to ask locals the way to obs
cure shrines from the Tevaram.
We crossed the leafy course of the Cavery: here a small stream like the Thames in the Windrush valley, a damp Arcadia with thickets of rattan cane and bamboo, overflowing with flowers, coco palms and acacias. By the roadside were huge banyans, neem, wild lime, laurel, wood apple and beech; in the gardens, banana, tamarind, mulberry and pomegranate underneath the rattling crowns of areca palms. Irridescent colours: orange fruit of vilva; yellow flowers of the konnei tree and, lifting above the trees at every village, the crumbling gopuras of ancient shrines, in faded pastels, sprouting tufts of grass and birds’ nests.
At Konierirajapuram the paddies were flooded, and the narrow causeway road had been swept away, leaving a gaping crater of red mud. Soon a group of villagers arrived with a bullock cart loaded with stones to fill the hole. On the temple walls a big painting showed British district officers in pith helmets attending a temple festival in the 1920s. Inside were extraordinary tenth-century bronzes, some of them given by Sembiyan Mahadevi, the greatest Cholan royal patron, who is depicted on the nave wall worshipping Siva: a perfect small village temple, untouched. Not far off, over two flooded arms of the Cavery, enormous gopuras rose tantalizingly over the silent damp forests:
‘Where’s that?’ I asked the driver.
Tiruvidaimarudur.’
Once again that magical name. ‘Can we go there?’
‘Not possible,’ he replied. ‘Roads are flooded.’
In the depths of the countryside south of the river I came to Tiruvilimilalai, one of the sites most hymned by the ancient saints. It had a spectacular campus under a grey curtain of rain, an immense eroded red-brick perimeter wall dark with damp and lined with seated Nandis, and mud streets of pillared wooden Brahmins’ houses, just as Appar described it in the seventh century: The huge tank had displaced steps and crumbling mandapas. The front gate had cracked lintels and crumbling brickwork supported by bamboo scaffolding: trees were everywhere in the overgrown outer court along with the blackened ruins of a house. Three people were at the puja. ‘We were famous in ancient days,’ said a man sitting at the tank. ‘This temple was a grand place when Rajaraja the Great was here,’ he said, as if referring to recent history. ‘But we have no trains and few country buses, and with no communications no one comes. Now this historical place is destroyed.’
My goal was Suryanarcoil, the Sun temple Rajdurai had told me to visit four years before. It lay up a warren of country lanes in thick palm forests and took some finding. A lovely tree-lined track with a floor of damp sand led up to the gate. On the left was a deep green tank the colour and consistency of pea soup. Stalls for coconuts and flowers. Twenty or thirty orange-clad sadhus. Some leapt up and hared across to me with an alacrity which belied their age. A moustachioed chap behind me dismissed them with a humph: ‘Not sadhus, not holy men.’ How anyone can tell beats me. ‘Beggars?’ ‘Humph,’ again. He’s with his wife doing a honeymoon bus tour: ‘We worship the planets with a view to acquiring peace, prosperity, wealth and longevity in this world. We believe they influence the destinies of human beings.’
Suryanarcoil is the only major temple of its kind in the south, a temple exclusively to the sun. It is completely surrounded by palm groves which crowd its walls and lean over the little swept courtyard. It has no prehistory. Inscriptions show the temple was built by Kulottunga I in the twelfth century as a response to the fashionable northern solar cults. The worship of the sun, of course, is one of the most ancient rituals of Hinduism, the chief item in morning prayer of every Hindu.
Outside, the cella is ringed by eight box shrines each on its own platform like little doll’s houses stained black by offering lamps; these are for the other seven planets, preceded by the gatekeeper Chandikeshwarar. The pilgrims go round them in a clockwise direction.
The main cella is surmounted by the sun’s disc flanked by lions, for the sun is the lord of Leo. (That is why Raj told me to come here, as Leo is my birth sign.) In front, where Nandi normally sits in a Siva temple, is a horse, the mount of the sun. The entrance was hung with a curtain of palm fronds; inside was a satisfyingly literal concretization of a set of ideas which could only ever happen, one imagines, in India. The long narrow cella is raised on a high platform. At the end stands the Sun, a young male figure hung with white flowers and wearing a white dhoti. He is faced by his guru Jupiter, a handsome and upright young man with a high forehead, open face, the epitome of knowledge and enlightenment. On his head are marigolds and red flowers, long garlands of fresh jasmine and small white hibiscus fall right down to the floor. Big flowers lie at his feet, bright red hibiscus, more jasmine. The wives of the sun stood to one side. His face was strangely familiar; I realized it resembled Rajdurai Dikshithar, the guru of my journey as it were, who had sent me to these places four years before. I almost expected a conspiratorial wink.
THE DANCE
I returned to Chidambaram and more storms. Rain beat down the bougainvillea outside the hotel foyer, where an old circular red British letter-box stands at the bottom of the steps. The hoot of a steam train, the local passenger to Cuddalore, huffing and puffing out of the station; the glint of the firebox through the drizzle. There was a tourist coach outside and the foyer was full of people shaking rain off their coats.
They were Malaysian tourists just arrived from Pondi, Tamils now living in south-east Asia (in the cultural zone of India’s spirit empire, remember, which left its monuments from Java to Cambodia). They had come back to see Nataraja’s temple, returning to their roots. They were all professionals, teachers of English, business people, all of them born abroad: ‘My father was born here in Chidambaram,’ said one. All were culture-shocked by south India:
‘What do you think?’ asked one woman hesitantly before admitting she found it all rather alarming. ‘The first day, arriving in Madras, we experienced a bit of a shock. You see, Malaysia is so clean and efficient, but in Madras the first thing was that the stench was terrible everywhere. Here at least the air is fresh.’
They were on day four of a three-week trip; and some were worn out already. Their bus had broken down in Pondi and now they had a replacement coach with no air-conditioning, not much better than Mr Ramasamy’s video bus. They sat in the restaurant mopping their brows, while the boys brought out vegetables and rice, at which they picked with some trepidation. Their programme was to eat, go to the temple for an hour at nine, come back for a short entertainment in the hotel, then take the bus on to Kumbakonam, as there is nowhere satisfactory to stay in Chidambaram. Then Tanjore, and two days in Trichy before going down to Madurai, Comari and the hill stations, doing the ancestral haunts. They sang the praises of Malaysia.
‘India is the land of our fathers and mothers,’ said the English teacher, a lady in her mid-thirties, wearing Western dress, ‘but we are used to a multiracial land, a place where everyone works hard and everything is properly regulated. Malaysia is a highly advanced state; here it strikes us as chaotic, dirty, unclean, inefficient. The poverty is shocking. I really believe nothing much can have changed since my father’s day. He said all India’s problems are to do with health education and infrastructure. If they are not improved the rich will rise and the poor remain poor. Also, it’s dangerous even, with all this growing communal trouble and the fundamentalism. In Malaysia we are multiracial and prosperous, no troubles: Muslims, Hindus, many cultures live side by side, united in our desire to build a good life. Our standard of living is such that we would never contemplate returning to this.’
The man next to her felt the same. He was a businessman in his early sixties I should guess; his father had been an indentured labourer under the British.
‘Look, in Malaysia we have rules which everybody obeys. We go to school from four or five, and they tell you how to behave, how to do everything: where to go to the toilet, how to brush your teeth, how to live life. You cannot disobey the rules. It is a well-organized country. People obey the rules. Here just look at it. Every person has his own rules. Just w
atch the traffic, there’s no right or left; people just go wherever they want. Look at the beach; it’s a public toilet – they go anywhere.’
He shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands. ‘Sure is an independent country,’ he said without trace of irony; then realizing what he had said, he burst out laughing.
Around the table everyone nodded in agreement. I said I thought that ruling nine hundred million is different from ruling twenty million. India has been going through a profound revolution since 1947, a revolution caused by universal suffrage: democracy. No country this size had ever done that in history. Give it time. And given the scale of the problems, what an achievement it was to remain an open society. They clearly thought there was nothing which could not be achieved by judicious application of carrot and stick.
‘We all find it vibrant and exciting,’ said the English teacher. ‘But I think we mostly agree already that it is a place to visit rather than to return to live. It is a great excitement to be in Chidambaram, where my father was born. But I couldn’t live like this. Impossible. This kind of freedom is not freedom at all.’
The meal over, they threw jackets over their heads and piled back on to the coach to go to see Nataraja’s temple. In the restaurant the rain ran down the windows while Rajendran cleared up the plates after them.
An hour or so later they came back. You could tell from their faces that it had been a moving experience, seeing for themselves the ancient traditions of Nataraja’s temple, which is so revered throughout the Tamil diaspora. Exiles tapping a root, retrieving distant dreams, the ties that bound their grandparents and which their parents had chosen to cast off. As they reflected on what they had seen, you sensed the power of it for them: childhood tales, visions, smells, the repetition of the ancient gestures and words: the sound of the temple trumpet. The weight – and the spaciousness of tradition.
