The Pillars Of Our Culture Celebrate All Consciousness, With No Exceptions 

Hindu temples in South India are an expression of triumph. They have survived some of the worst assaults by alien invaders. Almost every temple that one sees today, exists only because the local community members came together to protect them by sacrificing their lives and facing worst kind of tortures. Eminent temple historian Dr Kudavayil Balasubramanian, in his work on the famous Thiruvarur Shiva temple, writes how in 1758, a French invader occupied the temple and searched for the sacred forms of deities sculpted in precious metals, and other jewellery. However, the temple priests had effectively hidden the sacred objects. Finding nothing but grains in the temple premises, he tortured the priests, and since he could not extract any information, he ordered them all to be shot dead. Yet none of them betrayed their god and became martyrs of dharma.

History textbooks have been designed during both the colonial times and in the post-colonial Nehruvian era with a centralised grand narrative from the point of view of Delhi-based rulers and the elite Anglican and Marxist worldview. The result is that such local events of great cultural and spiritual significance to the Hindus have been neglected and not recorded in the textbooks.

So, now more than three generations have grown up that look at temples in a highly fractured manner. Even the academics, who study Hindu temples have this fractured view. Carmel Berkson, in her excellent work, The life of form in Indian sculpture (1998) points out how the colonial ‘preservers’ of Indian art with abject ignorance of the underlying aesthetics simply "collected, described, measured and categorized, establishing a tentative chronology". Their influence did not stop there. While one branch of Indian and non-Indian scholars "tended to focus on empirical description, chronology, narrative, iconography and iconometry", another set of scholars "focused on how these factors have been influenced and conditioned by … distinct societal contexts". Yet she points out that there is a "wider and deeper perspective influenced by Coomaraswamy, a primarily concept oriented approach" which perceived the Indian sculptures through "interlinking of data with the organism of Indian metaphysics and ritual".

One such, often neglected, element in the sacred architecture of South Indian temples is of the pillar sculptures. Initially a structural necessity, with the flow of history most of the stone pillars progressively started getting adorned with a diversity of sculptures. Embedded in these pillars is the interconnectedness, which pervades through all dimensions of life – both individual and societal, the explicitly spiritual and the outwardly secular history of the community and culture.

Here we look into certain pillar sculptures this writer had the chance to see in some local temples.

By South Indian standards, the Azhakamman Temple or the temple of the goddess of beauty, where she resides with her consort Shiva is a small one though pivotal to the local people. It has an outer and inner corridor for devotees to circumambulate. The mornings are quite calm, and except for the activities of a regular few devotees, the silent ambience heightens the sacred atmosphere. So, one can calmly walk through, stand and look at each pillar and marvel at the symbolic web they weave.

There, among the temple pillars, along with the deities and seers, stands a street entertainer. He is balancing a sharp knife on his nose. He is juggling balls with his one hand and leg, while in his other hand he holds a swirling top. So, here we have a street entertainer frozen in stone for all eternity, with all his glory, along with the gods and goddesses. As I capture the sculpture digitally, a question arises in my mind. What about his counterpart elsewhere in the world?

And the performers. What about the performers in Europe? Not in a clownish way but in the same regal way in which the street performer is depicted here. Could he be seen with the same respect there? Does the theology of the West impute to his talents, divinity as in the case of India?

Historian Dr Kathy Stuart in her book Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge University Press, 1999) provides a clear picture of how Christendom treated the street performers and wandering minstrels. Both the categories "were strongly vilified in ecclesiastical literature", she points out. Not only did the performers live in sin but "from the church fathers through the church councils and synods" considered that "merely by watching their performances and giving them money, their audiences participated in their sin". They were considered as living "in a state of sin and led others into sin as well". They were demonised and dehumanised. Dr Stuart writes that "some theologians went so far as to define them as monsters without virtue, outside of the human species, and denied them a place within the divine order". Perhaps in a way they were seen as the last vestiges of Pagan West.

This theological position led to severe discrimination. St Augustine not only decided to "exclude performers along with prostitutes from Holy Communion" but he also wanted them to "be excluded from citizenship and public office". While St Thomas Aquinas made some small concessions for performers 'within limits', they still faced severe discrimination. Dr Stuart writes that "the secular and religious authorities mutually reinforced and drew on each other to justify their discrimination" and it continued well into "the early modern period". Of course sin was replaced by the label of being ‘criminal’. Remember the fight between Vitalis, the street performer, and the policeman in Paris in the nineteenth century novel Sans Famille by Hector Mallot? Actually, what it depicts is more than the animosity of a single policeman. It expresses the prejudice of modernising Christendom against the street performers.

Now compare the majestic street performer frozen in stone in the temple corridor, sharing the sacred space with the divine, with the theological position they had in the West which led to centuries of oppression and marginalisation of street performers.

In the image above, you see a seer emerging out of the fish. Epigraphist S Ramachandran confirmed the writer’s identifying the seer as Matsyendranatha, who is traditionally considered the founder of the natha sampradaya. He is considered the guru of Gorakhnath. In South Indian tradition, it is said that Matsyendranatha gave holy ash to a woman, who was grief-stricken because she had no child. The woman, however, feared foul play and threw the holy ash from her kitchen oven. After 10 years when Matsyendranatha visited the village again she was still in a state of grief. He took pity on her and went to the pit where she had dumped the ash. He uttered 'Gorakhnath' and out of the ashes from the pit came a 10-year-old boy, who immediately renounced the world and followed Matsyendranatha.

According to Ramachandran, there have been land grants from the local Pandya chieftains of South Tamil Nadu for Gorakhnath institutions in 1540 CE. So, the pillar sculpture actually embodies one of the major spiritual traditions which was flourishing locally and has influenced the cultural history of the region.

And the two birds. From the very beginning of Indic spiritual traditions they have been a powerful symbol. The Rig Veda sings of 'two birds' which are intimate companions sitting together on the same tree, one of them eating fruits while the other looks on (RV I.164.20,21). Later, both the Mundaka and the Svetasvatara Upanishads used the two birds to symbolise the ‘experiencer’ and individual consciousness.

The story of Markandeya overcoming death is a favourite one to all devotees and one of the cherished bedtime tales of Indian children. Kala tries to drag the boy Markandeya, who is destined to die at a very young age. The boy has surrendered himself to Shiva and hangs on to a Sivalinga. Unmindful, Death throws his noose around both the boy and Shiva. Now Shiva emerges from the Linga and kicks Kala and thus Shiva becomes Kalakala – the death to death. The above is the pillar sculpture at Azhakamman Temple. Now compare this with the same scene depicted in the Irawatheeswara temple at Tarasuram:

So, what we have in the temple sculptures are springboards into our social history, spiritual traditions, local as well as pan-Indic culture. Even Jawaharlal Nehru, when speaking about India’s unity, talked almost mystically about the "a cultural unity ... held together by strong but invisible threads". But here, I see those invisible threads in stone. In this almost obscure temple in a small town in the southernmost tip of the Indian mainland, the unknown sculptor had identified with the spiritual poetry of Vedic Rishi and the Siddha tradition that found a place of pride in almost every corner of India. He had been, in present day anglicised Indian standards, daring enough to see the divinity in such mundane everyday activity like the excellence in a street performer and give it the same space as the most venerated divines. But then going through various such small temples, most of them almost unknown outside the tiny district of Kanyakumari, I dare say the pillar sculptures sing their own songs in each temple and wait for us to listen to them.