The Penguin History of Early India

by Romila Thapar

  rising to heaven, but his sterner face

  will be hidden, and he will show you

  the form of a young man, fragrant and beautiful

  and his words will be loving and gracious –

  Don’t be afraid – I knew you were coming.

  Pattupattu, ‘Tirumuruganarrupadai’, 285-90, in A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India, p. 330

  Tamil devotionalism achieved a great wave of popularity in the hymns and poems of the Alvars and the Nayanars, the Vaishnava and Shaiva poets. The hymns dedicated to Shiva and Vishnu have been preserved in two separate collections, the Tirumurai and the Nalayiradivya-prabandham. Of the Shaiva poets the most popular were Appar – who is said to have converted King Mahendravarman – Sambandar, Manikkavasagar and Sundaramurti, some of whom were apostate Jainas. The better-known Vaishnava Alvars were Nammalvar, Tirumankai Alvar and the much revered woman poet, Andal. Vedic gods were either denied or ignored, the emphasis being not on the object of worship but on the relationship involved in worship. Manikkavasagar explains it in his hymns:

  Indra or Vishnu or Brahma

  Their divine bliss crave not I

  I seek the love of thy saints

  Though my house perish thereby.

  To the worst hell will I go

  So but thy grace be with me

  Best of all, how could my heart

  Think of a God beside Thee?…

  I had no virtue, penance, knowledge, self-control

  A doll to turn

  At other’s will I danced, whistled, fell.

  But me He filled in every limb

  With love’s mad longing, and that I might climb

  There whence there is no return.

  He shewed His beauty, made me His.

  Ah me, when shall I go to Him…?

  P. Kingsbury and G. E. Phillips, Hymns of the Tamil Saivite Saints, pp. 89, 127

  Nammalvar’s poems to Vishnu evoke an even stronger commitment to the deity, with no concession to formal religion:

  You believers in Linga mythologies

  And you Jainas

  you Buddhists

  becoming all of you choppers of logic

  becoming even your gods

  he stands there

  our lord:

  Come see him in Kurukur

  where rich ears of paddy

  fan him like ceremonial yak tails.

  In this place without lies

  Come praise him.

  Elsewhere he says:

  I just said

  ‘The grove and hill of my lord’

  and he came down

  and filled my heart…

  My lord

  who swept me away forever

  into joy that day

  made me over into himself

  and sang in Tamil

  his own songs through me:

  what shall I say

  to the first of things

  flame

  standing there,

  what shall I say

  to stop.

  What her mother said:

  O women

  you too have daughters

  and have brought them up.

  How can I tell you

  about my poor girl?

  She talks of the conch shell, ∗

  she talks of the wheel,∗

  and she talks night and day

  of the basil in his hair.

  what shall I do?

  A. K. Ramanujam, Hymns for the Drowning, pp. 57, 78 ff., 35

  Appar says:

  Once he made me run about

  with the naked Jainas

  then made me sing sweet songs

  for his golden feet.

  Kurankatuturai’s Lord

  saved me from karma

  and joined me with his true devotees.

  Indira V. Peterson, Poems to Shiva, p. 289

  Although there were some brahmans among the singers of poems, many of the participants were of the lower castes, being artisans and cultivators. Not all were composers but they were nevertheless familiar with the compositions. They came from various parts of the Tamil country and travelled a great deal. Among the more radical features of these groups were the active participation of women poets and the presence of the pulaiyar or outcastes.

  The poems of Andal, one of the best-known women poets, were frequently sung. She saw herself as the beloved of the god Vishnu and her verses encapsulated her love for the deity. These foreshadow the verses of Mirabai, who was to become equally famous as a Bhakti poet many centuries later in north India, celebrating her love for the Krishna incarnation of Vishnu. The evocations of Karaikkalamnaiyar were closer to asceticism. Women participants in the Tamil devotional movement renounced their social obligations, but did not join an alternative order or become nuns. They created alternative possibilities within society by their poetry, their activities and their sublimation of eroticism. Up to a point this was a challenge to patriarchy, but the challenge had to take the form of devotion to a deity. Nammalvar, in one of his poems, imagines himself as a woman in relationship with the deity who is a male. But the passionate love of a male poet for a goddess was not encouraged. Although goddesses were widely worshipped, they were rarely the focus of devotion in these poems.

  The question still remains why the religion of the Alvars and Nayanars became so popular from the latter part of the first millennium AD. It may have been a reaction to the formalistic Sanskritic culture and religious practice introduced into elite circles, and a reluctance to be subordinated to this culture. The role of the Bhakti tradition in relation to Vedic Brahmanism was in many ways similar to that of the earlier Shramanic sects. The rituals and the claims of the brahmans to being close to the gods were unacceptable, as was the social exclusion of lower castes. But Tamil devotionalism was also ambivalent towards the Shramanic tradition and was hostile to the Shramanas. From the Vaishnava and Shaiva perspectives, Shramanic beliefs were heresy. The Generality of the deity, visualized in iconic form and housed in a temple, had become important facets of Puranic Hinduism with which the devotional movement had obvious links.

  It has been suggested that the movement was parallel to changes in the polity. The king is seen as the focus of loyalty and demands devotion from the intermediaries and his subjects, while the deity receives similar sentiments from worshippers. This implicit overlap might have encouraged rulers to patronize the devotional sects, underlining the notion of loyalty. This was a more direct message than in religions that had no place for temples and the divinity of kings. But the equation of the state with the temple, and the king with the deity, was more complex. Although changes in polity of the kind that occurred in Tamil-nadu also occurred in other parts of the subcontinent at this time, the manifestation of what might be called Bhakti is a later phenomenon in other areas. A wide social range inspired the devotional movement, but the individual liberation suggested in these teachings may have resonated with historical changes. In Tamil-nadu it may also have related to the upward mobility of some groups of peasants and artisans, and with the freedom provided by cities to ideas and actions.

  According to some traditions, Tamil society eventually rejected Buddhism and also reduced its patronage of Jainism. An incident frequently described is that of many Jaina monks, who agreed to a debate after attacking a Shaiva monastery, and, when they lost, further agreed to be impaled. The figure of those impaled is sometimes quoted as eight thousand. This sounds an unlikely story, particularly during a period when rulers were said to be converting from Jainism to Shaivism. In such traditions, the hostility is generally between the Shaivas and the Shramanic sects, as was the case in other parts of India. Gradually, the Jaina lay community in the peninsula was limited to Karnataka with small pockets elsewhere in the south. But the imprint of Buddhism and Jainism was evident in the Tamil devotional sects. They leaned towards rejecting the established order of society as stratified in the caste structure, but the rejection was on the ethical plane and not a p
relude to a radical change of society.

  The deity could be a folk-deity in origin promoted to a manifestation of a mainstream deity. The concept of a compassionate deity reflected Buddhist ideas, more specifically the notion of the compassionate bodhisattva, though the Christians of the south may also have made a contribution. The feeling of human inadequacy that became an important facet of the Bhakti devotional sects would have owed more to Buddhist ancestry than to Vedic. The decline of the heterodox sects coincided with the rise of the Bhakti sects, probably depriving them of much of their potential following.

  At one level the Tamil devotional sects resisted Sanskritic culture. The brahmans enjoyed royal patronage, but the sects were widely supported by common people, although royal patronage was extended to the sects in later centuries when they had a substantial following, partly for reasons of political expediency apart from religious conviction. A constant awareness of the strength of popular movements was a necessary counterpart to royal power. Association with a popular movement brought a network of loyalty which, if the movement was widespread, could be territorially extensive. The Tamil devotional movement had roots in the area and was to that extent useful to political authority. Whereas Vedic Brahmanism propagated the use of Sanskrit through elaborate rituals, the devotional sects expressed themselves in easily understood forms using the commonly spoken language. The brahmans were obsessed with caste regulations, the Tamil poets excluded no one for reasons of caste alone and, on the contrary, welcomed lower castes.

  Under the aegis of the brahmans, organized religion was well fortified with finance and patronage, both of which came from either royal families or wealthy landowners and merchants. The local temple, seen as the abode of the deity, was one location of religious activity. Some sought to integrate the two levels of religion – the brahmanical and the devotional movement – through rituals and functions, if only to a limited extent. The temple became a location for this attempt at integration. Temples had various categories of officiants. The most influential were the smarta brahmans proficient in Vedic and other Sanskrit learning. A large number of brahmans were locally recruited priests, with a smattering of Vedic and Puranic knowledge, who performed many of the routine rituals. Where the temple had emerged from a local cult centre the priests introduced the local mythology and ritual into the worship of deities. This was then given a stamp of authenticity by inclusion in the sectarian Agama texts, which provided the temple with a presumed history via the sthala-puranas and the mahatmyas, when these came to be written. The Tamil devotional poets addressed a specific deity and its icon. When their following grew, their compositions became part of devotional worship. Some tension between the different groups could have resulted from this divergence. At one level devotionalism focused on the local cult, forms of worship and language. At another level, by the worship of deities known to other areas of the subcontinent, it also acted as a way of partially homogenizing Puranic Hinduism.

  The Role of the Temple

  Temples were maintained from endowments that consisted either of villages and agricultural lands, or else came from the investment of capital. The donors could be members of the royal family, wealthy intermediaries or merchants or guilds. The smaller accessories of the temple, such as subsidiary images, lamps, oil, etc., were generally obtained through the individual donations of lesser members of the community. Temple attendants were of various categories. Brahmans alone could conduct the rituals in the garbha-griha, the holy of holies, whereas members of the other castes (generally the lower castes) played music for the ceremonies in the temple, lighted the lamps and attended to the flowers and garlands necessary for the worship of the images, as well as to the cleanliness of the temple. But castes of potters and tanners and the outcastes, regarded as ritually unclean castes, were not permitted to enter the temple since their presence was held to be polluting. A sizeable increase in the endowments and attendants of the temple usually led to the appointment of a formal managing committee to supervise their administration. Members of this committee included brahmans, velalas or landowners graded as ritually clean shudras, and some officers.

  The Tamil poets popularized their hymns and music, which were slowly incorporated into temple ritual. In later times this inspired some deeply moving music. The vina, the lute, was probably the most frequently used instrument. Initially an instrument with a pear-shaped body, it later took the form in which it is found today – a long fingerboard with gourds at either end. Dancing and music were included in the temple ritual as forms of service to the deity. From the Pallava period onwards the more prosperous temples maintained trained dancers, singers and musicians. Originating in folk-dancing, the choreography of temple-dancing became the sophisticated and stylized renderings of religious themes apparent in its later forms. This gave rise to the system of employing devadasis – the women who served the deity – in many large temples, virtually all over India. The training, was arduous and based on complex techniques and forms of dance, singing and music. Some among them became composers of devotional poems. In origin, the rituals they performed were related to the idea of the special power embedded in women, aspects of which were expressed in ritual and dance. But this was sometimes deflected to entertaining the more affluent temple functionaries and worshippers. Inevitably, where it degenerated it required the women to include activities that had little to do with homage to the deity.

  The vogue established by the Buddhists for excavating cave temples continued. Patrons of brahmans and Buddhists vied with each other in having shrines and temples excavated in the Deccan hills and further south. The most impressive of these caves were at Ajanta and Ellora. At the latter site, the excavation of temples to Shiva and Vishnu, and of rock-cut Jaina temples, revealed that the earlier style of cutting cave shrines started by the Buddhists had continued.

  Murals at some Buddhist cave shrines had illustrated Buddhist narratives. Such paintings depicted familiar themes from the narratives of Buddhist texts, but at the same time drew on a rich cross-section of contemporary life. To cover the walls of deep-cut caves with murals, or to sculpt into rock, was an achievement of no mean order, considering the difficulty of adequate lighting and working conditions in these vast caves. The technique of painting required the preparation of the ground before it could be painted. A paste consisting of powdered rock, clay or cow dung mixed with chaff and molasses was smeared on the wall as a base. This was carefully smoothed out and while still wet was overlaid with a coat of fine lime wash. Colour was applied when the base had dried, and the finished form was burnished.The colours were made from minerals and plants, and a few still retain some of their original brilliance.

  Murals were common not only in cave temples, but in the freestanding temples of the south as well. In the case of the former some of the murals may have been painted by the monks, although the professional excellence of those visible today almost certainly suggests the work of artists. Murals were not restricted to religious monuments alone, since, judging by literary descriptions, domestic architecture was also embellished with paintings, but unfortunately these have not survived.

  In a rock-cut temple, sculpture cannot be added on, therefore every detail of positioning had to be planned in advance. The cutting of the rock required extremely careful control as a wrong move could ruin a sculpture or the architectural form. Rock-cut temples were introduced in the Pallava period, and these were akin to the Buddhist cave shrines, but much smaller and showing evidence of the preliminary stages of an artistic technique. The monolithic temples at Mahabalipuram, carved out of granite boulders, still carry the barrel-vault roofs and archways generally associated with the Buddhist cave shrines of the Deccan, as well as contemporary architectural styles. They range in style from what looks like a village hut to an elaborate house, and represent a transition from domestic architecture to more complex temple styles.

  The rock-cut temples on the island of Elephanta near Bombay can claim an impressive style. But the most spectacula
r example is the Kailasanatha temple at Ellora, which is a transition from the rock-cut to the freestanding style on a massive scale. It was built, or rather hewn, under the patronage of a Rashtrakuta king in the eighth century. When finished, it was a freestanding temple open to the sky, wholly cut from the rock of the hillside. The plan of a freestanding temple was rigorously adhered to. The Kailasanatha temple at Ellora covered approximately the same area as the Parthenon at Athens, and was one-and-a-half times higher than the Greek structure. The number of stonecutters and workmen employed and the expenses involved in cutting the temple must have been immense, perhaps the equivalent in cost to a major military campaign. It has been suggested that it was cheaper to cut the temple from the rock than to build a freestanding structure of the same dimensions. This supposition may partly account for the prolonged popularity of the rock-cut shrine and temple. Stone structural temples were built at Aihole in the late sixth century, at Mahabalipuram – the famous Shore temple – in the seventh century, and at Kanchipuram. But, as a form, examples of the rock-cut temple continued to the Chola period.

  In Karnataka the temples at Aihole, Pattadakal and Badarni range from the relatively simple to the more complex, and are examples of the developed Deccan style. The Chalukya temples evolved from the Gupta shrines, but in their period of maturity they had links with both the northern and southern styles of architecture – the Nagara and the Dravida. The Durga temple at Aihole is stylistically a continuation of the Buddhist chaitya plan, since it is an apsidal temple, but it does not have the barrel roof usual to apsidal temples. Aihole itself emerges as a temple town, possibly because it was regarded as an ancient sacred site. There were megalithic structures in the vicinity, as well as earlier Buddhist activity at the site. It was also an important trading centre, which bestowed its name on one of the foremost guilds of the peninsula.

  The rapidity with which architectural styles changed is evident if one compares the plan and elevation of the Ladh Khan temple with the Virupaksha temple. Locations such as Aihole have temples of the post-Gupta style with elements of the Dravida style, and the meeting of styles is only too evident. Changing styles not only reflected contacts between the Deccan, south India and the Ganges Plain, but also reflected the evolution of political forms within a region. These moved from small to larger kingdoms, from reasonable to substantial revenue, with the conviction that the expense of building a temple complex was an act of enviable patronage likely to bring much merit. Temples now became more than places of worship, for they were recognized as statements of power and authority: as well they might, considering the enormous expense of building a temple. What is striking is that those commissioning and financing the temples were not only members of the royal family or ministers, but also well-placed merchants.