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Mahabalipuram - Sculptural Extravaganza |
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A soft pearly light dims the stars and lifts the opaque veil of darkness from Mahabalipuram and the pyramidal contours of a
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diminutive temple swim into view silhouetted against a vast cathedral sky, like a wondrous unreality spun out of early morning magic.
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The colors deepen; the virginal blush of dawn smears the sky. Delicate skeins of pale gold and searing orange lie intertwined in intimate embrace across the smudged horizon, suffusing the idle waters of the Bay of Bengal-an unabashed foreplay of colors. A thin hot wedge of vivid red emerges out of the sea, growing every moment into a flaming, pulsating disc that soon disowns the theatre of its birth.
The lone temple, that guardian of the shore, is a becalmed spectator. It has been an apathetic witness to this impassioned spectacle every dawn for the last twelve hundred years.
For Mahabalipuram - Mamallapuram, the ancient name for it has now been revived - is one of history's intriguing enigmas. It was flourishing port town of the Pallava rulers of south India who chiseled in stone a fabulous "open-air museum" of sculpture under the vault of a burning sky. That much is known. But was this sculptural glorification a king's fancy? A celebration of war victories? A queen's fantasy? A stone bench at the site is supposedly one on which kings of the time sat while discussing projects with their masons.
Why then after all that royal patronage, was most of the work abandoned? Left incomplete? What interrupted them in their tasks? No answers are available.
They say there were seven pagodas or temples on the shores of Mahabalipuram. All but one were pillaged by the rapacious sea, though there is little underwater evidence to substantiate their existence.
The mystery of Mahabalipuram lingers, unraveled, but its sculptural extravaganza is a living testament of the virile artistic temperament of the Pallavas who were trendsetters in south Indian art. And their monuments tenanted by the gods evoke the transience of man and his civilization. The Shore Temple and the five rathas (chariots) are forerunners of the Dravidian style of architecture that evolved later. Mahabalipuram is supposed to be the handiwork of three monarchs. Mahendra Varman I (600-630 A.D.), Narasimha Varman I (630-666 A.D.) and Narasimha Varman II ((700-728 A.D.). Hence the three distinctly discernible styles of sculpture reflecting progressive degrees of refinement. One school of thought attributes this wonderland in stone entirely to the multi-faceted artistic genius of Rajasthan, though the coastal village itself derives its name from Narasimha Varman I hailed as Mamallan or Mahamalla (great wrestler).
A delightful freshness permeates their outpourings here, larger due to their folk art origins. Rocks have been scooped out to make cave temples and rock-cut shrines. Rock surfaces have been filled with bas-reliefs and panels crowded with a cavalcade of men, gods and animals, their figures and movements breathtakingly realistic.
The Varaha cave, a small rock-cut mandapam (hall) is a faceted and finished gem with four panels of the famous Pallava door-keepers who wear an expression of "pious rapture," as Heinrich Zimmer, a leading expert on Mahabalipuram put it. There is about them a mood of contemplative reverie, a lyrical softness and a subtle grace totally at variance with the primordial machismo their role as guard's of the gods imposes on them. In the presence of their divine masters, the surge of manhood is harnessed into a religious fervor.
Feeble sunlight glimmers on panels of enduring beauty in the Mahishamardini cave. The Somaskanda sculpture radiates peace, power and wisdom while Lord Vishnu in omniscient repose is a masterpiece of dhwani (the art of suggestion) perfected by the Pallava sculptor.
It finds vivid and animated expression in the northern wall panel that is an explosive, action-packed scene of a hunting aesthetic perfection. Goddess Durga's fight with the buffalo-headed demon Mahishasura, an episode culled form the celebrated Sanskrit poem Devi Mahatmya.
It is a glimpse of eternal beauty, a fragment in time, a fleeting moment imprisoned forever on stone. The young, sylph-like goddess looks playful in battle. Humor puckers the corners of her full lips and a strange ecstasy glows on her face. Her head is titled back in saucy pride, her diadem undisturbed. A heavy necklace nestles in the soft sanctuary of her bursting young bosom restrained only by the barest hint of a raiment. Reckless courage courses through her slender arched body and she flexes her arms regally aiming her deadly missile t her brutish adversary who is well-versed in craft, cunning and stratagem, endowed with a physical prowess the Devi Mahatmya refers to with awe, "when the swaggered round with speed, the earth crumbled into pieces under his hooves…" But the goddess is unruffled, a remarkable serenity, a self-assurance and an astute presence of mind in her pose. And a supreme confidence, almost like a foretaste of victory.
And yet the battle is far from won, though triumph does hover in the air. The demon retreats a bit, not so much in arrogant bluster or defeat as in shrewd appraisal. Brutal and retributive, weighing in his hands his large iron club as much as his chances in war, biding his time to parry and thrust.
Arjuna's Penance, perhaps the world's largest bas-relief is the universe itself in stone, throbbing with a vastness of conception. With magnificent largesse did the Pallava mason spend himself on this colossus of art 27 metres long and 9 metres high. But the identity of the chief protagonist of this panel has endlessly puzzled historians. Is he Arjuna, the hero of the epic Mahabharata, or is the Bhagiratha, Rama's ancestor?
Legend has it that King Bhagiratha had to bring down to earth the celestial Ganga to purify and redeem the accursed souls of his ancestors. But the river in its torrential plunge would inundate the earth and so he had to undergo a penance to propitiate Shiva who finally received the flood in his matted locks and let it trickle down! This was a sight for the world's creatures to see and they gathered round. The cleft in the rock depicts the descent of Ganga, a theory supported by the ruins of a stone water tank on the hill. There is a forest with tribal people and all forms of animal's life, just as they would appear in their habitat. Women clothed in an aura of ineffable grace, a rich inner beauty transfiguring the plainest of them. The whole scene has a delicate edge of humor. Juxtaposed against the ascetic is a cat doing rigorous penance too, eyes firmly shut, even to the delectable mice scampering around within easy reach!
The five rathas (chariots) are architectural precursors of the temples of south India. The smallest and the simples is the Draupadi ratha and the largest is the multi-storeyed Dharmaraja ratha scoped from a monolithic rock. These small-unfinished shrines ravaged by war and weather are things of undiminished beauty.
But it is the Shore Temple a three-in-one abode of god that evokes the spell of Mahabalipuram. A Vishnu temple sandwiched between two Shiva temples, it is a visual delight, its precincts abounding in architectural masterpieces.
On either side of it the sea spreads, illimitable and infinite. The afternoon sun glances slantingly through its weathered spires, curiously amorphous, lacking in finiteness. And its is a disquieting thought that comes unbidden to one's mind. How long will it survive? This mute tireless sentinel of the shore, pregnant with the unrevealed secrets of a thousand two hundred years? How long more this grand defiance? How long more this unyielding anchorage by the sea? For it is the Shore Temple, wind-whipped and surf-beaten, that is that ultimate expression of Mahabalipuram.
A 65-Kilometers stretch of sun-scorched road connects Mahabalipuram to the fabled city of a thousand temples, Kanchipuram.
Kanchipuram is the ancient capital of the Pallava rulers who for some unknown reason, ventured into Mahabalipuram first to perfect their art before they here. Rampantly, leisurely, and superficially. But not gratuitously.
A hot wind stirs languorously in the stately old trees that dot the roadside. But beyond, it is a treeless, trackless, tamed wilderness, the unexpected patches of ripening green fields and thorny bushes melting into ochre pools of water the recent rains have left behind.
Eyes are dulled by this heat induced soporific and a pleasant unconsciousness invades the senses when one's startled gaze focuses indistinctly at first, on a bulky tiered stone Gopuram (tower) that thrusts itself insistently upward, dominating the landscape with a presence more felt than seen.
But then this is just one of the Gopurams in the famous city of the Pallavas. For Rajasthan or Atyantakama (he of boundless desires) as he is referred to in inscriptions reveled in creating an "unlimited variety" of art. There are 650 stone inscriptions in Kanchipuram belonging to different dynasties and different periods; but though the city reached its zenith during Pallava rule, their lithic records number a mere 12.
The temples here reflect the maturity and efflorescence of Pallava art and the ornate and often imposing embellishments were produced later by the Chola, Vijayanagar and Chalukyan kings. Transient royal whims that turned into monumental endurance.
There is a solemn grandeur, a grandiosity of vision and ornamental excess in the temples here. A disembodied otherworldly stillness impregnates their vast inner domains where time is a captive fugitive. The Ekambaranathar temple, the outcome of the artistic impulses of three different dynasties, has five prakarams (enclosures) and a thousand-pillared mandapam. A soaring piety takes its clustered 11-storeyed pinnacles upward to the very threshold of god's own heaven.
The Kailasanatha temple, Sri Varadaraja temple, Sri Vaikuntaperumal temple… the names stretch endlessly. The city itself is dedicated to the presiding deity, Sri Kamakshi (one with "eyes of love") at the Kamakshi temple. In Sanskrit, the word kanchi denotes girdle and poets have allegorically characterized the city as a girdle to the earth.
And so it was. A seat of learning that attracted scholars from far-flung corners of the globe. Dharmapala, the Buddhist scholar and Vatsyayana, the author of Natyabhashya belonged to Kanchipuram while Hieun Tsang the indefatigable Chinese pilgrim visited the city and chronicled what he saw. Kanchi was the cradle of a great religious renaissance too. Tamil Shaivite saints. Appar and Siruthonder lived and worked here. It enjoys a unique status among India's ancient cities, for all indigenous religions - Jainism, Buddhism, Vaishnavism and Shaivism - flourished here. Even today, it is one of the most sacred places of pilgrimage in India and one of the seats of the Hindu math of Sri Shankaracharya.
But what has now girdled the earth is the gold-embroidered Kanchipuram silk sari that has been for centuries a prized possession of the south India woman. Kanchipuram, though, is not a centre of silk production. It is ironic that the yarn comes from Surat. However, it ahs traditionally been the home of this handloom industry. Now its industrious weavers have come out with Kanchi cotton-cheap, sturdy and colourful and aesthetically designed to suit contemporary taste and the export market. Shops dealing with silk and cotton saris and material line the main streets of the town and for a demonstration of handloom weaving, visit the Weaver's Service Centre, 20, Railway Station Rod. Kanchipuram is the only city in south India to have played such a dominant, decisive and continuous role in the history of the peninsula. At one time, it was the hub of the empire; of pomp and panoply. Today, it is a small place that time has forgotten. Royalty shifted its allegiance to other more dramatic arenas. And in the quiet interregnum to the centuries when life thundered by elsewhere, the ancient city, wrapped in nostlgia, to proud to change with times, withdrew form the mainstream. To become what it is today. An Arcadian fastness of beauty. A dreamy detachment and a quaint medievalism, the lasting impressions of which one consigns to memory.
GETTING THERE
By Air
The nearest airport, Madras is 64 Kilometers away
By Rail
The nearest railway station, Chingelpet is 29 Kilometers away.
By Road
Mamallapuram is connected by road to Madras. Tirukkalikundram, also known as Pakshithirtham, Kanchipuram and Pondicherry via Chingelpet. It is 16 Kilometers from Pakshithirtham and 65 Kilometers from Kanchipuram via Chingelpet.
LOCAL TRANSPORT
Tourist taxis can be hired form Madras. Unmetered private taxis available. Cycle rickshaws available.
MISCELLANEOUS
Tourist Information Centre Tourist Information Counter, Government of Tamil Nadu, Mamallapuram.
Guide Service
A guide lecturer of the Archaeological Survey of India is available at the Archaeological Survey Office. He can guide visitors on request. His services are free of charge. Guides trained the Department of Tourism, Government of India can be engaged from Madras.
Excursions
Tirukkalikundram. 16 kilometers. A pilgrim centre known for its temples. An important feature here is the feeding of a pair of kites by the temple priest at noon daily.
Covelong. 20 kilometers. A fishing village and a beach. A 16 kilometer road branches off at Kelambakkam for Covelong.
Festivals
Palanquin festival at the Sthalasayana Perumal Temple in October-November.
Courtesy : Discover India
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