Ganga Through The Ages And Empires

Within a hundred years of the end of Harsha’s empire, the arena of imperial rivalry had shifted to the south. In the political drama that unfolded over the seventh and eighth centuries c.e. in the Deccan, the Western Gangas, the Pallavas of Kanchi, the Chalukyas of Badami, and Pandya kings farther down the peninsula were embroiled in a struggle for political supremacy that brought about an extensive period of intrigue and military raids. The Western Gangas, based in present day Karnataka, were once vassals of the Pallavas but asserted their independence with the rise of the Chalukyas in the western Deccan and eventually allied with the Chalukyas against the Pallavas. Around 617 c.e. the Chalukya forces under Pulakeshin II had forced their way into the outskirts of Kanchi, the capital of Pallava king Mahendravarman I.

During these fierce contests, the temple served as a direct symbol of political power. The Pallava king Narasimhavarman commissioned the Mallikarjuna temple in the heart of the Chalukya capital, with an inscription proclaiming his military triumph over his Chalukya rivals. In a fitting riposte, Queen Lokamahadevi, wife of Vikramaditya I, had the Virupaksha temple built in 745 c.e. to commemorate the victory of her husband, “captor of Kanchi,” over the Pallavas. In both these monuments, the River Ganga appears as a deliberately chosen motif. In the Mallikarjuna temple, Ganga and Yamuna are installed as guardian deities.

In the Virupaksha temple, Ganga is represented as flowing in all three directions—heaven, earth, and the netherworld—along with a recapitulation of the story of its descent. In fluid dynamic sequences carved meticulously in sandstone, the old myths are retold. The Vasus come to life in the act of being liberated from the curse of sage Vasishtha. There is a penitent Bhagiratha waiting to consecrate the remains of his ancestors, the sons of Sagara lying in a heap of ashes beside an enraged sage Kapila, and Ganga flowing into Shiva’s matted locks before splashing onto earth. Paintings of Ganga as Shiva’s consort once adorned the pillared courtyard (mandapa) of this temple, which can still be recognized in the fragments that have survived on the underside of the eaves. On the facade of the nave (garbhagriha) of the Papanatha temple in the Chalukya capital of Patadakkal, adorned with finely carved pilasters on both sides, Ganga and Yamuna appear astride their respective vehicles, the crocodile and the tortoise.

In this sense, the architect’s homage to the river may also be seen as a prayer to the actual rivers of the region for the wellbeing and prosperity of the kingdom. The Pallava kings wanted to extend their domains beyond the fertile basin of the Kaveri River, into the valleys of the Tungabhadra and the Krishna toward the west and north. An inscription of Simhavishnu, one of the early rulers of the dynasty, states clearly that he seized the territory of the Cholas of the north country “embellished by the daughter of Kavira,” that is, the river Kaveri, “whose ornaments are the forests of paddy” and where one can find the “brilliant groves of areca palms.”

A copper plate inscription of the Pallava king Nandivarman dating to the eighth century c.e. clearly shows an attempt by his scribes to relate the story of the descent of the Ganga to the descent of royal lineage. It states that the Pallavas were a powerful and untainted race of warriors, a part of Vishnu incarnate (vis.noram. s′avataˉra), who had demonstrated unrelenting courage in their conquest of all parts of the terrestrial sphere, enforcing rules of the caste order (varna), and they had descended on this earth just like the Ganga (gan˙ gaˉ vataˉra) to purify the world. In the light of such a claim, the proliferation of Ganga images in Pallava temples, either as freestanding guardians or displayed along with Shiva, makes perfect sense. In the cloisters and panels of the freestanding masonry temples built by the later Pallava kings we can see a further elaboration of this theme, with the rendition of Shiva as Gangadhara, catching the celestial river in his matted hair to break the impact of its fall on creatures of the earth. An early execution of this form can be found at the Tiruchirapalli rockcave temple, where Gangadhara stands with his foot on the dwarf Apasmara, a symbol of folly and ignorance.

At the Kailasanatha temple in the Pallava capital, Kanchi, Shiva holds out a single lock of his hair to receive the river hurtling down from heaven. Such images were meant to augment the reputation of the ruling dynasty, which is one reason why many of these temples were attacked and desecrated during times of war.

The appropriation of the Ganga motif during the long and unfinished struggle for dominance between rival powers of the Deccan—from the Narmada River in the north to the Kaveri in the far south—points to a different kind of war waged over icons and meanings. The patronage and construction of royal temples had become essential elements of statecraft. The evolution of the Pallava temple, for example, from smaller rockcut caverns and enclosures to massive freestanding structures on stone platforms endowed with lofty towers (vimana) and stepped cornices rising skyward toward elaborate golden capstones show this most clearly. The careful placement of guardians (dvarapalas) and guardian deities at the entrances of Pallava temples was an attempt to fashion the gates of the temple as entrances to the kingdom itself. The Pallava ruler Mahendravarman I, who initiated many of the dynastic feuds with the Pandya and Chalukya kingdoms, was an indefatigable patron of such structures. Many of them were named after his honorific titles (birudas) in Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu, such as the uppercave temple at Tiruchirapalli, famous for the image of Shiva as Gangadhara, bearer of the Ganga.

Placed within the sanctum of the king’s temple, the Ganga—the river that is supposed to emanate from the Milky Way galaxy—implied a communion between the ruler and the realm of Shiva in the northern mountains of Kailasa. The temple was a visible embodiment of the heights of royal power, reinforced by endowments, gifts, and charity. It was precisely because the temple and the deity enthroned therein were extensions of the king’s consecrated body that they were objects of great political value and vulnerable to attacks during times of war. For the regimes that succeeded the Pallavas and Chalukyas in the south, pillaging and desecration of idols and artifacts became increasingly common, sometimes involving distant regimes of the north. The construction, endowment, and defense of large temples, in this regard, were practices dedicated largely to the extension of the political aura and ritual preeminence of the ruler.