"
M.V. Bhaskar and K.T.
Gandhirajan have made an important and significant contribution towards
helping to preserve the heritage of the Tamil people by
setting about the task of systematically digitizing the
temple mural paintings of the temples of Tamil Nadu and
making them freely available at their
website. Theirs is a
labour of love and will be received with affection by
Tamils living in many
lands and across distant seas." tamilnation.org [see
also A
Video Essay on Tamil
M. V. Bhaskar and K. T. Gandhirajan ]
From the
Introduction to the Website by
M.V. Bhaskar and K.T.
Gandhirajan...
"Our aim in making these pages online is
to represent and illustrate work that involves many
people, organisations and locations, and the scope of
the work, covered under what we call “Nayaka* Painting
Archival Project” - through just one painting.
The actual size of the featured mural is 22’ x 9.5’. It
was photographed in 39 parts and digitally stitched for
museum quality reproduction at actual size at 300 dpi.
You are seeing it at a pixel dimension of 630 x 250,
medium quality jpeg. The black gap in the painting is a
wooden pillar against the wall. The pillar is left out
of the digital stitch.
This mural is in the first tier of a temple tower of
five tiers with 30 such walls in all, in a tiny village
in the far south called Tiruppudaimaruduur in
Tirunelveeli District, Tamilnadu. A digitally
reconstructed line drawing is annotated section by
section
in the following pages. Murals like these are
found on the walls and ceilings of many temples all over
India, though our work is confined to the state borders
of Tamilnadu.
In Phase 1 of this project, we completed the digital
capture of close to 25000 square feet of murals from 11
temples, from out of a total of 135 temples that were
surveyed, over a period of 2 years."
