The Story of India

by Michael Wood

  Rajaraja’s personal story has some of the disturbing hallucinations of a myth. His dynasty had been overthrown by enemies during his childhood; his great-uncle committed religious suicide by fasting to death, probably when he (Rajaraja) was a child; his elder brother was assassinated in palace infighting; following this, his father died mysteriously (‘Of a broken heart?’ speculates historian Nilakanta Sastri), and his mother committed ritual suicide on his father’s funeral pyre. Father and mother were subsequently elevated almost to divine status in the inscriptions recorded on bronze images commissioned by Rajaraja’s sister Kundavi. After all this, his uncle, rather than the boy-prince, succeeded to the throne (shades of Hamlet or The Lion King?), and is regarded by some Tamil historians, though not all, as a ‘wicked uncle’. Although Rajaraja was ‘begged by the people to become king and dispel the darkness of the Kali age’, he refused to do so. ‘He did not desire the kingdom for himself, even inwardly, so long as his uncle coveted the rule of the land …’ The tale no doubt conceals infighting within the royal house, as seems to have happened with so many ancient and medieval Indian successions. But to placate court factions, and after ‘certain marks were observed on his body … showing that he was the very Vishnu descended to Earth’, (which has hints of the Rama story) his uncle named Rajaraja as his heir. So he was installed as crown prince, while the uncle himself ‘bore the burden of ruling the Earth’.

  With the self-possession of Rama in exile, the young prince did not fight, but waited for his time to come. When it finally did, the king displayed a practical genius, a ruthlessness and a knack for self-promotion that has left an enduring mark on the cultural, political and religious life of southern India.

  Rajaraja’s personal deity – his family god (kulandeva) as the Tamils put it – was Shiva, but as with all great Indian rulers he was an enthusiastic patron of other faiths, building a temple and a huge Buddhist monastery in Nagapattinam, the main seaport, to welcome Eastern pilgrims. (This, incidentally, continued to be used by Asian pilgrims into the sixteenth century, and was not demolished until the 1860s.) He even sanctioned Buddhist sculptures on the walls of his great Shiva temple in Tanjore, built to commemorate his rulership, his conquests and, above all, himself.

  Rajaraja’s temple at Tanjore is a World Heritage Site today, but still a living shrine. The weathered red sandstone gopuras, or gate towers, announce the ceremonial entrance, looking for all the world like exotic petrified vegetation with their sprouting ornaments and horned finials. The temple is named after the great king, Rajarajesvaram (Lord of Rajaraja), and has lengthy inscriptions about his victories and donations carved all around its walls. The royal family and courtiers emulated his generosity by making lavish gifts of bronzes, utensils, candelabra and furnishings. Most prominent among the donors, though, are not his ten queens, but his ‘beloved elder sister’ Kundavi, with whom he seems to have had an unusually intense relationship. She takes priority over her brother’s queens in all the inscriptions, and he would later marry one of her daughters and name one of his own daughters after her.

  The great gateways open on to a campus so elegant and spacious after the crowded hurly-burly of the town that the effect is eye-popping. It measures 1200 by 800 feet and is entirely surrounded by a pillared cloister, with a dado and pilasters, that runs along a magnificent granite wall 40 feet high. Its beautiful and austere classicism is enlivened by rows of little sculpted figures of Nandi, Shiva’s bull, along the top. Peeping over the wall, the bending heads of cocoa palms are tousled beguilingly by the warm wind as knots of pilgrims make their way around the shrines in brilliant saris of lemon, crimson and gold.

  The court was a great ritual space, a theatre for royal ceremonies. There are perhaps few places in the world where so old a building is still perfectly preserved, and still works as a living institution. In the centre of the courtyard the main shrine stands on a great platform, with a huge pyramidal vimana (tower) 216 feet high, which, when it was completed in 1010, was the tallest building in India. The completion was celebrated in a grand festival in which the top royal acting troupe performed a specially written musical play telling the story of the king and his temple. Sadly, the text is now lost, though sitting in the courtyard in brilliant sunshine, with today’s festival tents flapping, it is pleasing to imagine Rajaraja as prince and script editor-in-chief – both Hal and Hamlet, solid and quicksilver, swordsman and poet-philosopher – giving his actors last-minute instructions on how to deliver their lines extolling him: ‘… his deeds such as to make the goddess of fortune his own wife, and the goddess of the great Earth, his mistress.’

  Around the base of the vimana are rows of sculpted figures of Shiva in his warlike form with shield and sword, the destroyer of cities. Inscriptions list thirty Cholan regiments with battle honours. By the doors are carved images of Rajaraja and his guru Karuvur Devar. Up the steps the inner sanctum is approached through a dimly lit and fabulously atmospheric hall supported by massive, squared granite columns. Finally, inside the shrine, set against a giant bronze seven-headed serpent, a 12-foot black lingam stands on a huge pedestal – the emblem of Shiva. The name of the lingam is ‘Lord of Rajaraja’. Every dawn milk libations are poured over the polished granite before it is washed and decorated with long golden streamers of marigolds and wrapped in a gleaming white cotton skirt. As is the custom in Tamil Nadu, on the day of Rajaraja’s birth special pujas are still performed in the king’s memory. (And could it perhaps be – given the insistently personal nature of the foundation – that the shrine was planned also to mark the eventual burial place of the king’s ashes?)

  As the king intended, the scale and spaciousness of it all creates a feeling of tremendous grandeur. From the last gate the pilgrim walks across the vast sun-beaten courtyard on a progress from wide open sky to the dark ‘womb-chamber’. But the most beautiful, intimate and evanescent traces of Rajaraja’s age have for many years been hidden from public view. Inside the wall of the shrine, in a narrow ambulatory passage, are much earlier murals that were rescued in the 1930s from underneath rain-damaged paintings from the seventeenth century. Little Cholan painting has survived, and what has been exposed and conserved here is magical. The technique is true fresco – paint on wet lime plaster – and the images give an extraordinary glimpse into the lost world of the Cholan Empire. Most striking is the strange mingling of militarism with the most exquisite delicacy. This was an age that produced love poetry of almost postmodern awareness and sexual frankness, yet also enjoyed bloodthirsty battle eulogies in which enemies’ temples are looted, the heads of rebels squashed like melons under elephants’ feet and, most grisly of all, royal women of the defeated side are mutilated – in one case the defeated king’s mother, in another the king’s wife, a woman ‘as lovely as a peacock’. In one war in the Mysore region women in the conquered countries have their ‘girdles loosened’ or are ‘deprived of their caste’ – in other words, raped. More bizarrely, one condemned ambassador is humiliated by being dressed in women’s clothes and set afloat in a boat with no oars. Perhaps all this casts a different light on similar wars between Turkic sultans and Hindu rajas in the north during the Middle Ages, when temples were sacked as an act of religious iconoclasm. Muslim hostility towards Hindu image-making is no doubt part of it, but one should never underestimate the retributive impulses of the conqueror. As in the medieval West, to renounce one’s overlord was to break a religious vow.

  So it was a time of blood and flowers, evoking strange parallels – feudal Japan, perhaps, or even the Aztecs? In the lamplight inside the ambulatory of the great temple you can gaze on the faces of that age and gradually make out soft, blurred outlines as if through a smoky mist: lapis lazuli, terre verte, white lime, lamp black, yellow and red ochre. There’s an extraordinarily lifelike portrait of Rajaraja himself, fleshy lipped and golden skinned, with the faint suggestion of puppy fat you might see in any well-fed, rich Tamil politician or Bollywood star today. Head inclined, he is deep in conversation wi
th his white-bearded guru and poet laureate Karuvur Devar. On the wall near them is Shiva, again in his military incarnation – the destroyer of the cities of the demons, full of bulging-eyed rage, tracers of paint swirling around him like time-lapse headlights. Here too is the royal family worshipping its family god: the shadowy image of dancing Shiva in his ring of fire, jewels shimmering faintly, as if on a photographic negative, and behind him the unmistakable bowed roof of the sanctum at Chidambaram, the ‘hall of consciousness’ where he performed his cosmic dance.

  The dance, both divine and human, is a central image in the temple and in the culture – as God’s dance and as an art form. On the frescoes there are girls dancing, curvaceous and naked but for a waistband, bangles, anklets and elaborate hairdo. Upstairs, in the upper ambulatory gallery, unfinished at the king’s death in 1014, is a great sequence of sculpted panels of the 108 poses of the dance, the Bharat Natyam, in the exact sequence of the ancient text book, the Natya Shastra. Of 850 temple employees dedicated by Rajaraja to his new establishment – servants, dance masters, musicians, drummers, singers, accountants, parasol bearers, lamplighters, watermen, potters, washermen, barbers, astrologers, tailors, carpenters, goldsmith – there were 400 dancing girls brought from all over Chola Nadu for its dedication in 1010. They lived in streets adjacent to the shrine and are all named in inscriptions on the exterior walls, with the address of their house and the name of their native village. All were dedicated to a life of service to God and king, and the details are there for all to see: terms of employment, remuneration, duties, pension arrangements and rights upon death. Take this typical example: ‘South Street, south row. House number 80, the girl Sengulam, from Tiru Merrali temple in Pachchil village.’ Or what about young Solam at number 79? The detail is so immediate and alluring that it is hard for the historian to resist trying to trace them …

  IN IMPERIAL TANJORE

  Evening is coming on, the rains have stopped, and warm sunlight is slanting across the bus stand. I take a rickshaw into the old town. Despite the riches of the epigraphy from this period, there is no description of this great Indian imperial city, and no information about its situation or layout. It first appears in the early eighth century as a new town, Tanjapuri, that was fortified in the mid-ninth century when it became the Cholan capital. That city lay to the north of today’s town on the banks of the Vennar river, where a little temple, whose god is called the Lord of Tanjore, still survives. Then, in the late tenth century, Rajaraja laid out a new city, with wide streets and bazaars, and a hospital dedicated by his sister Kundavi. But the city layout as it stands today seems to be sixteenth to seventeenth century. And whether Rajaraja’s capital stood on the same site has not yet been proved: many think it lay somewhere outside the present moated city, but I’m not sure. It’s time for another exploration on the ground.

  I bring with me an eighteenth-century map made by British military observers, ‘engraved from an exact survey’ during the Carnatic wars (1746–63). This shows the place as it stood in the days of the British–French wars, when the armies of the imperialists went on destructive marches across the south, causing havoc and huge loss of life. The map is so detailed that it marks the sight-lines of the artillery, and the locations of French attacks; but it also shows the pre-modern streets, alleys and shrines. Inside the defences there were four great streets forming a square, and off them was a warren of narrow alleys. Could these be the four great streets of the Cholan inscriptions? I leave the rickshaw and plunge down a narrow alley under the palace walls, where I swiftly stumble on a derelict medieval shrine, now used as a bike shed. The columns used to support festival canopies are still sticking up out of a midden heap.

  Further on the centre of the old town is a warren hidden from the world, reachable only on foot. In the middle of today’s West Street is a big shrine with Cholan inscriptions; and close by is a series of stone-lined lanes, part of what looks like a deliberately planned layout of housing plots, each with its own alley entrance. I then turn into South Street, where the dancing girls perhaps lived. The tenth-century house numbers are no guide. ‘Are you looking for an old number or a new number?’ I am asked by a shopkeeper, pointing at his door frame, where both are painted. Needless to say, neither fits. I wander into a narrow lane off South Street by a new concrete shopping mall. It takes me through a small archway and ends in a little yard flanked by a printer’s shop on one side and an old family temple on the other. In the printing shop the printer makes tea, his old trays of metal type gathering dust: ‘We are now computerized,’ he says. We sit on his steps while across the yard an old man in a loincloth lifts the puja flame and rings the bell.

  ‘I can only tell you the oral tradition of the street,’ says the printer, ‘but we are a Tanjore family and the story here is that this was inside Rajaraja’s city: theroyal staff were accommodated on that side, the singers and dancing girls on this. See how old my neighbours’ shrine is: at least 600 years old. This is typical of old Tanjore.’

  I sit on the steps, sipping my tea, the last light touching the shrine roof while rush-hour traffic roars past the end of the alley and shoppers hurry home. Of course, what I am looking at is the product of many layers of time – Cholan, Nayak, Maratha, British – but in my mind’s eye I see the scene described in a great Tamil text of the tenth century: ‘The hum of people in the city is like the noise of the ocean … in the streets all the colours of the rainbow … banners fluttering, blue-painted water pots on terraces, tanks as deep as the hearts of courtesans. Men and women beautifully dressed like a city of the gods.’ This is from a poem by a Jain writer, influenced by traditional Tamil descriptions of cities, but it has the feel of the tenth century, when ‘the people of eighteen languages were congregated here as thick as birds on a tree ripe with fruit’. The poem, the Civakacintamani, goes on to describe the interior:

  [Inside] the city was filled with the merchandise of the islands … its bazaar streets long and wide, beautifully arranged, glinting with treasures, their warehouses crammed with precious luxuries … People of the seven castes so numerous, so close together that sandal paste rubbed on one shoulder came off on another, and voices were heard but language was not distinguishable … The smoke of a thousand cooking fires gusting through streets, darkens the sun, and when the festival is over the visitor must tread over heaps of garlands in the streets, through pools strewn with petals and reddened by coloured powders.

  Such, one imagines, was Tanjore in the days of Rajaraja.

  FROM ANCIENT TO MEDIEVAL

  So the cultures of India in the Middle Ages produced brilliant flowerings in many areas. Beyond what we have briefly glimpsed in this chapter, one might also mention the architecture of Khajuraho, Orissa and Gujarat; the cave shrines at Ajanta, Ellora and Karle; the Jain temples at Mount Abu; or the Buddhist architecture of Bengal, where the Pala kingdom between the eighth and thirteenth centuries left great monuments, such as the university at Somapura, now in Bangladesh. Although India was never united as a state, it is likely that through these centuries the subcontinent was the richest and most populous part of the world. Of course, these were all hierarchical and caste-ridden societies, where the tribal and untouchable peoples were often suppressed with violence, and where the elites spent vast resources on their own royal prestige and cults. The masses did not generally share in the surplus they generated, but still their culture had many qualities, and one notable area was pluralism in religion. Intolerance, of course, is the monopoly of no civilization, and it is easy to find examples of Hindu kings demonstrating hostility to Buddhists and Jains in the Middle Ages, and even towards other Hindu sects. But if a broad tendency can be detected, it is perhaps that foreign dynasties eschewed state religion altogether, and though some native dynasties favoured one – the Mauryans with Jainism or Buddhism, for example, the Guptas with Vaishnavaism, the Cholas with Saivism – enlightened Indian rulers were still active supporters of other faiths. The key, if at all possible, was pluralism.

/>   In the south the old native kingdoms went their own way until the early fourteenth century, untroubled by the wider world. In the north the great powers of the late antique period and early Middle Ages were buffeted by blows through the eleventh and twelfth centuries until the establishment of the Delhi sultanate in 1192 began the centuries-long domination of Afghan, Turkic and Mughal dynasties, some of whose kings aggressively propagated Islam. But, as we shall see, accommodation came. In a telling anecdote that could be multiplied over and over, the great traveller ibn Battuta tells how, in the 1330s, even the temples at Khajuraho, with their magically erotic sculpture illustrating the cosmic marriage of Shiva and Parvati, became a source for Muslim holy men as well as Hindus. All of them were united in that perennial Indian quest – seeking after wisdom.

  As for the Rama story with which I began, in the Middle Ages it became a metaphor, a carrier of meaning for the Indian experience, a lens by which to see the shifting currents of Indian history. There are said to be more than 300 versions, some containing radical retellings, in Tamil, for example, in Marathi, Telugu and Bengali, and in the northern lingua franca, Hindi. There is a Muslim Rama story told by the Mopylas, the old boat-building caste of Kerala: a tale of ‘Sultan Ram’ set firmly in tropical southern India in a Muslim milieu. There is even a Tamil ‘Life of the Prophet’ modelled on the Tamil Ramayana. In such ways the tale became a vision of Indian history: another root of a shared past, available to all communities and even all religions. Like all great creations of India, it came to belong everywhere. As an eminent member of India’s Supreme Court, a Muslim, puts it: