Nine Lives (35 page)

‘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, you 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 t
he great Chola temples at Chidambaram and Tanjore are still thriving and bustling.

Moreover, the devotional world which brought the Chola bronzes into being is still, just, intact. On my way from the airport to see Srikanda’s workshop in Swamimalai, I arranged to meet in the temple courtyard Shankara Narayana, one of the last professional singers of
Thevaram
devotional songs. These are the seven volumes of devotional hymns written by Appar, Sambandar and the other great Tamil saints, and first performed in this temple over a thousand years ago. I asked Shankara what it was like to sing in front of one of the temple’s great bronzes. ‘As singers, we try to lose ourselves in the beauty of Lord Shiva,’ he replied. ‘The bronzes allow us access to his beauty, and in turn our words help give life to the idol.’

It was these
Thevaram
hymns – the widespread oral memory of which is only now beginning to be endangered – that created the intense, mystical and often sensual
bhakti
world which needed the Chola bronzes as focuses for devotion. The direct family link between the Chola bronze casters and Srikanda’s family workshop in Swamimalai is only one aspect of a much wider continuity of Tamil theology and devotion.

On arrival at Swamimalai, I found Srikanda hard at work in his small family factory on the main street of the temple town.

No longer was he wearing the smart laundered lungi I had seen him wearing on my previous trip. Now he sat in an old stained vest and waist-wrap, unshaven yet with a smear of ash and sandalwood paste at the centre of his forehead. He was concentrating fixedly on a small idol of Mariamman, the mother goddess and principal deity of many of the villages of the region, gently chipping away at her with a hammer and chisel. While he finished his work, I looked around the workshop.

The smartest rooms were those closest to the street. Here, two air-conditioned offices contained piles of order books and a huge old-fashioned typewriter out of which sprouted several sheaves of carbon paper. It was manned by a matron in a stiff white sari who tap-tapped away at it with the regularity of a metronome. A few cuttings from newspapers were framed on the walls, as was a large photograph of Srikanda with his father and two brothers, receiving some award from Mr Karunanidhi, the sunglasses-wearing former screenwriter who was now Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu.

The next room was the workshop proper. On one desk was the abandoned arm of a goddess, moulded in fresh beeswax and tree resin; beside it was a small basin of wax warming on a brazier, along with a knife, a scalpel and a litter of pellets and shavings which some craftsman had left lying there while taking a tea break. A second basin, filled with water, contained a collection of finished but detached body parts, as if from the casualty unit of a Victorian field hospital.

Next to it was another desk where one of Srikanda’s elder brothers was busy kneading, smoothing, cutting and rolling a length of wax into what would soon be a deity’s arm.  The moulding took place with incredible speed, and with the ease of a child playing with plasticine. It seemed to be done entirely from memory: no pattern book or model lay open to guide him. When it was nearly done, and the fingers worked into the appropriate
mudra
, Srikanda’s brother held it in his left hand and began to finish modelling its curves with a hot scalpel. This he replaced every few minutes from a selection of chisels up-ended in a charcoal fire-pot at the edge of the workbench. As he gently caressed the wax with a series of quick strokes from the flat, hot blade it first liquefied, then vanished, with a sizzle of wax and a puff of fragrant resin.

On the floor at the other side of the room sat eight cross-legged workers, all stripped to the waist, chipping, filing, finishing and decorating the cast bronzes. One boy was busy polishing with a bottle of Brasso and an old rag; another rested the head of a nearly completed goddess on a wooden chock while he worked on her bangles and armlets. All around the workers were ranks of gleaming bronze idols in various stages of finish, some dull and leaden-looking, fresh from the furnace, others shiny and brassy new, while a few were of the same darkly muted gunmetal grey as those in museums.

The room beyond – which opened on to a yard and a cow byre at the back – was the part of the workshop that contained the furnaces, and was surrounded on all sides by a litter of slag and broken moulds. Here two men were calmly engaged in covering one of the wax models in a clay mud pack, while a third was embalming a finished mould in a lattice of wire, ready for firing.

Opposite them, only a short distance away, a pair of sweating dark-skinned and barefoot workers were stoking a furnace set in the mud floor, while a third worker fired it up with a pair of enormous bellows. Into this ever-hotter furnace, the two stokers were shoving old scrap – a series of crushed bronze
lota
pots, pieces of copper wire and brass plates. The temperature was very high, and orange, green and pale yellow flames shot out as the inferno was fed.