Trip to Kanchipuram - Kailasanathar Temple

We traveled to Kanchipuram on a day trip from Chennai. I was lucky to have my friend who is a learned historian, well versed in Pallava architecture and iconography. To warm things up, we went to a couple of smaller temples first (Mukteswara temple, Pravalavarna Swamy Temple) before lunch at Hotel Sakthi Ganapathy, followed by a 3 hour stop at the highlight of the visit - the Kailasanathar Temple.

Kanchipuram can stake a claim to be the temple capital of South India, if not all of India. The Pallavas ruled from here during the 6th, 7th and 8th centuries CE and have commissioned temples of breathtaking majesty, whose sculptural  and architectural excellence make them in my humble opinion on par with that dynasty's efforts at Mamallapuram.  UNESCO which bestowed World Heritage Site status to Mamallapuram, for some reason has given the Kanchipuram temples a miss. 

The Kailasanathar temple was commissioned by Rajasimha Pallava who is also credited with the Shore Temple at Mamallapuram. The vimanam (structure on top of the inner sanctum) is reminiscent of the Mamallapuram Shore Temple although much bigger. The vimanam and most of the superstructure is built of sandstone on a granite base. The Vijayanagar kings are said to have added the granite mandapam (hall) that connects the main temple to the original Pallava mandapam. I think they did a disservice which among other things, robs one off a more complete view of the beautiful main temple.

The temple is structural in the sense that it is made of a stack of sandstones, with the sculptures spanning and aligned across multiple stone pieces. See adjoining picture of Dakshinamurthy where you can see the crease line between the stones along the forehead of the elephant and along Dakshinamurthy's waist.

The unique architectural feature of the temple is the surrounding structure which is made up of 58 sub-shrines with exquisite sculptures both inside and between them. The sculptures depict Lord Shiva in his many forms, along with other figures of the Hindu Pantheon playing out scenes of stories from the puranas and other Hindu texts:

Gangadhara, where Shiva gathers the river Ganges with a strand of his hair. Parvathi in a twisted pose seems to be looking with a touch of envy.

Dakshinamurthy under a banyan tree surrounded by peaceful lions, deer and the rishis receiving his silent intonation of the vedas.

Dancing as Urdhwa Tandava where he is raising one of his legs almost vertically up to replace his fallen ear rings (kundalam) without missing a step (there is a legend that Shiva and Parvati were dancing in competition and Parvati could not match this particular move, understandably so, owing to her modesty). This pose is the second most common pose of Shiva dancing in Pallava and Chola art, with Nataraja being of course the more common and well known.

Lingodbhava, where Vishnu and Brahma are trying in vain to find Shiva's feet and head respectively.

Kalantaka, where Shiva is rescuing his devotee Markandeya from Lord Yama.

Kirata & Arjuna showing Arjuna and Lord Shiva as Kirata the hunter dueling before Shiva grants Arjuna his astras for the Mahabharata war.

In addition to Shiva, Vishnu also figures in some of the sculptures, the most common form depicted being the Narasimha.

There are Tamil inscriptions (in the Grantha script) along the bottom of the sculptures citing the many titles Rajasimha presumably bestowed upon himself  including ironically Guna Vineetha  - the humble one. There are two layers of inscriptions the bottom one a beautiful calligraphic version (see picture).

In the niches between the subshrines you see Somaskandhas - Shiva, Parvati seated with Karthikeya as a child between them and also a couple which is likely to be Rajasimha and his queen or Siva and Parvati. The case for the former is strengthened by the fact that the couple don't have their hands in the abhaya (blessing) mudra.

It should be noted that the iconography is not always obvious and the two experts who I was with sometimes had different interpretations of some of the sculptures. One such sculpture is remarkable for the dynamism in the poses of the figures is (arguably) a scene where Indra is trying to enter Kailasha but is stopped by a Gana*. There is something unique about this Gana, who is bigger and standing on a lotus which should have given Indra a clue. Indra, angered by the rebuff is about to deploy his Vajrayudha, while Brahma is desperately trying to stop him, having realized that the Gana is none other than Shiva himself.

I reached information overload and we had finished only two sides of the outer sub-shrine lined structure. After coffee and snacks at Saravana Bhavan, we made a quick stop at the Pandava Thoothar Perumal Temple that houses a gigantic form of Lord Krishna. He assumed this when Duryodhana tried to humiliate him when he came to visit as the Pandavas' messenger trying to stop the war. The bigger black statue is actually behind the Utsava Murthy (idol used during processions) in the inner sanctum.

It would take at least a week to do justice to all the major temples of Kanchipuram. We looked at the majestic gopuram of Ekambareswarar Temple from the distance. Not to mention Vaikunta Perumal, Kamakshi Amman, Ulagalantha Perumal to round out the top 5.

- Balaji


* Gana's are Shiva's attendants in Kailasha who are often portrayed as dancing, sometimes with musical instruments. They are also gatekeepers and are notorious for their protectiveness of Shiva's valuable time.

Thousand paper cuts

I have been meaning to write about the small irritants that we face every day as we commute back and forth to work and live our daily lives in ever more crowded metropolises. A lot of them, I realize, are avoidable, but we inflict them upon ourselves. They are community or government imposed restraints or misguided mitigations that could have been avoided in the first place if everyone followed rules and played nice. The problem with this is that the behaviors of the minority who are rule violators cause everyone to pay a penalty.

I will start with the ubiquitous speed breaker. When our residential community was built 8 years ago, we didn't have any speed breakers. After noticing how fast people were driving inside the community even after repeated exhortations, the community decided to put in speed breakers. This is a localized example of a phenomenon we see everywhere on public roads. Because people speed, the authorities think speed breakers are the only way to slow them down thereby penalizing drivers that drive responsibly with harsh thuds that cause just a tiny amount of degenerative change in your backbone every time. This I am sure has caused totally unintended consequences. People believe they can speed as much as they want until they are signaled by their authorities to slow down through the presence of a speed breaker. The effect of such speed breakers and the ever present potholes on Indian roads have caused car makers to build vehicles with higher and higher road clearance and often advertise it as a great feature.

I don't know why we need to ride or drive with high beam inside the city where there is plenty of ambient light. I am continuously blinded by them and I am sure I am not the only one who cannot see a pedestrian wearing dark clothes to the left of the oncoming car until the last desperate moment. I have tried playing traffic vigilante, flashing my lights at the oncoming car. One in ten cars get the hint and dim their lights perfunctorily. The authorities not only seem to ignore this problem, they actually accommodate for it; they build partitions between the two sides of the road and increased the height just enough to hide the headlights of cars coming from the opposing side. Car manufacturers have tried to mitigate the problem by manual or auto-dimmers in rear view mirrors.

This problem with high beams had an interesting ripple effect in my community. The security guards at the gates of my community like to look at the driver of an approaching car to see if it is a known inhabitant or a visitor and act accordingly. With the high beam this is simply impossible, so they decided to fight light pollution with more light pollution. They worked with the community officials to install bright LED lights facing the oncoming cars. This meant that the security area is lit up like a studio throughout the night; light that seeps into neighboring houses including mine.

I can go on. I see a similar phenomenon with security (either cyber or physical security), wherein in the name of security we have added inconvenience after inconvenience and we numbed ourselves to them as the new normal; my favorite example is flying in an airplane. This is a bit more controversial and a topic for another day.

R. Balaji