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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 Kañcipuram, 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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