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".

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.

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.