THE Kingfisher plane from Bangalore was an old fashioned twin-prop, and it carried only seven passengers. As it banked below the clouds, you could see for the first time the rich soils of the Cauvery delta spread out below: a flat plane, the essence of green, broken into a mirrored patchwork of flooded paddy fields, each glinting with a slightly different refraction in the light of the late afternoon sun. Through the middle ran the thin silver ribbon of the Cauvery, winding its way slowly through an avenue of palms that lined the bank of the rich delta, before looping itself around the great smooth rock of Trichinopoly.

As we glided down to land, we passed to our right the four great gopura gateways of the temple of Srirangam sitting on its island in the middle of the river. These sudden vertical intrusions into the great horizontal plain dominated the flat-roofed village houses, and the farmland round about, as completely as the cathedrals of the Middle Ages must once have dominated the landscape of Europe. They rose in great tapering, wedge-shaped pyramids, each layer swarming with brightly coloured images of Gods and demons, heroes and yakshis. It was the fabulous sculptures of these great southern temples, and particularly those in nearby in Tanjore, that I had come to see.

 

My journey to the delta had begun, oddly enough, in London’s Piccadilly. Earlier this year, the Royal Academy staged a small but magnificent exhibition of mediaeval Indian art – Chola: Sacred Bronze from Southern India. Forty masterly Chola bronzes had been borrowed from Delhi, Chennai, Stuttgart and New York; and brought together for the first time, they demonstrated the apparently effortless genius of the bronze casters who worked for the great Chola kings of southern India from the ninth to the twelfth century AD.

Exquisitely poised and supple, these bronze deities stand quite silent on their plinths yet with their hands they speak gently to their devotees through the noiseless lingua franca of the gestures (or mudras) of South Indian dance: their hands are raised in blessing and reassurance, promising boons and protection, and above all, marriage, fertility and fecundity, in return for the veneration that is so clearly their divine right.

In western art, few sculptors – except perhaps Donatello or Rodin – have achieved the pure essence of sensuality so spectacularly evoked by the Chola sculptors, or achieved such a sense of celebration of the divine beauty of the human body. There is a startling clarity and purity about the way the near-naked bodies of the Gods and the saints are displayed, yet by the simplest and most modest of devices their spirit and powers, joys and pleasures, and above all their enjoyment of each other’s beauty, and their overwhelming sexuality is highlighted.

The combination of the fabulous richness of the treasures displayed in the RA exhibition, along with the tantalising pictures up on the walls of the great temples from which the bronzes came, proved irresistible: on my return home to Delhi, I got out a map of the South and a guide book, and immediately began working out an itinerary.

 

As India leaps forward into the new millennium, and more and more of northern India becomes suburban and developed, I find that travelling in the rural South becomes more and more attractive. Around my farm on the outskirts of Mehrauli, new neighbourhoods are fast springing up full of call centres, software companies and fancy apartment blocks, all rapidly rising on land that only two years earlier was still billowing winter wheat.

In contrast, whole swathes of rural Tamil Nadu remains oddly innocent and timeless, especially when visited after an extended spell in Delhi or Gurgaon. There are no malls or multiplexes here; instead the villages are still like those in R.K. Narayan stories with roadside shops full of sacks of dried red chilli and freshly cut stalks of green bananas; buffaloes sun themselves on the sandbanks of the Cauvery, goats wander loose in the streets, and bicyclists wobble along red-dirt roads and past village duckponds and palm groves of the tall fans of banana trees. Driving to Tanjore from Trichy airport you discover that the villagers have left their newly-harvested grain on the road to be threshed by the wheels of passing cars. Women in bright Kanchipuram silk saris troop along the roads with jasmine flowers in their hair. The cattle are strong and white and their long horns are painted blue.

 

The greatest of the Chola kings who once dominated this landscape was Rajaraja I, who ruled from c 985-1012. It was he who conquered Sri Lanka and the Deccan for his dynasty, made Tanjore the capital of southern India, and who, at the end of his reign, erected what was then the most magnificent temple in the peninsula to commemorate his glory. On its completion in 1010, the Cholas donated no less than 500 tons of gold, jewels and silver looted from Sri Lanka, as well as sixty bronze images of deities to the new structure; two-thirds of which was given by Rajaraja himself, while the rest was given by his sisters, queens, officials and nobles.

Entering the great temple today, and passing over the warm flagstones through two magnificent courtyards, each entered through a monumental gateway, you see on every side oiled black-stone images of gods and demons, saints and hermits, and in particular of Lord Shiva and his consorts. In front of some, pilgrims prostrate themselves full length; in front of others, small offerings of flowers are placed, or the flames of small camphor lamps are lit.

 

All are as sensuously carved as the bronzes; indeed the same families who made the bronzes often worked as sculptors too, and the two were often made in the same family workshops. As with the Chola bronzes, there is a startling clarity about the way the near-naked bodies of the Gods are shown and there is something wonderfully frank about the strongly sensual nature of these elegant, courtly, divine beings who embody human desire. Lord Shiva gently nuzzles his consort, Uma-Parvati, fondly touching her breast, while with his other hand he feels the back of her shoulders. In some temples, the last act of the priests, before they close the doors of the inner shrine, is to remove the nose jewel of the bronze idol of Shiva’s consort lest the rubbing of it irritate her husband when they make love – an act, so the priests will tell you, that ensures the preservation and regeneration of the universe. The same sensuousness is there too in Tamil Sangam poetry:

 

My Love

whose bangles

glitter, jingle,

as she chases crabs

 

suddenly stands shy,

head lowered,

hair hiding her face;

 

but only till the misery of evening

passes, when she’ll give me

the full pleasure

 

of her breasts.

 

Elsewhere, Hindu sculpture can often be openly, explicitly and unembarrassedly erotic. The same is true of Hindu poetry: Kalidasa’s poem The Birth of Kumara has an entire canto of 91 verses entitled ‘The Description of Uma’s Pleasure’ which describes in graphic detail the love making of the divine couple. But with the Chola’s the sexual nature of the Gods is strongly implied, rather directly stated, in the extraordinary swinging rhythm to these eternally still figures, in their curving torsos, their slender arms, their high rounded breasts and their firm thighs. If it is partly the distinct and deliberate sexual charge of the sculptures and bronzes that makes them so appealing today, then this is not just a modern reading: contemporary devotees from the Chola period who viewed images of the Gods enraptured by their consort’s beauty, and clearly preparing to enjoy erotic bliss, have left inscriptions which can be read today asking the deities to transfer the sensual ecstasy they experience to their less fortunate followers.

 

Even in the holiest innermost sanctuary of the temple, guarded by colossal dancing demons, where the Brahmins perform the evening arti, or fire ceremony, incanting their ancient Sanskrit slokas in front of the massive six metre high Shiva lingam, queens, courtesans and goddesses alike are shown carefree and sensual: bare-breasted, they tease their menfolk, standing on tiptoe to kiss them, hands resting provocatively on their hips. Kings and Gods both wear their hair in beehive topknots and sit cross-legged, gazing down from their throne-gaddis under crimson parasols as the courtiers feast, and dancing girls celebrate their monarch’s victories over the enemy.

It is the Nataraja, Shiva as Lord of the Dance, that is of course the ultimate Chola icon. It is a perfect symbol of the way the bronze casters managed to imbue their creations both with a raw sensual power and a profound theological message: for the dancing figure of the God is not just a model of bodily perfection and the encapsulation of virility and desire, but also an emblem of higher truths: on one level Shiva dances in triumph at his defeat of the demons of ignorance and darkness, and for the pleasure of his consort. Yet at another level – dreadlocks flying, haloed in fire – he is also dancing the world into extinction so as to bring it back into existence so that it can be created and preserved anew. With one hand he is shown holding fire, signifying destruction, while with the other he bangs the damaru, drum, whose sound denotes creation. Renewed and purified, the Nataraja is dancing the universe from perdition to regeneration in a circular symbol of the circular nature of time itself.

 

The fierce elegance of Shiva reflects that of the Cholas themselves. For even as they brought South Indian culture to a peak of courtly civility and perfection, they also wreaked a savage destruction of their rivals and enemies. Anuradhapura, the great Buddhist capital of Sri Lanka, was twice plundered, sacked and consigned to the flames by their war-bands; for 75 years Sri Lanka was ruled from Tanjore. The Rashtrakutan capital of Manyakheta was also burned to the ground; according to a western Chalukyan inscription near modern Bijapur, the Chola army behaved with exceptional brutality on their conquests in Karnataka, slaughtering women, children and Brahmins, and raping even high-caste girls. Not for nothing did the Cholas worship and propitiate Kali, the fearsome Goddess of Destruction, and one bronze survives which shows her adorned with earrings of human cadavers.

It is of course often the way that the finest and most subtle masterpieces of ancient or mediaeval art were produced by Empires whose cosmopolitan nature and high culture was forged and financed in the hot furnace of bloody conquests: think of the Mughals or Ottomans, or further to the West, the Romans, or most startlingly the Aztecs, whose bloody if spectacular civilization resulted in another RA triumph two years ago. Certainly, the Chola’s conquests and trading expeditions – they sent embassies to China and war fleets as far as Bali – produced a massive concentration of wealth in South India, much of which was channelled by Chola patronage into art and architecture: Rajaraja himself gave his temple in Tanjore 230 kilos of gold from his conquests, yet more of silver and great sackfuls of jewels. In addition all the villages of the Empire had to set aside a proportion of their income to support the imperial temples and their art works. In 1118 Vikrama Chola recorded in inscriptions that he devoted an entire year’s state revenue to glorifying his temple at Chidambaram with gold, jewels and pearls.

Yet where the culture of South India differs from that of the Romans or the Aztecs is that the Hindu civilization of the South still survives almost completely intact. The great Chola temples at Chidambaram and Tanjore, are still thriving.

 

The rituals that you still see enacted in the temples such as Tanjore were already being performed when the temples of ancient Greece and Egypt were still in use; yet while the Gods of Thebes and the Parthenon have both been dead and forgotten for millennia, the Gods and temples of Hindu India are still as alive and active as ever.

For Hindu civilization is the only great classical culture to survive from the ancient world intact, and at temples such as that Tanjore one can still catch glimpses of festivals and practices that were seen by Greek or Egyptian ambassadors to India long before the rise of ancient Rome. Indeed it is only when you grasp the astonishing antiquity, and continuity, of Hinduism that you realise quite how miraculous its survival has been.

 

Twenty miles from Tanjore in the small village of Swamimalai I saw another no less miraculous survival. For here, the descendants of the original Chola bronze casters have settled, and today the same families that cast the bronzes for the great Chola monarchs are still at work casting bronzes for the new temples that are springing up wherever the Indian diaspora have settled from Neasden to New Jersey, from Solihull to Singapore.

I met the most senior of the different families of bronze casters, K. Mohanraj Sthapathy, in his workshop on the main street of the village. He explained to me the lost wax process by which the same sculptures are still made, thirty five generations since one of his ancestors first cast bronzes for Rajarajan Chola. He showed how, just as his ancestors used to do, he first makes a model in a mixture of bees wax and resin; how the model is encased in a fine-grained clay made from the Cauvery alluvium, then left to dry in the sun for a week. The mud pack is then heated in such a way that the wax runs out, leaving a mould into which the bronze is then poured – a process the sculptors compare to conception, with the mould taking the place of the womb for the future God. When the mould is broken, the sculpture of the God is waiting, ready for the beginning of the process of finishing – the most arduous part of the process, which alone can take as long six weeks for a metre high idol.

This simple process is, said Mohanraj, itself encased in a fine mould of ancient ritual: only on a new moon or a full moon can a model be begun or cast; its eyes must be carved open between four and six in the early morning when there is no sound or disturbance to upset the deity; no meat or alcohol can be consumed while a bronze is being made; a series of ancient Sanskrit incantations must be spoken while the work is in progress; and only the most elite families of Brahmins must perform this work. There were other workshops which did not follow these traditions, he said, and who made work for selling to tourists; but no temple of repute would, he claimed, touch bronzes made any other way.

‘With the blessings of God we have taken this birth,’ he said. ‘God creates man but here we are so blessed that we – simple men as we are – are able to create Gods.’

 

Mohanraj paused, looking for the right words: ‘Even the wax models we create have a little of God’s jivan in it, so as we work we think only of that God, saying the appropriate mantras as we carve and model. These idols are reflections of our minds and spirits, so while we are working we must behave as if we were in a holy temple: we must speak only the truth, be kind and polite to everyone. For weeks we must follow all the rules and regulations that have been laid down.’

Mohanraj stopped again, and pointed to a newly finished bronze that lay on a shelf beside him: ‘The God only fully enters a new idol when we open his eyes – the final piece of carving – when the bronze is delivered to a temple, and the appropriate puja is performed. It is hard, long, difficult work. But when I stand at the back of a temple and see the worshippers praying to a God I brought into being,’ said Mohanraj, ‘then my happiness is complete.’

 

* William Dalrymple’s most recent book, The Last Mughal, recently won the Duff Cooper Prize for History 2007.