Nine Lives

by William Dalrymple

  If the villages are the preserve of godlings and obscure village goddesses, then in the prosperous temple towns that dot the plains of the south many of the features of the landscape are animated with stories and myths which link them with the great pan-Indian gods Shiva, Vishnu and the Devi: on this shoreline, by this temple, the Devi does penance, waiting until the end of the great Cosmic Flood, after which she will finally celebrate her marriage; that rock was an evil elephant who attempted to trample the town’s Brahmins to death before being turned to stone by Lord Shiva; this temple marks the place where a peahen with beautiful eyes in its tail was revealed to be the goddess Parvati in disguise; the river there was created by Lord Murugan to quench the thirst of one of his wedding guests who had developed an unbearable craving for water after too much salty rice.

  Lying in the centre of these towns, the great temples of Tamil Nadu are conceived as the palaces of the gods. But the gods of this country are understood to be jealous and territorial deities, and instead of sitting in their temple-palaces, their devotees believe that they like to oversee their domains. It is for this reason that on the great festivals they are taken out from the temples, robed, jewelled and garlanded, put on a palanquin or temple chariot, offered betel leaves and areca nuts, and then, like a raja surveying his dominions, given a tour so that they can establish their sovereignty, and be taken along a circuit of the borders of their kingdom.

  Here in the streets and fields they receive tributes and offerings, while their devotees and subjects—including those of the lower castes who were traditionally not admitted to the temples—can see them, and make darshan, so giving the gods pleasure while at the same time providing spiritual merit for the devotees. Such expeditions sometimes end with the god taking a bath at the mouth of the delta of a sacred river, or taking a trip on a boat in a temple tank. On return the idols are bathed in milk, curds, butter, honey and sugar, before being anointed with sandalwood paste and dressed in the finest silks.

  When these temples were first built, the large stone idols of the temple sanctuaries were often found to be too large to move around. It was for this reason that in the tenth century the first portable bronze deities began to be cast in southern India. The art seems to have begun in the court of the Pallava monarchs of Kanchipuram, but it was under the patronage of their nemesis, the Chola kings of Tanjore, that the sculptors of this region brought the art to perfection. On the completion of their great dynastic temple in Tanjore in 1010 AD, the Cholas donated to their new structure no fewer than sixty bronze images of deities, of which about two-thirds were given by Rajaraja I, while the rest were given by his sisters, queens, officials and nobles. According to Srikanda, the Stpathy who oversaw all this casting was his direct ancestor Kunjaramalla Rajaraja Perunthatchan.

  Exquisitely poised and supple, these Chola bronze deities are some of the greatest works of art ever created in India. They stand quite silent on their plinths, yet with their hands they speak gently to their devotees through the noiseless lingua franca of the mudras—gestures—of south Indian dance. For their devotees, their hands are raised in blessing and reassurance, promising boons and protection, and above all, marriage, fertility and fecundity, in return for the veneration that is so clearly their divine right.

  It is the Nataraja, Shiva as Lord of the Dance, which is arguably the greatest artistic creation of the entire Chola dynasty. On one level Shiva dances in triumph at his defeat of the demons of ignorance and darkness, and for the pleasure of his consort. At another level—dreadlocks flying, haloed in fire—he is also dancing the world into extinction so as to bring it back into existence in order that it can be created and preserved anew. With one hand he is shown holding fire, signifying destruction, while with the other he bangs the damaru drum, whose sound denotes creation. Renewed and purified, the Nataraja is dancing the universe from perdition to regeneration in a circular symbol of the circular nature of time itself.

  In Western art, few sculptors—other than perhaps Donatello or Rodin—have achieved the pure essence of sensuality so spectacularly evoked by the Chola sculptors, or achieved such a sense of celebration of the divine beauty of the human body. There is a startling clarity and purity about the way the near-naked bodies of the gods and the saints are displayed, yet by the simplest of devices the sculptors highlight their spirit and powers, joys and pleasures, and their enjoyment of each other’s beauty.

  In one idol in the Tanjore Museum, Lord Shiva reaches out and fondly touches the breast of his consort, Uma-Parvati, who is naked but for anklets, bangles and waistband supporting a thin and diaphanous silk wrap. In another he nuzzles the back of her naked shoulders or touches the lobe of her ear. It is a characteristically restrained Chola way of hinting at the unmatched erotic powers of a god whose iconic image is a phallic symbol, and who is celebrated in the scriptures for his millennia-long bouts of Himalayan lovemaking. In some Tamil temples, the last act of the priests, before they close the doors of the inner shrine, is to remove the nose jewel of the bronze idol of Shiva’s consort lest the rubbing of it irritate her husband when they make love—an act, so the priests will tell you, that ensures the preservation and regeneration of the universe.

  Elsewhere, Hindu devotional sculpture can often be explicitly and unembarrassedly erotic: across India can be found medieval Hindu temples whose exterior walls contain graphic scenes of oral and group sex—most famously, and inventively, at Khajuraho and Konarak. This same sensuousness is also there in the startlingly beautiful Tamil poetry of the period:

  Her arms have the beauty

  Of a gently moving bamboo.

  Her eyes are full of peace.

  She is faraway,

  Her place not easy to reach.

  My heart is frantic

  With haste

  A ploughman with a single ox

  On land all wet

  And ready for seed.

  Or again:

  My Love

  whose bangles

  glitter, jingle,

  as she chases crabs

  suddenly stands shy,

  head lowered,

  hair hiding her face;

  but only till the misery of evening

  passes, when she’ll give me

  the full pleasure

  of her breasts.

  To some extent, none of this is a surprise. Sexuality in India has always been regarded as the subject of legitimate and sophisticated inquiry. Traditionally it was looked upon as an essential part of the study of aesthetics: sringara rasa—the erotic rasa, or flavour—being one of the nine rasas comprising the classical Hindu aesthetic system. The Judaeo-Christian religious tradition, which tends to emphasise the sinfulness of the flesh, the dangers of sexuality and the idealisation of sexual renunciation and virginity, begins its myth of origin with the creation of light. In contrast, the oldest scripture of the Hindu tradition, the Rig Veda, begins its myth with the creation of kama—sexual desire: in the beginning was desire, and desire was with God, and desire was God. In the Hindu scheme of things, kama remains one of the three fundamental goals of human existence, along with dharma, duty or religion, and artha, the creation of wealth.

  What is perhaps more surprising is that the same erotic concerns found in the secular poetry of classical India are equally evident in the devotional and religious poetry of the period: Kalidasa’s poem The Birth of Kumara, for example, has an entire canto of ninety-one verses entitled “The Description of Uma’s Pleasure,” which describes in graphic detail the lovemaking of Lord Shiva and his divine consort. The poetry of the Tamil saints, who walked from temple to temple in the region during the early centuries AD, singing and converting the local Jains and Buddhists, likewise dwells at length on the sensuous beauty of the deities they adore. The boy saint Sambandar, for example, was especially taken by the loveliness of Uma-Parvati, who, it was said, had taken human form and suckled and comforted him when, as an infant, he was left crying on a temple ghat, while his father went off to bathe:
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  Smooth and curved,

  her stomach

  like the snake’s

  dancing hood,

  her flawless gait

  mocks the peacock’s grace.

  With feet soft

  as cotton down

  and waist

  a slender creeper.

  Nor was it just the female deities who were imagined as magnificently sexual beings. The saint Appar, a convert from Jainism, wrote with equal sensuousness of Lord Shiva in his incarnation as the Enchanting Mendicant, a form of the god particularly popular with the Cholas and sculpted on the walls of many of the great Chola temples. In this poem, Appar imagines himself as one of the girls who falls in love with Shiva in this form of the beautiful beggar, whose stunning good looks could entrap any woman whom he approached with his begging bowl:

  Listen my friend,

  yesterday,

  in broad daylight

  I’m sure I saw

  a holy one.

  As he gazed at me

  my garments slipped

  I stood entranced,

  I brought him alms

  but nowhere did I see

  that Cunning One—

  If I see him again

  I shall press my body

  against his body

  never to let him go,

  that wanderer

  who lives in Ottiyur.

  If Chola poetry is sometimes explicit, then in Chola sculpture the sexual nature of the gods is strongly implied rather than directly stated. It is there in the extraordinary swinging rhythm of these eternally still figures, in their curving torsos and their slender arms. The figures are never completely naked; these divine beings may embody human desire, but unlike the sculpture at Khajuraho, the Chola deities, while clearly preparing to enjoy erotic bliss, are never actually shown in flagrante; their desire is permanently frozen at a point before its final consummation.

  The distinctly sensual charge of the bronzes is not just a modern reading: devotees from the Chola period who viewed images of the gods enraptured by their consort’s beauty left inscriptions asking the deities to transfer the sensual ecstasy they experience to their less fortunate followers. There is reason to believe that some of the images of goddesses were modelled on actual Chola queens—a Parvati in the Tanjore Museum is one example—and physical grace and sexual prowess seem to have been regarded among the Cholas not as private matters, but as vital and admired attributes in both god and ruler. When the dynasty was first established in Tanjore in AD 862, the official declaration compared the conquest of the town to the Chola monarch’s love sport: “He, the light of the Solar race, took possession [of the town] … just as he would seize by the hand his own wife who had beautiful eyes, graceful curls, a cloth covering her body, in order to sport with her.” What was true of rulers was also true of the gods, and there are many bhakti devotional poems apparently inspired by the feelings of a poet-devotee lost in an intense sensual-spiritual swoon before the beauty of an idol in a temple:

  So my mind touches the lotus feet of Ranga’s Lord,

  Delights in his fine calves, clings

  To his twin thighs and, slowly,

  Rising, reaches

  The navel.

  It stops for a while on his chest,

  Then, after climbing

  His broad shoulders,

  Drinks the nectar of his lovely face.

  Hinduism has always held that there are many paths to God. Yet for many centuries there has been a central tension between the ascetic and the sensual. The poet-prince Bhartrihari of Ujjain, who probably lived in the fourth century AD, oscillated no fewer than seven times between the rigours of monastic renunciation and the abandon of the courtly sensualist. “There are two paths,” he wrote. “The devotion of the sage, which is lovely because it overflows with the nectarous waters of the knowledge of truth” and “the lusty undertaking of touching with one’s palm that hidden part in the firm laps of lovely limbed women, with great expanses of breasts and thighs.”

  “Tell us decisively which we ought to attend upon?” he asks in the Shringarashataka: “The sloping sides of the mountains in the wilderness? Or the buttocks of a woman abounding in passion?”

  In the sculpture of the Cholas, and those like Srikanda who have kept its flame alive in the Kaveri Delta ever since, this tension is at least partially resolved. More than in any other Indian artistic tradition, the gods here are both intensely physical and physically gorgeous. The sensuality of a god was understood as an aspect of his formless perfection and divine inner beauty. Celebrating and revelling in the sensuality of a god was therefore central to the devotee’s expression of love for that deity.

  In this conception of theology, it was not considered necessary to renounce the world to gain Enlightenment in the manner of the Jains or the Buddhists or the Hindu sadhus; nor was it necessary to perform the bloody animal sacrifices or fire ceremonies laid down in the Vedas. Instead, intensely loving devotion and regular pujas to images were believed to bring salvation just as effectively. For if the gods were universal, ranging through time and space, they were also forcefully present in certain holy places and most especially in the idols of the great temples. Here the final climax of worship is still to have darshan: to actually see the beauty of the divine image, and to meet the eyes of the god. The gaze of the bronze deity meets the eyes of the worshipper, and it this exchange of vision—the seeing and the seen—that acts as a focus for bhakti, the passionate devotion of the devotee.

  The idea of the bronzes as the devotional focus for a religious rapture in which God is often envisaged as a lover is something that would have been entirely familiar to the ancient Babylonians, Greeks and Romans, but which is as far as it is possible to go, theologically, from the three Abrahamic religions, with their scriptural suspicion of idols and graven images, and their deep misgivings about sexual pleasure.

  As Srikanda later put it to me, “What is so strange about the statues being beautiful and attractive? The erotic is part of human life—the secret part—and the idol is the human form of God, God in the form of man. If it was unattractive and ugly, would anyone pray to it? The Shilpa Shastras that guide us as sculptors lay down certain norms about the correct proportions for each god. We believe that unless these proportions are exactly perfect, the god cannot live in the idol. As sculptors, we struggle to become master craftsmen just so that we can begin to convey the beauty of the deity.

  “Only then,” he said, “will a deity attract devotees. And it is only then that we as sculptors begin to do justice to the tradition we have inherited from our forefathers.”

  Swamimalai, where the Chola tradition of idol making has survived in the workshops of Srikanda Stpathy’s family, lies a couple of hours’ drive from the small airstrip at Trichinopoly, which itself lies a bumpy forty-minute flight in an old-fashioned twin-prop from Madras.

  Returning to the area two months after my first visit, as the plane banked and emerged below the monsoon clouds, I could see for the first time the rich soils of the Kaveri Delta spread out below: a flat plain, the essence of green, broken into a mirrored patchwork of flooded paddy fields, each square glinting with a slightly different refraction in the light of the late afternoon sun. Through the middle ran the thin silver ribbon of the Kaveri, winding its way slowly through an avenue of palms that line the banks of this rich delta, before looping itself around the island temple of Srirangam and the great smooth rock of Trichinopoly.

  Other parts of India may be leaping aggressively forward into the new millennium, but for a visitor at least, rural Tamil Nadu still seems deceptively innocent and timeless. On the way from Trichy airport, the villagers spread their newly harvested grain on the road to be winnowed and threshed by the wheels of passing cars. The villages appear like those in R.K. Narayan stories, with roadside shops full of sacks of dried red chilli and freshly cut stalks of green bananas. Buffaloes are wallowing on the sandbanks of the Kaveri, and bullock carts trundle along
red dirt roads, past village duck ponds and the tall, rain-wet fans of banana trees. Old women in blue saris sit out on their verandas, while their granddaughters troop along the roads with jasmine flowers in their hair. The cattle are strong and white, and their long horns are painted blue.

  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.