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Tamil Poem in Purananuru, circa 500 B.C 

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Home  Tamils - a Trans State Nation > The Tamil Heritage > Culture of the Tamils >  International Tamil Conferences on Tamil Studies >  University of California, Berkeley  1st Tamil Chair Conference: Invention, Imagination, Transmission and the Temples of Tamil Nadu

University of California, Berkeley
1st  Tamil Chair Conference
 

Invention, Imagination, Transmission and the Temples of Tamil Nadu
கோயில்

30 April - 1 May 2005

[see U.C. Berkeley Department of South and South East Asian Studies,
Center for South Asian Studies and Berkeley Tamil Chair Web Site
]


About the Conference

The Tamil conference, the first of its kind to be hosted by U.C.Berkeley focuses on the temples of Tamil Nadu, South India as sites of cultural production and transmission. Some of the most important active temples and temple towns of India, such as those of Kancipuram and Chidambaram are located in Tamil Nadu. The temple as its Tamil name koyil (home of the king) suggests, was intimately connected to the affairs of the court. Often erected as performances of imperial power, they quickly became the loci for the production of elite urban culture�the performing arts, production of sculpture and bronzes, a more sophisticated ritual culture, and cults of saints were associated with these magnificent buildings. It is no surprise therefore, that the temple travels with Hindu-Indians as they move to North America and Europe and often becomes the site where a diaspora cultural identity is reimagined. But much earlier, the architectural forms, iconography and ritual texts associated with the Tamil temple move into Southeast Asia evident in the building of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. The ubiquitous presence of the Tamil temple as a symbol of elite urban culture both in India and in the diaspora has expectedly generated discourses of resistance as well. On the one hand, we witness an explicit rejection of the Tamil temple, by twelfth century poets and twentieth century politicians alike as a site of corruption, exploitation and oppression. On the other hand, the Tamil temple appears in more humble village settings, where traditionally disenfranchised groups recast it to suit their purpose. Despite the pervasive presence of the temple in Tamil Nadu, there has been little sustained academic focus on them. Largely, the temple has been the staple of Art Historians, who have contributed much to our understanding of the development of stylistic and architectural features and more recently, in the political implications of temple building.

The two-day conference brings together for the first time twelve invited North American scholars from a variety of Humanities fields (for example Literary Studies, Religious Studies, Art History) whose studies focus specifically on the Tamil temple. These twelve scholars will present on topics that range from temple epigraphy, significance of the royal cult of temples in Cambodia, newly emergent temple cultures (such as the temple-tomb) as imaginative ways of asserting Tamil cultural identity.*. Furthermore, the conference also brings into dialogue senior scholars in the field and junior scholars�it is often the case that the exciting new work of junior scholars, who are yet to be published, is not available to senior scholars. The Tamil conference bridges this gap, to facilitate a new kind of dialogue, while also linking junior scholars with senior scholars who can act as guides and mentors. It is our hope that such a format will benefit all our participants and lead to fresh new ideas, perspectives and discussion. We aim to bring the papers presented at this conference together in an edited volume that will contribute to the literature on Temples of South India. Furthermore, we see this conference as the initial step to a larger research project that will eventually lead to yet another much larger conference on temples that brings together scholars from both India and Europe.

While the immediate audience for the Tamil Conference, are South and Southeast Asianists in allied departments (for example, Art History, History, and Anthropology), the concerns of the conference for the ways in which cultural knowledge is transported will also appeal to U.C. Berkeley�s broader University Humanities community. In addition, the conference, which is free and open to the public, will also bring in the Bay Area�s Tamil community that raised the funds for the Tamil Chair. The Tamil Conference addresses a broad audience, comprised of the scholarly community, both at Berkeley and around the United States, as well as the Tamil diaspora community.
 


Conference Program

Whitney Cox - Periyapuranam among the Public Narratives of Cidambaram

The Periyapuranam, Cekkilar�s long narrative of the sixty-three saints revered in southern Saivism, was demonstrably a product of the culture of the great Tamil temple city of Cidambaram in the middle decades of the twelfth century. The text is generally counted among one of the foremost examples of the Tamil mahakavya, or court epic. This definition, while useful for explaining certain formal features of the text, fails to capture some of the dynamism that underlay the text�s creation and that conditioned its initial reception. In an earlier paper, I argued that an episode of the Puranam could best be explained through reference to a controversy among theologians writing in Sanskrit in that time and place. In the present paper, I will focus on the relationship between several sections in the first long canto of the narrative and the complex textual ensemble of the inscriptions housed in the temples of Cidambaram. Understanding this latter archive as the principal medium for the articulation of public claims about self and community, I am interested in attempting to understand the Periyapuranam within a similar social and textual logic. In addition, this will provide an opportunity to discuss more broadly the question of embedded textual genres within the literary narrative.

Leslie Orr - Renunciation and Celebration: Ascetics in the Temple Life of Medieval Tamil Nadu


The Tamil inscriptions of the ninth through thirteenth centuries (the Chola period) provide us with a somewhat unexpected picture of the roles of ascetics in the life of the temple. Individuals and groups who are referred to by various terms cognate with the Sanskrit tapasvin appear in the inscriptions as temple patrons and as pilgrims coming to celebrate festivals, and -- unlike their contemporary counterparts in Karnataka -- are more often depicted as participants in temple worship than as performers of austerities. The inscriptions tell us that these �ascetics� were active in Saiva, Vaisnava, and Jain institutions, that they were women as well as men, and that their status (e.g. as renouncers of householdership, or as persons who had undergone initiation or ordination) and functions (e.g. as priests, teachers, or inmates of mathas) were various and frequently ambiguous. The religious literature contemporary with the inscriptions introduces further complications into the picture of medieval asceticism, with, for example, the revisioning of tapas as devotion in the Saiva Periyapuranam and the modification and elaboration of the ideal of sannyasa in Srivaisnava treatises and hagiographies. My effort in this paper will be to explore the activities and circumstances of various kinds of ascetics in Chola period temple life, and to trace the historical shifts over time -- and the processes of masculinization, hierarchization, and politicization -- that, by the fifteenth century, had produced the well-defined sectarian lineages and celibate institutions which are today associated with South Indian Saiva Siddhanta and Srivaisnavism.

Richard Davis - Aghorasiva's Guidelines for a Perfect Temple Festival

Aghorasiva's Mahotsavavidhi, or "Rules for the Great Festival," is a twelfth-century Sanskrit text that provides step-by-step guidance for a priest officiating in a nine-day Saiva temple festival. In my talk I will discuss what this work might tell us about the historicaldevelopment of temple festivals in Tamilnad during the Cola period, and what it cannot tell us.

Davesh Soneji - "No More Nautches in Poodoocottah:" Colonial Modernity, Memory and the Devadasi Dance Tradition of the Viralimalai Murukan Temple

R. Muttukkannammal, the last dedicated devadasi of the Murukan temple at Viralimalai in Pudukkottai district, remembers dancing to English marching-band songs when the Maharaja of Pudukkottai would come to her temple. Integrated into the catir kacceri or formal concert repertoire in the nineteenth century, these compositions were meant to be part of the courtly �rituals of display� of the Tanjavur and Pudukkottai Maharajas, and devadasi dance was a central visual marker of these spectacles. But by the 1930s, devadasi performances in both the temples and courts of Tamilnadu had become merely perfunctory as far as temple administrators, priests, zamindars, and audiences were concerned. In Viralimalai, the �ritual-dance repertory� of the temple had disappeared by this time, and instead, only the catir kacceri was performed in the temple on festival days by Muttukkannammal. Transmogrified by colonial modernity and the discursive contours of �social reform,� the performance culture and lifestyles of devadasis in the Pudukkottai and Tanjavur districts had become irrevocably divested of function or meaning.

In this paper I examine how shifts in the sites of devadasi performance can be read as indexes for the process of the community�s disenfranchisement in Tamilnadu from c. 1920-1955. I suggest that the impact of social reform movements is felt very early in the devadasi communities of Tamil-speaking South India, accounting for the disappearance of �ritual dance� on the one hand, and the disappearance of patronage of courtly dance on the other. Using ethnographic data and analyses of specific genres within the dance repertoire, this paper illustrates the innovative ways in which the devadasis of Viralimalai transformed and negotiated their identities in relation to the temple and court before, during, and after the implementation of the Anti-Devadasi Act of 1947.

Indira Peterson, Mt. Holyoke College - From Sthalapurana to Dance Drama: Temples and New Strategies of Localization in Yaksagana Dramas from the Tanjavur Maratha Court in the 18th century

The role of the agamic temple as a site for religious, cultural, social and political localization, and the agency of courts and literary production in the process of such localization, has received much attention in scholarship on South India (for example, Dennis Hudson, �Two Chitra Festivals in Madurai�, in G.Welbon and G.Yocum, eds., Religious Festivals in South India and Sri Lanka, 1982, David Shulman, Tamil Temple Myths, 1980, and Indira V. Peterson, Poems to Siva, 1989). In this paper I argue that the yaksagana dance dramas commissioned by the Maratha court in Tanjavur, especially in its foundational period in the early 18th century, deploy the agamic temple as a device for expressing an innovative vision of localization. Examining the plots and performance contexts of several Marathi, Tamil and Telugu yaksagana dramas commissioned by Shahji II (1685 �1712) for enactment at the Tanjavur court and the Tyagaraja temple in Tiruvarur, and a Telugu Yaksagana drama commissioned in 1728 by Tulajaji for the Visnu temple in Mahadevapattanam, I show that in these dramas particular temples in the Tanjavur kingdom served as locations, contexts, and tropes that enabled an imaginative rehearsal of the Maratha court�s political and cultural relationship with the multi-ethnic and multicultural Tamil-Telugu world in which it functioned. In the plots and performance contexts of these dramas, court, temple, and new publics were brought into conversation in new ways.

A literary genre developed at the 17th century Tanjavur Nayaka court, under Shahji�s patronage the yaksagana became a full-fledged dance-drama that was staged at the court or the temple. Early Maratha period dance dramas treat a variety of myths and invented themes in several languages (Tamil, Marathi, Telugu, Sanskrit), foreground dialogue and mimesis, and often focus on popular and folkloric themes. The plots of many of these yaksaganas involve a particular temple in the Tanjavur region. They invent new narratives (sthalapurana) for the temple, link the temple with deities from other temples in the Tamil area, or connect the new narrative with older, local and translocal myths. For example, the Marathi Gangakaverisamvada, performed at Shahji�s court, tells a new story about the relationship between the river Ganga and the Kaveri, the local river, at the Pancanadisvara Siva temple in Tiruvaiyaru, near Tanjavur, while the Telugu Sivakamasundariparinaya, commissioned by Tuljaji for the Visnu temple festival at Mahadevapatnam, simultaneously provides a new narrative of the wedding of Siva Nataraja of Chidambaram with the Goddess Sivakami at Mahadevapatanam and stages Tulaja�s vision of Smarta religion. Early Maratha Tanjavur yaksagana dramas not only link the Maratha king and court with the local temple, but also invent new political, literary and religious networks for the region. In these dance dramas local temples perform complex cultural work, now functioning as the sites and contexts of performance, and now as the subjects of a court drama, pointing at new slippages between the spheres of court and temple.

Steven P. Hopkins, Swarthmore College -  Sanskrit in a South Indian Imaginaire

My paper is part of an on-going project on a major trans-regional and multi-religious poetic genre in South Asian literature: the sandesa kavya or �messenger poem.� In such kavyas, an exiled lover (human or divine) sends a message to a distant beloved via a messenger -- a starling, a goose, a bee, a cuckoo, a language (Tamil), or a cloud. The first part of the sandesakavya is a detailed description of the landscape over which the messenger will pass on its way to the absent beloved; the second contains the message itself. Such descriptions emphasize the beauties of nature, love, separation, and eventual reunion. But as royal or religious texts, they also show the individual poet�s chosen sacred or politically/ideologically important landscape, making these texts compelling sources not only for literary historians or scholars of religion, but for those interested in pre-modern socio-political formations. Each messenger poem carves a distinctive map of the sub-continent that has political and social implications, reflecting the poet�s royal or sectarian patrons, as well as favored sacred temple sites. I will focus on Vedantadesika�s 13th-14th-century Hamsa Sandesa, its valorization of Vaisnava and Saiva temples of Tamil Nadu. Though the poem lacks a clear royal context, and its sectarian spirit is rather irenic when it comes to Saiva shrines such as Kalahasti and Ekramresvara, its rootedness in South Indian landscapes and Vaisnava shrines, notably Ka�cipuram, reveal a distinctive form of �southern� cosmopolitanism and a vivid example of �Southern Sanskrit.�

Sam Parker, University of Washington - Imagining Ancient Creativity: An Ethnoarchaeology of Creative Practice in South Indian Temple Arts

This essay examines the practices and products of Tamil temple construction and image making insofar as they serve as a privileged site for the symbolic, social production of reality. After considering selected visual and ethnographic evidence of creative practice, the essay explores some of its comparative, cross-cultural and ethnoarchaeological implications for contemporary readings of ancient material culture. These implications suggest that modern scholars who write about ancient India may be needlessly hampered by an over-reliance on universalizing theories. While current popular controversy centers on the application of psychoanalysis to ancient Indian texts, broader and more profound issues arise in the application of a modernist, common-sense �realism� often smuggled in through uniform, modular, discipline-oriented histories and systematized methods of analysis. Readings of Indian antiquities that adopt more humble, ethnographically informed, context-sensitive approaches display greater potential. Unless one�s work explicitly aspires to sympathetic identification and is framed in relational terms, only the local realities of ancient Indian �others� will be put at critical risk, not those of the scholarly interpreter. While this may be fair to the former, it is primarily the latter who loses in the bargain.

Padma Kaimal, Colgate University - Mapping Artistic Space: The Kaveri Style

This paper is about uses of space in southern India during the ninth and tenth centuries. Specifically, it is about some surprises in ways that the work of people living the southern peninsula defined regional units of space. My access to this subject is through dozens of durable stone temples that workshops of artisans built for various patrons across the south during this period. Some of these temples were dedicated to the worship of Siva, some to goddesses, some to Jaina tirtankaras. These temples were also social, economic and political centers for their local communities. So these temples had significance for their original users that extended beyond the esthetic sphere. The very forms of temple buildings can, therefore, reveal dimensions of that social, economic or political world and they can reveal perceptions of space and uses of space.

In the forms of these temples, I see patterns of similarity and difference indicating that geography, and specifically the watersheds of the great river systems, played a strong role in defining regional space. I find that temples built across the vast watershed of the Kaveri River and its many tributaries share a common architectural style. This is surprising because the Kaveri is, in many other ways, divers. Climate, government and language distinguish Karnataka's upper Kaveri highlands from Tamil Nadu's lower Kaveri delat, and they did so in the 9th century as well. And yet, temples built in these two regions during the 9th and 10th centuries are so similar in style that they must have been built by the same groups of artisans. Artisans, in other words, worked and moved freely between these regions; language shifts and political discontinuities were not barriers for them. The spatial unity of the Kaveri watershed was a more compelling influence on their lives and actions.

Vasudha Narayanan, University of Florida - Kanchi and Kambuja: Temple Transfers and Cultural Contacts with the Khmer empire

The story of the Hindu traditions have been narrated without taking into account the hundreds of Saiva and Vaishnava temples in Cambodia and other countries of South East Asia. This paper will focus on Hindu temples in Cambodia built between the ninth and twelfth centuries CE and discuss their similarities with contemporary or earlier structures in India. Specifically, I shall focus on the Kanchipuram area and argue both for the strong connections between the Khmer and Indian temples as well as the distinctive features of the Khmer shrines.

My paper will focus on three west-facing temples in the Kanchipuram area�those known popularly as the Vaikuntha Perumal, Yathoktakari, and Ashtabhujakaram temples�and show both structural similarities as well as common tropes in the iconography. The eighth century, three storied, west facing Vaikuntha Perumal temple in Kanchi was probably the prototype for the twelfth century three storied, west facing Angkor Wat built by Suryavarman II in Kambuja. Carvings of the �reverse-reclining� Vishnu (whose head is to the right, unlike most icons in south India) seen in Yathoktakari and the second floor of the Vaikuntha Perumal temples are found in abundance in Cambodia, as are eight-armed Vishnus like the presiding deity of the Kanchipuram Ashtabhujakaram temple. The motifs in these three temples which are located very close to each other in Kanchipuram are prominent in the Cambodian temples and are indicative of more than a casual connection between the realms.

Despite the many similarities, there are many unique and distinctive features of Khmer Hinduism. Temples in Cambodia were nonsectarian, unlike those in ancient Tamilnadu. The Hindu temples here were pluralistic and inclusive with several deities from various sectarian traditions. Second, stories which were relatively minor in the sub-continent became extremely popular in Cambodia. One such narrative is the churning of the ocean of milk. This story, which is seen in very few panels in India (but which is known in early Tamil literature) becomes the most prominent story in Cambodia. My paper will speculate on the reasons as to why this story becomes significant in Cambodia and showcase it as a symbol of Khmer agency and ability to refashion narratives, concepts, and themes to fit their own interests.

By studying Vaishnava and Saiva temples in South-East Asia we can understand the Hindu traditions as a global religion. It prods us to revise our understanding of Hinduism which is based almost completely on Orientalist concepts of a religion congruent with the bounded territories of India and as one where the religion overlaps with the boundaries of the nation-state.

Gita V. Pai, U.C. Berkeley - Politics, Patronage and Piety at The Ramaswami Temple in Kumbakonam

At first glance, the Ramaswami Temple in Kumbakonam, erected during Raghunatha Nayak�s reign (1612-1634), is an easy example of a political-theological conflation: the royal sovereign Raghunatha is the royal deity Rama. However, a close examination of its sculptural program, steeped in Vaisnava iconography, reveals that it is reductive to limit the Ramaswamy temple to a mere kingship-divinity fusion scheme. This paper will suggest an alternative idea.

Joanne Punzo Waghorne, Syracuse University - The Temple-Tomb in Tamilnadu

The popularity of temples dedicated to the living presence of deceased Shaiva and Vaishnava saints continues to grow in urban Tamilnadu, especially in Chennai. The replicas of saints� samadhi/brindhavan often occupy the sanctum along with their own or other divine images. The most popular manifestation of this mixing of temple and tomb are the four thriving Shirdi Sai Baba centers in metropolitan Chennai�each with a replica of the Hindu/Muslim saint�s famous tomb in Maharastra with a life-like image in front usually within a sanctum. In the far suburb of Nanganallur, the Raghavendra Swamy Brindhavan houses a replica of the tomb (Brindhavan) of a seventh-century Vaishnava saint whose Brindavan remains a pilgrimage site in Mantralaya in western Andhra Pradesh. The website for the Mantralaya Brindhavan includes a retelling of the saint�s entering the samadhi-state as his disciples encased his deathless body with stone slabs creating the Brindhavan on the site. The less-known Apparswamy Temple in Mylapore attests to the century-old precedent of surrounding a tomb with temple in this urban environment. In 1851, a disciple of a Saiva saint built a temple around the entombed body of his master after he �took samadhi. In 1929 disciples photographed poet-saint Pambam Swamigal as he entered the samadhi-state just before his entombment in the present Sri Pamban Swamigal Math in Tiruvanmiyur. But in the case of this math, devotees successfully stopped attempts build a temple complex arguing that the site should remain a place for meditation and prayer only. What do these temple-tombs tell us about the complex problem of defining a temple and the nature of its presiding deity? In the light of the common association of sacred sites and tomb in both Islam and Christianity, what do these temple-tombs reveal about Tamil-Hindu sensibilities? And, why have such temple-tombs become so popular in a major urban center this era of globalization?

Joanne Punzo Waghorne, Syracuse University - The Temple-Tomb in Tamilnadu

The popularity of temples dedicated to the living presence of deceased Shaiva and Vaishnava saints continues to grow in urban Tamilnadu, especially in Chennai. The replicas of saints� samadhi/brindhavan often occupy the sanctum along with their own or other divine images. The most popular manifestation of this mixing of temple and tomb are the four thriving Shirdi Sai Baba centers in metropolitan Chennai�each with a replica of the Hindu/Muslim saint�s famous tomb in Maharastra with a life-like image in front usually within a sanctum. In the far suburb of Nanganallur, the Raghavendra Swamy Brindhavan houses a replica of the tomb (Brindhavan) of a seventh-century Vaishnava saint whose Brindavan remains a pilgrimage site in Mantralaya in western Andhra Pradesh. The website for the Mantralaya Brindhavan includes a retelling of the saint�s entering the samadhi-state as his disciples encased his deathless body with stone slabs creating the Brindhavan on the site. The less-known Apparswamy Temple in Mylapore attests to the century-old precedent of surrounding a tomb with temple in this urban environment. In 1851, a disciple of a Saiva saint built a temple around the entombed body of his master after he �took samadhi. In 1929 disciples photographed poet-saint Pambam Swamigal as he entered the samadhi-state just before his entombment in the present Sri Pamban Swamigal Math in Tiruvanmiyur. But in the case of this math, devotees successfully stopped attempts build a temple complex arguing that the site should remain a place for meditation and prayer only. What do these temple-tombs tell us about the complex problem of defining a temple and the nature of its presiding deity? In the light of the common association of sacred sites and tomb in both Islam and Christianity, what do these temple-tombs reveal about Tamil-Hindu sensibilities? And, why have such temple-tombs become so popular in a major urban center this era of globalization?
 

Blake Wentworth, University of Chicago - From Sage to Critic: Thoughts on Some Tamil Critiques of Temples, Old and New#

This conference certainly situates itself within a field of study that has a long history. As long as people have been studying Tamil culture, they have turned to the temples, and reasonably so: not only are these superb monuments to devotion and skill artistic wonders in themselves, but, as the official seal of the government of Tamil Nadu itself powerfully suggests, the temple stands as perhaps the consummate emblem of all things Tamil. As valuable as the large amount of scholarship on temples is, however, we might also ask whether it successfully accounts for the fact that many Tamilians have opposed the dominant role of temples in society. Although it makes no affectations of comprehensiveness, this presentation seeks to recognize the textual dimensions of this stance of resistance, skirting such well known figures as E. V. Ramacami Nayakkar in favor of authors whose views may not be as familiar, such as Civavakkiyar, C. M. Iramacantiran Cekkilar, and G. Kecavan.

 

 

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