A watershed in temple architecture

"ON the 275th day of the 25th year of his reign, the Lord Shri Rajarajadeva gave one sacred copper pot (kudam), to be placed on the copper pinnacle (stupi tadi) of the sacred shrine (srivimana) of the Lord Sri Rajarajadeva", so runs an inscription of emperor Rajaraja I, the author of the famous temple of Brihadisvara at Thanjavur (Tanjore). And this was the finial pot that was handed over for the ceremonial inauguration of the temple, termed the kumbhaabhishekam. This temple, for the next 1000 years, was to be the cradle of Bharatanatyam, through the reigns of successive dynasties, the Cholas, the Pandyas, the Vijayanagara Nayaks who had a long spell of three hundred years and more, in the earlier half as local governors on behalf of the suzerain, and later as independent princes during the post Krishna Deva Raya days, and finally the Marathas till the extinction of the independence of Thanjavur as a principality in 1802, in the days of Sarfoji II, with the advent of the British into the scene.

Political vagaries and vicissitudes notwithstanding, the temple, with all its trials and tribulations during the various wars fought in the region over the Centuries, nurtured this art and preserved the tradition of dance. This facet of the temple history need not concern us excepting fleetingly, for it is this monument that the emperor Rajaraja raised in his capital city that concerns us presently. Completed in A.D. 1010, this noble edifice marks, along with the Lingaraj temple at Bhubaneswar, and the Khandariya Mahadeva temple at Khajuraho among others, a watershed in the history of art and architecture of India. In a span of less than 50 years, there came into being, in different parts of India, a few temples remarkable for their dimensions, artistic quality and innovativeness. Of giant proportions, they rose to sheer heights unknown till then to Indian architecture.

When Rajaraja I built this temple, he called it the temple of the Lord of Rajaraja, being the titular deity of the emperor. The present name of Brihadisvara came into vogue centuries later. He called the presiding deity of the temple Sri Rajarajeesvaram Udaiyar (in fact in the Tamilised form Rajarajichchuram). To support the large mass of the 13 tiers and the sikhara, all made of stone, the device of widening the load-bearing surface of the walls of the garbhagriha had been conceived by his architects. But, instead of presenting the requisite base surface in one compact stretch, the royal sthapathis struck upon an ingenious, utilitarian, and, at the same time, aesthetically satisfying arrangement of two uni-centric parallel walls on all the four sides, removed from each other by a width of about 1.68 metres. This broad double-walled based gave the enormous superstructure the requisite stability, and, in fact, served incidentally to form an art gallery, invaluable to the student of Dravidian art.

Thus the sanctum has two walls around it, with the space between the two providing a vestibule running round the presiding deity and offering to the sthapatis the unique opportunity of making the mutually facing wall surfaces, which are in two floors, into rare, delightful mural canvases in the lower level, converting the inner surface of the upper level into a gallery of Bharatanatyam panels where there is an array of sequentially arranged karanas in high relief in stone. These sculptured karanas provide the first ever authentic representation of the dance units or karanas, described in Bharata's Natya Shastra. Inexplicably, out of the 108 karanas, only 81 karanas have been carved out, while the remaining high relief stone blocks out of which were to be chiselled the remaining 27 karanas, stand today in mute testimony to an unknown reason for the incomplete effort.

The karanas run like a ribbon round the outer face of the inner wall at eye level in one continuous order, commencing with the tala pushpa puta karana from the southern wing of the eastern face of the wall. They move on to the southern wall and then to the northern through the western wall. Beyond the middle of the northern wall, towards its eastern wing, the panels abruptly stop with the 81st karana, viz sarpitam.

This type of sculptural representation set the precedent for a general architectural and sculptural practice that came into vogue in a big way in the 12th Century in particular, and thereafter in general, where the karanas were carved on the flanks of the basement or upapitham portion of the wall of enclosure (tiru-ch-churru-maligai), or on the mutually facing vertical surfaces of the passage way of all the four gopurams as in the temple of Nataraja at Chidambaram, among others.

We have no clue as to how for the first time in the history of lithic presentation of the karanas, the Cholas of Thanjavur and the Brihadisvara temple of their creation took the initiative. Sarngadeva's father, Sodhala Deva, who came in the wake of a large inflow of Kashmiri scholars to peninsular India, particularly to the courts and religious centres of the Chalukyas and the Cholas in the 10th and 11th Centuries, was yet two centuries away from the Thanjavur temple and its karana depiction. By the time of Sodhala Deva's arrival in the Chola terrain, the Thanjavur temple and the provenance of Bharata's Natya grammar with lithic representation had already been there for a couple of centuries and a half. When Sodhala Deva moved out of Chola desa again northwards in the 13th Century to the kingdom of the Yadavas of Devagiri in what is southern Maharashtra today, along with his son Sarangadeva, who was to be become the author of the great work, Sangeeta Ratnakara, the Chola country and the Pandya country had been familiar with Natya Shastra at least for over a quarter of a millennium. Sodhala deva was greatly influenced by the Tamil traditions and art forms and was enriched by the sojourn in deep peninsular India. And the marital connections between the Cholas and the Eastern Chalukyas of Vengi (the Godavari-Krishna delta region) resulted in the entire peninsula from the Vindhyas down to the cape of Kanyakumari patronising the dance form that came into vogue in the turn of the millennium bringing about a blend of styles and evolution of the Bharata natya form despite variations in terminology used in describing the local forms of this grammar-guided dance format. When the Cholas and the Pandyas passed into history and the Nayaks and the Marathas came in as inheritors of a rich cultural legacy, they proudly acknowledged the handed down inheritance and sedulously fostered the art form in the temple and the court, leaving for us today a rare and vibrant legacy.

B. VENKATARAMAN

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