There are few places in the world where landscape and divinity are more closely linked than in southern India.
In the sacred topography of the south, every village is believed to be host to a numberless pantheon of sprites and godlings, tree spirits and snake gods, who are said to guard and regulate the ebb and flow of daily life. They are worshipped and propitiated, as they know the till and soil of the local fields and the sweet water of the wells, even the needs and thirsts of the cattle and the goats of the village.
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:
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’.