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Magazine
ON THE ROAD
`I show you Mahabalipuram'
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RANJIT HOSKOTE trails the Pallava man-lion ... .
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K. GAJENDRAN
Relics of an architecture competition?
MY breath returns slowly. The car was headed straight for the monumental relief sculpture, carved from a single rock, showing Ganga's descent from heaven. At the last possible moment, just as we had resigned ourselves to a nose-to-nose collision with the hooded serpent-king descending in a stately flow of images, the driver swerved, and we came to rest in a crowd of guides, peddlers, tourists and mendicants. It takes a while to accept that the Seventh-Century Pallava masterpiece is for real. Having made its acquaintance in reproduction, we have become convinced that it stands in splendid isolation, separated from the earth by an aura of eternity. The belief survives the experience, standing unshakeable even as our eyes register the relief as a tableau vivant propped up in the middle of the vaster, more mobile tableau vivant that is present-day Mahabalipuram. Theatre of fantasy, tapestried by myth, this historic ocean-port is both shock and dazzlement to the first-time visitor.
"I show you Mahabalipuram, city of great Bali, also Mamallapuram," says the inevitable guide. We don't know where we are, right, but help is at hand. Wading further through the crowd, we decline a chorus of importunate hands, each holding out postcards that detail the site's glories. Like all good tourists, we should have told the guide — who has attached himself to us — that we are not tourists; that we have prepared ourselves for this sublime moment of encounter. The speech would have cut little ice on this summer morning; and besides, the man is inoffensive. Unlike his closest competitor, a sinister figure in sunglasses whom we leave behind. We follow our native informant's narratives, which pilot us along a path that winds around hillocks and dips behind giant boulders, to reveal the most exquisite shrines of Mahavishnu and Mahesvara, jewels coaxed from the granite by the Pallava sculptors.
Mahabalipuram, this particular Sunday in March, has been overrun by several hundred villagers: not squatters, our guide explains, but worshippers who have participated in a festival at the relatively recent Sthala-shayana temple across the road. To these transients, the remnants of Pallava glory are just a convenient colonnade where the day's washing may be spread, a roof under which to snatch a nap before the bus-ride home. Women cook sambhar in aluminium vessels; men gather in knots of conversation. `Relatively recent' is a description that does little justice to the Sthala-shayana temple, built by the Vijayanagara rulers; but the centuries are so many broken cowrie shells on this beach, and you and I and Krishnadeva Raya are all recent by comparison with the 1,400-year-old monuments we have come to see. Passing among the peninsula's distinctive gold-bordered purple, mulberry and parrot-green saris, hung out to dry, we pick our way through time's workshop, past dried thorn-bush and sleeping children.
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Material passes abruptly into form here: the cave-temple's logic demands a visual insistence on the entrance, not an extensive dressing or adornment of the surrounding rock surface. The eye, as it drifts across the pitted buff skin of slope and cliff, is arrested by a frontage of cushion-type columns, which invites us into a sanctuary hollowed from the stone. In the Varaha-mandapa, we step across a small moat and find ourselves flanked by Vishnu in the Boar avatar, rescuing the Earth, and Vishnu as Trivikrama, conquering the universe in three gigantic strides; the cave also boasts the presence of Gajalakshmi, directrix of prosperity, and Durga, goddess of victory. These celebratory allegories encode the triumph of the Pallava emperor Narasimha-varman (630-668 A.D.) over the Chalukyas; this dynastic patron and reigning spirit of Mahabalipuram is rendered homage, also, through the lion or man-lion, a recurrent visual pun in its iconographic programme.
A complex figure, he was called `Mamalla', the wrestler, to honour his passion for that sport; he wrote the Sanskrit play "Mattavilasam", a satire on the hypocrisy and pretence of rogue ascetics. An energetic ruler, he dispatched naval expeditions to Sri Lanka and presided over the military and mercantile expansion of the Pallava dominions. Looking out over the palm-dotted beach and the hypnotically blue Bay of Bengal, we try to imagine how this eastern harbour must have looked and smelled in the Seventh Century, as cargoes of silver, spices, fragrant wood, wine, coral, turquoise and ivory circuited through it, connecting it to South-east Asia and to the Roman Orient. And who were the people who imagined these divine presences; what ideas and emotions informed these visionary manifestations from the rock?
On site, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) does little to assist imaginative reconstruction. Its prose style is trapped in the time-warp of the early 20th Century, confined to rusting purple plaques protected by grilles, and stone slabs blessed by passing birds; these edicts inform us that the Mahabalipuram monuments are "mute witnesses to the virility" of Pallava art. Curiously enough, despite being a major tourist attraction — the Shore Temple is the South's answer to the North's Taj Mahal, in the cosmology of postcard-type memorabilia — Mahabalipuram has never been the subject of systematic study.
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To invoke another Mughal parallel, this enigmatic stone city recalls Fatehpur Sikri, in that the original meaning of its architecture is obscure, if not lost. Both cities are mapped only through fictions invented by locals for the benefit of visitors, or the conjectures of long-distance readers. In Fatehpur, the Buland Darwaza, the Great Doorway, leads to a tank; Birbal's house is far too open to the winds to bear the suave missives of diplomacy; seated in the axial pavilion of the Ibadat Khana, the emperor Akbar might have conducted soliloquies, not conversations. Likewise, Mahabalipuram's five Pandava rathas are far from chariotesque. They resemble, rather, the results of an architecture competition: five test-runs or drafts, each in a different style, ranging from the thatch-roof to the apsidal type, briskly hewn from a sequence of rocks, but left incomplete. One of them boasts a hieratic portrait of Narasimha-varman: his high cylindrical crown, triple-wound knotted girdle and long, thin nose lend colour to the suggestion that the Pallavas were of Iranian origin. In the punning sculpture that they loved, the sovereign was depicted both as king and god, pointing to an Iranian conception of kingship; similarly, the motifs of the sun and moon as guardian-witnesses of regal and divine splendour, repeated in Mahabalipuram, comprise an Iranian symbolism brought into India by the Kushans and Shakas.
Whatever its complex significance, Mahabalipuram bears animated witness to one of the supreme achievements of Indic art: the energy and refinement of Pallava sculpture. People, unaware that they stand among the earliest stone temples in southern India, jostle for the mandatory group photograph. Or stroll past the Pallava image-maker's most memorable passages, ignoring the interplay of stylised transcendental icon and tender realistic detail; as, for instance, in the Govardhana-dhari cave, where the eye transits from a cosmic Krishna, holding the mountain umbrella-wide above the villagers of Vrindavana, to the detail of a cow's tongue, as she licks her calf while being milked.
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"No electricity in Pallava period," says our guide, evidently regretting this lack of foresight on the part of an otherwise perfectly sensible dynasty. The focus of his meditation is the lighthouse that rears up from within the complex; in rectifying the lapses of the Pallavas, this tower also overshadows the cave temple of Mahishasura-mardini. This is possibly the most beautiful of Mahabalipuram's treasures, the high point of our pilgrimage: its relief panels counterpoint the resplendent lion-mounted Devi, vanquishing Mahisha as a buffalo-headed minotaur bearing a mace, heroic even in defeat, with an elegant Mahavishnu as Anantashayana, reclining on the cosmic serpent. In the centre is the sanctum of Shiva as Somaskanda, a favourite Pallava compositional choice, showing Shiva with Parvati and their son Kartikeya. Somaskanda and Anantashayana recur as the governing deities of the Shore Temple, erroneously described as the `pagoda', dedicated by a later Pallava.
The neat lawns developed around the Shore Temple are incongruous with its weathered magnificence: we approach with the nasty feeling that the original has been spirited away and substituted with a Ramoji Rao replica. But then the walled enclosure opens to captivate us with the serenity of its presences: the broad-shouldered Shiva and the resonant Vishnu, each darsana emerging from the depths of shadow. Repeatedly, the iconographic programme of Mahabalipuram emphasises the reconciliation of opposites: whether lasya and tandava, incarnated in the tranquil Varaha and the violent Trivikrama; or the twinning and mirroring, beyond sectarian impulses, of Mahesvara and Mahavishnu.
As the car swings onto the East Coast Road, on the way back to Chennai, we find a man-lion dancing on the sandy strip between kiosks advertising Kodak film and "Frooti", and the metalled speedway. The last of Holi's revellers, costumed in orange, sporting a mane and a lion mask: the translation may be demotic, but Narasimha-varman lives on.
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