A chapter from my research as Nehru Trust & Victoria and Albert Museum Small Studies Research Grantee..also early experiments in art history writing.
/As the train hauled into Srirangam railway station, there was some consciousness about entering the heart of the
Kaveri delta. The anticipation of seeing one of the most significant
Vaishnavite temples, also one of the largest temple complexes of Tamil Nadu was
strong enough for me to be up before sunrise, bathe and yet be early for the
morning darshan. As I soaked in the Srirangam
town at the crack of dawn sipping coffee and buying flowers I realized that the
town is heavily dependent on tourism and pilgrimage as sources of income; and
one could clearly see it was not too much. As I went into the layered cave like
temple towards the revered and enigmatic garbagriha
for my darshan the mind was pre-occupied with a question…….how
can a ritually, culturally and art historically significant site like Sri
Ranganathaswamy temple fail to draw a heavy stream of tourists and pilgrims?
Three days had passed I
was walking aimlessly around Srirangam. When I had
applied for the grant I had little idea that this will evolve to be a
disciplinary crisis in a way. I had visited Srirangam many times before. With
the department of art history MS University of Baroda I had visited Srirangam
twice. Both were exhilarating experiences. However they were also codified
experiences. We often headed straight to the Sriranganathaswamy Temple. There
used to be a clear disciplinary brief….. (Dynastic affiliations, iconographic
cycles, cultic affiliations, stylistic affiliation/locations…..how to look at a
monument was already briefed to us way before we arrived. The observations
based on which I had written my proposal for this research were made more during
dinning, shopping, going for our Cauvery bath…..and moments like that.
Suddenly
my research and documentation required me to stop looking at the temple and
start looking at the city. For the first two days out of sheer habit I kept
waking up early morning and heading straight to the temple. On the third day I
told myself this could not carry on. I had come with a limited budget, limited
time and I needed to get a grip over my field visit. My third day was spent walking around the
town and having a sort of anthropological interaction with rickshaw divers, shop owners, temple guides
and others…..however the feeling of being blank walled by my object of
study was becoming stronger and
stronger.
*****
After the darshana,
surveying the various mandapas and
sub-shrines, that as compared to complexes like Chidambaram or the Madurai
Meenakshi, the Sri Ranganathaswamy temple complex is far from ordered. A
simplistic semiotic equation drawing told me that what I was seeing was a lack
of discipline[1] . Very often within the same mandapas iconography, form and finish of the pillars, pillar
capitals to the extent that it becomes really difficult to imagine that they
might have been sculpted or conceived together. To put it in other words the
over all plan of the sub-shrines and the mandapa
was not well coordinate to my eyes at both the macro as well as the micro
levels. It is not as if a temple had to be built all at once for the layers
disappear in coordination. The Madurai Meenakshi and the Subramanyam shrine in
relation to Brihadeswara Tanjavore are good examples.
Thirsty, under a hardening morning sun, I headed out towards a
shop selling home made lemonade sweetened with honey. The spartan shop was
adorned with three large representations of a goddess on a lion holding the
sword as a chief attribute. The shop keeper explained that she was Bhadrakali
(along with Munniamman the most popular goddess in the region), the chief
goddess of the sudras. The city of Srirangam seemed more dynamic and
layered than I had anticipated. The
last thing I was expecting to encounter in this ‘eternal seat of Vishnu’ was an
overwhelming popularity of Shaivite mother goddess. By now I was interacting
with a small group of people who had all joined the conversation out of
curiosity.
It was a surprise to learn that there was not a single Bhadrakali
shrine within the first six gopurams of
the temple complex (counting from the core outwards). Exclusions can be interesting…… what disturbed me is
that a temple which has grown and prospered over the years by being able to
hegemonise various cultic practices.
Could it be an exploilitary exclusive institution in its home base? Quite an
interesting understanding of caste
unfolded as we talked on, the general level of interest in our group being
quite high. Every one who had gathered identified himself as shaiva and claimed that said that all shaivas were sudras. When I asked about the shaiva
priests who conduct their religious rituals, it was very grudgingly admitted
that there were some shaiva
Brahmins……but very clearly they did not identify with these Brahmins at any
level. There is no meat shop within one and a half kilometres of the forth gopuram when most of the Srirangam
population eats meat.
The rest of the day was spent walking around the town studying
how it spreads. Soon learnt that all the Vaishnavite priests stayed within the
forth and fifth enclosures of the temple complex (the Shaivite priests are
seemed so ‘invisible’ that my new guides could not tell me where they
lived). The rest of the town had fair
degree of caste homogeneity though one could clearly see new and powerful class
equations shaping the landscape of the city. Most of the river front was being
occupied by the upper middle class hailing from Trichy. Exhausted and terribly
sun burnt, I returned to the hotel………the strange town still very much on my
mind. The grand gopurams, the gigantic
enclosure walls, the maze of mandapas,
the lavishly sculpted pillars of the ‘thousand pillared hall’ and the barely
finished pillars of the same structure were images playing in a loop[2].
Too restless to sleep I picked up my travel guide[3] to bed. Aimlessly flipping across pages I
stopped and pinched my self for failing to notice that in the Srirangam delta
itself, there was a huge Shiva temple in the village of Tiruvannakoil[4]. Don’t know how much sleep
came my way that night but I was up at the crack of dawn. Sipping my coffee and
drinking in the early morning flavours of kukmum,
haldi and jasmine, I asked for
directions to the Jambukeshwara temple.
The temple is situated on the other side of the railway track,
and as I walked towards the connecting bridge, I began to notice a significant
change in the cityscape. Form the eastern fringe of the town onwards right
through to the Jambukeshwara temple, there was an extended village/slum dotted
with Murugan, Munniamman, Bhadrakali and Ganesha. All the narratives about the
Kaveri delta being hegemonised into Brahmanism during the Bhakti movement turned in my head as my eyes continued to hunt for
at least one Vishnu or Shiva shrine. I had to wait till I reached the
Jambukeshwara temple.
The temple is gorgeous and one of the finest examples of Nayaka
period architecture. The planning and ordering of space far surpasses the Sri
Ranganathaswamy temple and yet it became clear to me that it had long lost its
ritual status and funding had dried up.
Over the last two days the structures through which I have studied
temple and temple urbanization had come under serious strain and I desperately
felt the need to push the refresh button…. By noon I was on the bus to
Chidambaram to a new temple in a new city…….
One of my lasting memories of the five hour journey was searching
the countryside for Shiva or Vishnu shrines and not finding any………….
[4] The Sri
Jambukeshwara Temple is dedicated to Lord Siva and has five concentric walls
and seven gopurams. It is built
around a Siva lingam partially submerged in water that comes from a spring in
the sanctum sanctorum. Non-Hindus are not allowed inside the
temple. The some parts of the complex were built around the same as Sri
Ranganathaswamy temple. However the ‘stylistic quality’ of the pillar
decorations, and attitude towards finish (especially if looks at the pushpapotitas and the crispness in the
carving) puts it closer to Chidambaram.
No comments:
Post a Comment