" 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."
