HERITAGE
Down the corridors of time
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GEETA DOCTOR looks at a palace in South India that once rivalled the monuments at Thebes.
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The Tirumalai Nayak Palace ...
IN its heyday, Tirumalai Nayak's Palace at Madurai was considered to be one of the wonders of the South.
A Jesuit priest who summed up his life's achievements, soon after his death in l659 has this to say about him:
"His reign was rendered illustrious by works of royal magnificence. Among these are the pagoda of Madura, several public buildings, and above all, the royal palace, the colossal proportions and astonishing boldness of which recall the ancient monuments of Thebes. He loved and protected the Christian religion, the excellence of which he recognized, but he never had the courage to accept the consequences of his conviction. The chief obstacle to his conversion came from his 200 wives, of whom the most distinguished were burnt upon his pyre."
Madura Gazetteer
In these few lines, we might read some of the drama of Tirumalai Nayak's life. Much more impressive however is to walk through the corridors of the recently restored palace itself and marvel at the sheer size of his Durbar Hall, even while shaking one's head at the architectural glory that has been lost. Only two portions of the palace remain — an open central courtyard that is 252 feet long and l51 feet wide surrounded by immense pillared halls and galleries around the sides (that lead their way into the lavishly domed and decorated audience chamber at the far end), and an adjoining building by its side that now functions as a museum. Even these, we are told, represent only one-tenth of the building's original space.
Describing the main courtyard and the apartments around it, the Gazetteer notes:
"It is supported on tall stone pillars 40 feet in height, connected by foliated brick arches of much elegance of design ornamented with Hindu designs carried out in fine shell-lime plaster which almost resembles marble. Round three sides of this court at the back of the arcade, runs a very handsome line of lofty cloisters, 43 feet wide and upheld by three parallel rows of pillars supporting arches some 26 feet high. In the middle of the two sides of this are large domes built on pillars of the same height as those of the outer arcade and an upper gallery runs all round it. On the fourth side of the court the cloister is much deeper and finer, being altogether l05 feet wide and supported on five rows of huge pillars and roofed with three great domes, the central and largest of which measure 60 feet in diameter and is 73 feet above the ground."
During the daily son-et-lumiere programmes that take place in the open courtyard, some of the history of Tirumalai Nayak's tumultuous reign (l623-59) is revealed. Part of the glory of the Nayak dynasty is the reflected splendour of the Vijayanagar kingdom, of which they were the vassals, until the decisive battle of Talikota in l565, when the Muslims overran the kingdom and forced the remnants of the dynasty to retreat further east and south. The artistic vigour of the Vijayanagar kingdom, that had attracted visitors to the fabled "City of Victory" from different corners of the world, however continued long after the demise of their power. The Nayaks or Nayakkans, as they were also called, were the feudatory governors appointed by the Vijyayanagar rulers to protect their interests in parts of what are now Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.
The Nayaks, while consolidating their own power, were equally adept at imitating the style of the rulers, particularly in the matter of art and architecture. This is what makes even the remnants of Tirumalai Nayak's palace so fascinating. It continues the style and manner of some of the fabled structures that are to be seen at Vijayanagar, particularly the building that is called the Lotus Mahal, while the use of the large Durbar type of audience hall with an open courtyard suggests the Islamic architecture of the Deccan.
As George Michell, leading authority on the Vijayanagar kingdom has noted at length, even while resisting the downward thrust of Muslim expansionism, the borders between art and architecture remained porous. Politically, they may have remained enemies, but this did not prevent them from making cultural exchanges. Not only where ideas on clothing, food, language exchanged, there is evidence that the masons working at Hampi, the capital of the Vijayanagar kings used the techniques of vaulted roofs and soaring domes that they borrowed from their Muslim neighbours in the Bahmani kingdom, with its capital at Gulbarga. Or as Michell notes, "The appearance of early Bahmani features at Vijayanagara demonstrates an immediate attraction for Islamic-styled modes of architecture, elements which were rapidly absorbed into Vijayanagara's distinctive courtly idiom."
MEENAKSHI DOCTOR
... the forgotten passage of history.
The use of architecture as a means of strengthening their position in a territorial that they occupied by force rather than by right was a standard practice amongst the Nayak rulers appointed by the Vijaynagara kings, whether in parts of Andhra Pradesh, at Warrangal for instance, where the earlier Kakkatiya dynasty had been destroyed, or at Madura, where the Nayaks took over, but never actually replaced the local Pandyan kings. There were similar governors at Tanjavur, Gingee, Mysore and after the fall of Vijayanagar each of these de-facto rulers sought to increase the glory of their reign through architecture, even while engaged in long and vicious battles against one another. At one point in his reign, Tirumalai Nayak turned the tables against all the Hindu rulers in the region by persuading the Sultans of Golconda and Bijapur to help him. The Sultan of Golconda graciously leapt into the fray, flattened out Mysore and in return extracted huge amounts of tribute from the Nayaks of Madura and Thanjavur. Whether Tirumalai Nayak regretted his action is not known, but for the next century or so, Madura was left alone to progress under the Nayaks.
Despite so many upheavals, Tirumalai Nayak's reign is famous for the legacy he left behind in numerous constructions. If he was not adding a tower to the Meenakshi temple, the unfinished tower called the Raya Gopuram and adding a hall, he is credited for having excavated the huge artificial reservoir, or Teppakulam and some scholars say, even the interesting building called "Tamakam", or Collector's bungalow. It's at the palace however that he excelled himself. There are stories of how he himself sat on a jeweled throne in the midst of a chamber made of ivory set in a pillared hall made of black stone. This was called the abode of paradise. As though to mock this memory, there is now a tacky throne made of cheap materials placed under the central dome of the audience hall. Even this feeble attempt at grandeur is diminished as visitors climb over it and pretend to be kings, while their friends scribble their names on the once shining plaster walls and pillars, under full view of the sleeping guards.
What is even more surprising is that the destruction of Tirumalai Nayak's Palace at Madurai was started by his own grandson, Chokhanatha, who carried parts of it for his own palace at Trichy. During the course of the centuries, it has been used as a paper making factory by convict labour, as a weaving depot, a district court, municipal school and so forth. Lord Napier, one of the British Governors in Madras directed Mr. Chisholm, leading Government architect of that time, who has left some excellent public buildings at Chennai, to prepare the initial reports for repairing the palace. It seems however that for a people so lacking in a sense of historical correctness, or who are more than content with the buzz of popular legends that are sung about the glories of Madurai and its enchanting goddess, the palace is just another crumbling monument that refuses to be wiped out entirely.
One rumour that persists — perhaps it is the same one that the Jesuit priest suggests — is that Tirumalai Nayak met his untimely death because he was about to declare himself a convert to Christianity. To save him the trouble, the head priest at the temple led him into an underground vault and left him to his fate, while telling the populace that the goddess herself had taken him to heaven.
No matter what the truth, the Palace of Tirumalai Nayak waits like a small architectural gem tossed into the dusty corridors of history just waiting to be admired for the glory that it once was meant to reflect.
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