The great temple-building dynasties were people of “charm and cruelty,” to borrow a phrase that has been applied to kingdoms in Southeast Asia.39 Death and taxes were, as always, the standard operating procedure, the death consisting, from Chola times, in a series of martial expeditions to conquer the world (dig-vijayas). In 1014, Rajendra I invaded (the present-day) Sri Lanka, sacked Anuradhapura, plundered its stupas, opened relic chambers, and took so much treasure from the Buddhist monasteries that the Buddhist chronicles compared his forces to blood-sucking fiends (yakkhas). But Buddhism was not the only Chola target. A western Chalukyan inscription, in the Bijapur district, accuses the Chola army of behaving with exceptional brutality, slaughtering Hindu women, children, and Brahmins and raping high-caste girls.40 Clearly both of these are heavily slanted evaluations.
Such violence against temples had little, if anything, to do with religious persecution. The Cholas were generally Shaivas, but within their own territories they protected and enriched both Shaiva and Vaishnava temples, as well as Jaina and Buddhist establishments.41 It was, however, the Cholas’ custom to desecrate the temples of their fellow Hindu rivals and to use their own temples to make grandiloquent statements about political power. Plunder was a prime motive for Chola military aggression; Rajaraja looted the Cheras and Pandyas in order to build the Thanjavur temple.gz42 Often the Cholas replaced brick temples with grander stone ones, particularly on their borders with the Rashtrakuta kingdom to the north.43 Though kings and local rulers maintained large amounts of capital, the temples were the banks of that period, and the invading kings kept knocking off the temples because, as Willie Sutton once said when asked why he robbed banks, “That’s where the money is.”
The Chalukyas, by contrast, did not destroy the Pallava temples but were content merely to pick up some of the Pallava architectural themes to use in their own capital,44 importing workmen from both the north and the south. Some of the Chalukya buildings are therefore among the finest extant examples of the southern style, with the enormous front gate (gopuram), while others are in the northern style (later epitomized in Khajuraho) and still others in the Orissan style. At first the Chalukyas cut temples right into the rock, but Pulakeshin II (610-642), using local sandstone, built some of the earliest freestanding temples in a new style at Badami and at the neighboring Aihole, Mahakuta, Alampur, and Pattadal.45 The Chalukya Vikramaditya II (733-746), in 742, left an inscription on the Pallavas’ Kailasanatha temple boasting that he had captured it but spared both it and the city, returning the gold that he had taken from the temple. Clearly this was a most unusual thing for a king to do.
KINGSHIP AND BHAKTI
South Indian religion under the Cholas and Pallavas was fueled by royal patronage, and kingship provided one model for bhakti, which, from its very inception, superimposed the divine upon the royal. Some of the early Tamil poems praise the god just as they praise their patron king; you can substitute the word “god” wherever the word “hero” or “king” occurs in some of the early royal panegyrics, and voilà, you have a hymn of divine praise.46 While the secular poems praised the king’s ancestors, the bhakti poems praised the god’s previous incarnations; the battles of gods and of kings were described in much the same gory detail. But there is a crucial difference: The god offered his suppliants personal salvation as well as the food and wealth that kings usually gave to bards who sought their patronage, spiritual capital in addition to plain old capital.
We have noted the close ties between kingship and devotion in the image of Ram-raj in the Ramayana, Rama as king and god. The Cholas regarded themselves as incarnations (not the official avatars but earthly manifestations) of Vishnu but were by and large worshipers of Shiva.ha Thus Vishnu (the king), the god manifest within the world, was a devotee of Shiva, the god aloof from the world. As the subject was to the king, so the king was to the god, a great chain of bhakti, all the way down the line, but the king was also identified with the god. The divine married couple, Shiva and Parvati or Sita and Rama, served as a template for the images of a number of kings and their queenshb who commissioned sculptures47 depicting, on one level, the god and his goddess and, on another, the king and his consort.hc The bronzes commissioned by the Chola kings are the most famous, and surely among the most beautiful, of this genre of the couple standing side by side. Rama and Krishna, the primary recipients of bhakti in North India, were already kings before they were gods; the worship of Rama was by its very nature political from the start. But this was a two-way street, for the rise of bhakti also influenced the way that people treated kings and the games that the kings themselves were able to play.
Sacred places are the counterparts to the king’s domain, his capital and his forts.48 The temple was set up like a palace, and indeed Tamil uses the same word (koil, also koyil or kovil, “the home [il] of the king [ko]”) for both palace and temple. Temples were central to the imperial projects of the upwardly mobile dynasties; every conquering monarch felt it incumbent upon him to build a temple as a way of publicizing his achievement. Brahmins became priests in temples as they had been chaplains to kings. Temples also brought puja out of the house and into public life, making group puja the center of religious activity, mediating between the house and the palace. These manifestations of the divine were specifically local; the frescoes in the great Thanjavur Brihadishvara temple depicted not just the images of Shiva and Parvati, or of Shiva as Lord of the Dance and Destroyer of the Triple City, images that were known from northern temples, but also scenes from the legends of Shaiva saints (Nayanmars), while other temples did the same for the Vaishnava saints (Alvars).49 By building temples, making grants for temple rituals, and having the bhakti hymns collected, the Cholas successfully harnessed and institutionalized bhakti. The deep royal connection goes a long way to explaining the ease with which religious stories and images were swept up in political maneuverings throughout the history of Hinduism.
DARSHAN
A feudal king, subject to a superior ruler, had to appear in person in the court of his overlord, publicly affirming his obedient service through a public demonstration of submission, so that he could see and be seen.50 So too the temple was both the god’s private dwelling and a palace, a public site where people could not only offer puja but look at the deity and be looked at by him. Many temples have annual processions in which the central image of the god is taken out and carried around the town in a wooden chariot (rath), in clear imitation of a royal procession.
Darshan (“seeing”) was the means (known throughout North and South India, from the time of the Alvars and Nayanmars to the present) by which favor passed from one to the other of each of the parties linked by the gaze. One takes darshan of a king or a god, up close and personal. Darshan is a concept that comes to the world of the temple from the world of the royal court. To see the deity, therefore, and to have him (or her) see you was to make possible a transfer of power not unlike the transfer of karma or merit. And this was the intimate transference that South Indian bhakti imagined for the god and the worshiper.51 Darshan may also have been inspired, in part, by the Buddhist practice of viewing the relics in stupas. But it was also surely a response to the new bhakti emphasis on the aspect of god in the flesh (“right before your eyes” [sakshat]), with flesh and blood qualities (sa-guna), in contrast with the aspect of a god “without qualities” (nir-guna) that the philosophers spoke of.
Artists, both Hindu and Buddhist, have always painted the eyes on a statue last of all, for that is the moment when the image comes to life, when it can see you, and you can no longer work on it; that is where the power begins.52 Rajasthani storytellers, who use as their main prop a painting of the epic scenes, explained to one anthropologist that once the eyes of the hero were painted in, neither the artist nor the storyteller regarded it as a piece of art: “Instead, it became a mobile temple . . . the spirit of the god was now in residence.”53 The Vedic gods Varuna and Indra were said to be “thousand-eyed,” because as kings they had a thousand spies, overseeing j
ustice, and as sky gods they had the stars for their eyes. The sun is also said to be the eye of the sky, of Varuna, and of the sacrificial horse (BU 1.1) and we have noted analogies between human eyes and the sun. Varuna in the Rig Veda (2.27.9) is unblinking, a characteristic that later becomes one of the marks that distinguish any gods from mortals.54
In Buddhist mythology (the tale of Kunala55), as well as South Indian hagiography (the tale of Kannappar, which we will soon encounter), saints are often violently blinded in martyrdom. The hagiography of the eighth-century Nayanar saint Cuntarar tells us that Shiva blinded him (darshan in its negative form) after he deserted his second wife but restored his vision (darshan in its positive form) when he returned home to her again. Many of Cuntarar’s bitterest poems are ascribed to the period of his blindness, including the poem cited at the opening of this chapter, which is in the genre of “blame-praise” or “worship through insult” that also became important (as “hate-devotion”) in the Sanskrit tradition. Cuntarar was known for the angry tone of his poems and sometimes called himself “the harsh devotee,” though the Tamil tradition called him “the friend of god.”56 His poems, which range from humorous teasing to tragic jeremiads, combined an intimate ridicule of the god with self-denigration.
The sense of personal unworthiness and the desire for the god’s forgiveness that we saw in the Vedic poem to Varuna is also characteristic of attitudes toward the bhakti gods, who are, like Varuna, panoptic, as is Shiva in this poem by the twelfth-century woman poet Mahadevi:
People,
male and female,
blush when
a cloth covering their shame comes loose.
When the lord of lives
lives drowned without a face
in the world, how can you be modest?
When all the world is the eye of the lord,
onlooking everywhere, what can you
cover and conceal?57
The divine gaze makes meaningless the superficial trappings of both gender (“male and female”) and sexuality (“covering their shame”).
WOMEN IN SOUTH INDIAN BHAKTI
Gender and sexuality are front and center in bhakti poetry. The gender stereotype of women as gentle, sacrificing, and loving became the new model for the natural worshiper, replacing the gender stereotype of men as intelligent, able to understand arcane matters, and handing down the lineage of the texts. The stereotypes remained the same but were valued differently. And so men imitated women in bhakti, and women took charge of most of the family’s religious observances. At the same time, a new image, perhaps even a new stereotype, arose of a woman who defied conventional society in order to pursue her personal religious calling. Only one of the Alvars, in the eighth century, was a woman, Antal, who fantasized about her union with Vishnu as his divine consort until he finally took her as his bride. Her life story is best known of all the Alvars,58 and many women saints followed her example; her poems express her protest against the oppression of women.59 Two of the Nayanmars were women whose words were never preserved, one a Pandyan queen and the other the mother of the poet Cuntarar.60 But a third Nayanmar woman did leave us four poems, Karaikkal Ammaiyar.
Karaikkal Ammaiyar probably lived in the mid-sixth century CE or perhaps in the fifth century.61 According to Cekkiyar’s Periya Purana (twelfth century), she was born the beautiful daughter of a wealthy and devout merchant family. Shiva rewarded her devotion by manifesting in her hand delicious mangoes, which magically disappeared. When her husband saw this, he left her. Thinking that he might one day return, she continued her dharmic wifely responsibilities, keeping her husband’s house and taking care of herself. One day, however, she discovered that her husband had taken another wife. Feeling that she had no more use for her physical beauty, she begged Shiva to turn her body into a skeleton and made a pilgrimage to Shiva’s Himalayan abode, walking the entire way on her hands, feet in the air. Shiva granted her request that she join his entourage as an emaciated ghost or demon (pey), singing hymns while Shiva danced in the cremation ground. Eventually she settled in a cremation ground in Alankatu.62 Four of her poems found a place in the Tamil Shaiva canon, the Tirumurai. Here is one:
She has shriveled breasts
and bulging veins,
in place of white teeth
empty cavities gape.
With ruddy hair on her belly,
a pair of fangs, knobby ankles and long shins
the demon-woman wails at the desolate cremation ground
where our lord,
whose hanging matted hair
blows in all eight directions,
dances among the flames
and refreshes his limbs.
His home is Alankatu.63
The female saints flagrantly challenge Manu’s notorious statement about a woman’s constant subservience to her father, husband, and son. They are not usually bound to a man at all, and “It is more common for a married woman saint to get rid of her husband than to endure him.”64 Defying her parents, she may escape marriage in any of several ways. She may become a courtesan, transform herself into an unmarriageable old woman, or terrify her husband by performing miracles (as Karaikkal Ammaiyar does). Or she may become widowed, presumably by chance (though those women saints were capable of almost anything). Widowhood is not normally a fate that any Hindu woman would willingly choose, but in this case the woman would regard herself as married to the god.hd Or she may simply renounce marriage, walking out on her husband, leaving him for her true lover, the god. A woman named Dalayi deserted her husband while he was making love to her, at the call of Shiva (a rare reversal of the more usual pattern of the worshiper’s interrupting the god when he is engaged in lovemaking). Or transgressing the transgression, she may refuse to have the god as her lover: The Virashaiva woman saint named Goggavve was so obstinate that she refused to marry the disguised Shiva, even when he threatened to kill her.65
The early, secular Tamil male poets often adopted a woman’s point of view and a woman’s voice. So basic was the woman’s voice to the language of bhakti that the bhakti poets took up this convention and developed it into a complex theological argument about men speaking with the voices of women; the fifteenth-century Telugu poet Annamayya wrote many poems in a woman’s voice. The female saints of course did not have to undergo any gender conversion (though some of the hagiographies tell of women who, with double-back perversity, “transformed . . . into a male by God’s grace.”)66
In a poem to Krishna, Nammalvar imagines himself as a woman abandoned by Krishna, the Dark One:
Evening has come,
but not the Dark One.
Without him here,
what shall I say?
how shall I survive?
The bulls,
their bells jingling,
have mated with the cows
and the cows are frisky.
The flutes play cruel songs,
bees flutter in the bright
white jasmine
and the blue-black lily.
The sea leaps into the sky
and cries aloud.67
Sometimes the male poet, as worshiper, takes over from the earlier genres of love poetry (akam) the voice of the lovesick heroine, or of her mother, and addresses the lover as the god. Here the male poet assumes the voice of the heroine’s mother addressing Rama as destroyer of Lanka:
Like a bar of lac
or wax
thrust into fire
her mind is in peril
and you are heartless.
What shall I do for you,
lord who smashed Lanka,
land ruled by the demon?68
The fire that is already a cliché for lovesickness now also represents the fire of bhakti, and the expectation is that the lover/Rama can save the heroine/worshiper, as the incarnate god saved Sita from Ravana, but also that he may destroy her, as he destroyed Ravana, or even perhaps that he may just let her burn, as Rama let Sita walk into the fire of her ordeal.
As a mother runs
close behind her child
with his hand on a cobra
or a fire,
the lord of meeting rivers
stays with me
every step of the way
and looks after me.69
The poem, quite straightforward, needs no gloss. But a Kannada listener/reader would hear echoes of this story:
SHIVA AS MIDWIFE
A devotee’s daughter was about to give birth to her first child. Her mother could not cross the flooding Kaveri River and come in time to help her waiting daughter. So Shiva took the form of the old mother—“back bent like the crescent moon, hair white as moonlight, a bamboo staff in hand”—and came to her house. Uma [Parvati, Shiva’s wife] and Ganga [the river, often said to be a wife of Shiva] had been sent ahead with bundles. When labor began, Shiva played midwife; a boy was born and Mother Shiva cradled and cared for him as if he were Murukan. Soon the floods abated, and the real mother appeared on the doorstep. Shiva began to slip away. Seeing the two women, the young couple were amazed. “Which is my mother?” cried the girl. Before her eyes, Shiva disappeared into the sky like lightning.70
“As if he were Murukan” is one of those switchbacks that the mythology of doubling and impersonation, so dear to Shaiva literature, delights in: A human woman might indeed treat her grandson like a god (in this case, Murukan, the son of Shiva), but in this story the god pretends that the child is his very own son, pretends that he himself is a woman pretending to be Shiva—a double gender switch too, by the way. Careful, down-to-earth details, such as Shiva’s sending “bundles” on ahead with his two wives, strongly suggest that this is a story about “women’s concerns,” surely a place to hear women’s voices. Shiva clearly enjoys being a woman, or else why did he not just stop the river from flooding so that the real mother could get to her daughter? He wanted to be there himself, to be intimately involved with this most basic of women’s experiences.
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