The Indus River gave its name to India and along its banks
are the sites of some of the earliest urban settlements on earth.
Though the sub-continent was the birthplace of many
of the world's great religions, excavations of these cities
have uncovered no evidence of any organised religious practices.
But in the last 2,000 years a culture of religious
tolerance developed amongst the many faiths of these lands.
Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism all originated here, and the Mughal
conquerors built their Islamic mosques alongside Hindu temples.
In 1582, when Europe was in the grip of almost continuous
religious conflict between Christian sects, the Mughal Emperor
Akbar the Great exhorted his philosophers to seek a way for all
religions in his empire to co-exist.
To some extent this is still a society that is
tolerant of religious difference, but the balance has shifted
and today Hinduism is the majority faith in India
and consequently the third most popular religion in the world.
Hinduism has been evolving for thousands of years and its current
dominant status has been achieved by its willingness to change, its
genius for adapting to the changing circumstances of its followers,
absorbing the customs and beliefs of different faiths as it grew.
The temples constructed to nurture this faith are some of the
greatest architectural treasures in India and in this last programme
of the series we are in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
This is where Hindu temple culture reached its zenith and there is
no better place to understand the story of these remarkable buildings.
MAN SINGS
India is a country of over a billion people
and the Hindu majority understand and interpret their existence
in terms of their relationship with the divine.
Their faith, a complex synthesis of many ancient beliefs,
is inseparable from their everyday lives.
The sacred and the profane are inextricably entwined.
Even some of its most ardent followers will tell you that
Hinduism is not a religion but a cultural phenomenon.
The word Hindu is also derived from the mighty Indus river.
And for those who have not grown up in its homeland this most
Indian of faiths can be difficult to understand.
The myriad Hindu deities inhabit another dimension
but its followers believe that the world in which we live is
illusory and the goal is to break through this illusion
and discover the reality beyond.
The locus for this quest is the temple.
The Hindu temple is where the divide between illusion
and reality is at its most porous, where the opportunity to
achieve darshan, a vision of the divine, is most possible.
Every community in India, great or small, will have its own temple.
The centre of its social and spiritual life. And these places
have fostered the greatest flowering of Hindu artistic expression.
I've been studying these buildings for over 20 years.
They are remarkable works of art in their own right, but they are
also the cradle of creativity for sculpture, poetry, music and dance.
The very heart of a vibrant culture that is beating as strongly as ever.
My fascination began as a student,
when I set out across this landscape on a scooter
and discovered a way of life that stretches back over millennia.
Descending from the arid Deccan plateau the flat and forested
landscape of southern India is very different to the north.
This is a land apart - ethnically and culturally distinct,
and with a separate history.
Even the Mughal conquest did not reach this far south.
In the 6th century a dynasty known as the Pallavas came to
power in southern India.
Their empire thrived on trade, and the town of Mahabalipuram,
on the Coromandel Coast, was their principal port.
Fishing is now the mainstay of this coast, part of the modern state of
Tamil Nadu, but in a golden age in the 7th and 8th centuries the
Pallava kings turned Mahabalipuram into an artisan laboratory
for the craft of stone carving and it now has World Heritage status.
Beached like a petrified ship to the south of the town is one
of the earliest free-standing stone temples in India, the Shore Temple.
When this temple was built many of the elements of temple design
had already become standardised but the origins of this
architectural form are not buildings at all.
A few hundred yards inland from the Shore Temple is
a shrine from the start of the Pallava period that helps us
appreciate why these buildings evolved in the way they did.
Like many caves and natural rock formations in India,
an opening in this granite overhang has been enlarged and shaped
over many generations to provide a site to worship local gods.
The earliest temples were built at potent natural sites where it
was believed that these unfathomable beings were most likely to
reveal themselves.
These shrines could have been as simple as a clearing
in the forest, a source of spring water or, as in this case, a cave.
What they all shared was a setting where the natural
energy of the earth seemed to manifest itself.
This remarkable rock architecture is 1,400 years old,
and the men who carved it were trying to harness
the spirit of the stone from which it is formed.
These beams mimic timber cross-members
and the whole structure was formed in imitation of wooden temples.
The columns appear to be holding the roof up
but it is all made from the living rock.
Inside is a small,
dark womb-like chamber where very little natural light penetrates and
this is regarded as the most sacred part of the temple, the sanctum.
On the back wall is a carved panel which tells us that this
temple is dedicated to Shiva, shown here with his consort, Parvati.
On the side-wall is a panel showing Vishnu,
reclining on the primordial waters.
Shiva and Vishnu are two of the principle gods of Hinduism.
Here in this early temple we see both Vishnu and Shiva co-exist,
but that won't last.
As Hinduism evolved,
here in southern India Shiva became the more popular deity,
while in the north Vishnu is more common
but both are aspects of the divine.
At the time these cave temples were made by far the most popular
faith in India was Buddhism and the people who worshipped here
would have been most surprised to discover they would one day
be regarded as part of an organised religion called Hinduism.
The earliest animist practices saw the spirit of the earth
and its power manifest in all natural things.
Despite its selection of recognisable Hindu deities,
this isolated rural shrine in a forest clearing has
a powerful sense of mystery.
When it was first venerated by the local villagers it would have
had little to do with Shiva.
The many hundreds of clay horses gently
decaying in the undergrowth tell us that this
shrine is dedicated to Ayyanar, a deity who protects rural
villages and is almost exclusively found in Tamil Nadu.
He rides around on horseback fighting the demons of the forest.
The inspiration for this holy place was spiritual rather than
religious - a potent nexus for the essence of the forest.
A similar sense of the power of natural forces is
evident by the shore at Mahabalipuram.
Set back from the sea we find the next
phase in the development of the Pallava stone carvers.
A row of rocky outcrops and boulders allowed them to work on a relatively
modest scale to try out some of their ideas for rock-cut temples.
These are the rathas, a word that means chariot,
and they are the first free-standing rock-cut temples in Indian
architecture and they are completely without precedent.
The rathas are not strictly temples because they were never finished
but they functioned as an aesthetic playground for the Pallava kings.
They are extremely architecturally diverse for the 7th century,
each one trying out different shapes and layouts
and with a rich variety of ornamentation.
The smaller outcrops were used to create animals
and other mythical figures.
However there were occasionally botched jobs.
Imagine the sorry group of stone cutters who stood around this
magnificent carving of Shiva's bull, Nandi and watched as a natural
fault in the granite caused his rear end to fall off.
But this challenge seemed to be one the Pallava craftsmen relished
and it was in stone that Hindu architecture came to life.
At the four corners of this last ratha are figures of Shiva and
other gods, with scripts in ancient Tamil carved in the masonry above.
One is thought to be the king, Narasimhavarman I,
with an inscription that proclaims his patronage of the site.
"Look on my works ye mighty and despair".
The skills developed in the Pallava times have not been lost.
In the back alleys of the town today there are hundreds of stone
artisans chiselling away in ramshackle street studios
meticulously turning stone into devotional art.
The granite that these stonemasons are carving is not found
locally and has to be transported from a quarry 50km away.
But what Mahabalipuram does have, which makes it the undisputed
centre of stone carving along this coast, are the craftsmen.
Right, so the skill is here?
Yes, that's right. Do you take the craftsmen
to see the ancient temples?
The apprenticeship to become a master mason here takes a minimum of
seven years and in that time every aspect of the process is covered.
The workshop even manufacture their own chisels.
Do you see the production of sculpture as an act of devotion?
There is no doubt that the modern carvers have developed their
own style. Though they are depicting the same deities, these figures
are subtly different from those we see from 1,000 years ago.
There is some mechanisation to relieve the more laborious work, and
there are other welcome innovations, like hot chai at 3:00.
MUSIC: (Played on traditional Indian Instruments) Everything Stops For Tea
As well as doing a brisk business with passing tourists
the masons working in these yards are kept busy supplying
sculptures to temples all over the world, from Neasden to Nairobi.
These stone images would be used in temple shrines,
like this small rock cut building nearby,
which takes its inspiration straight from the rathas on the beach.
It consists of nothing more than the shrine-chamber itself
and a narrow veranda for worshippers.
So this temple has actually been consecrated with an image
of Ganesh and people are clearly leaving prayers and lighting lamps.
Ganesh is Shiva's oldest son
and as ever there are many versions of his story.
The most common tells how Parvati gave birth to a boy
while Shiva was on his travels.
She went to wash herself
and told her son not to admit any man to the house while she did so.
Shiva returned and found his way barred by the youth and,
in a rage, beheaded him.
Parvati emerged and revealed the identity of the boy
and a remorseful Shiva brought him back to life,
replacing his head with one from a passing elephant.
Family fidelity was restored.
As any Bollywood filmgoer will tell you, the Indians love a good yarn.
This passion for storytelling is extravagantly
indulged at Mahabalipuram's greatest treasure,
the low relief carving known as The Descent of the Ganges.
Carved in the early 7th century at the same time as the rathas,
this exuberant panorama is packed with life, spilling
down the faces of two monolithic boulders, some 43 feet high.
As far as story-telling in stone goes this is pretty hard to beat,
but it's also an example of inspired planning.
The sculptors have adapted a natural cleft in the rock to represent
the story of the Ganges whose life-giving waters are
so central to the Hindu world view.
So what are we being shown?
Well, the simple version is that the mythical sage, Bhagiratha is
entreating Shiva to bring the celestial river Ganga to earth.
The gods are rushing to the banks to see this miracle
and all the creatures of creation are watching in admiration,
including a family of life-sized elephants.
It's full of beautifully observed details and comic allusion.
Bhagiratha is shown as a sadhu, a holy man, balanced on one leg
but his holiness is somewhat undermined
when we see his pose imitated lower down by a cat.
For Hindus, Ganga is personified as a goddess flowing down from a
faraway source high in the Himalayas to water the plains of India.
So powerful was her force that Shiva had to break her
descent by extending his matted locks, lest she flood the earth
and thus you see the union of male and female forces.
A more complex alternative is that this is
an episode from the early Hindu epic tale, The Mahabharata.
The holy man is in fact a character called Arjuna standing on one
leg as a penance in the hope that Shiva will grant him
an invincible weapon to destroy his enemies.
We don't know which of these two narratives the original artists had
in mind, but both resist complete explanation with equal stubbornness.
What we are seeing here is an early example of the taste
for complex ornament and this seething mass of deities will
eventually become a staple of temple decoration.
Lots of people find Hinduism confusing
because of the multiplicity of gods and goddesses
but amid this profusion of deities lies a very simple idea.
These characters are all different aspects of one ultimate
energy which is beyond name and form.
So at its core, Hinduism is actually a monotheistic religion.
For the Pallavas their greatest moment was the construction
of the Shore Temple, a landmark not just for their own progress
as masons but for the development of the nascent Hindu faith.
The Shore Temple marked a significant move towards
building on a monumental scale.
But whether it was an architectural masterpiece or a simple
carving on the back wall of a cave, at the heart of any Hindu
devotional building is the shrine, the small sacred space where the
devotee experiences darshan, the presence of the divine.
As these buildings grew in size it became common to mark
the presence of the central shrine with an elaborately carved
tower, known as the vimana which stands as a marker,
very visibly proclaiming the temple's location to the faithful.
Though this building is a freestanding structure
the way the rock is carved harks back to the rathas.
It is not made of regular stone blocks and mortar
but huge sections of precisely shaped granite.
This temple, which has stood here for 12 centuries,
is only held together by the weight of its component parts
and a complex system of load distribution.
Time has proved this to be perfectly sufficient to withstand
the elements.
The 2004 tsunami hit this coast with considerable force
but the building survived.
The Shore Temple shows just how far early Hinduism had
come by the 8th century, but there was plenty of opposition
for the hearts and minds of the people.
What was needed was a big marketing push to advertise its advantages
and that is exactly what it got.
It's too simplistic to suggest that Hinduism was just a more
attractive religious experience than the Buddhist or Jain alternatives,
but both these faiths demanded rather a lot from their adherents.
This is a sculpture of the Buddha during the six years
he spent fasting.
After this extensive road test even he acknowledged that this was
not the way to attain enlightenment.
But here in Tamil Nadu there was a group of characters who found
just the right sales pitch for Hinduism,
a set of holy men called the Nayanmars, or the Hounds of Shiva.
Between the 7th and the 9th centuries this
pantheon of 63 mystics and philosophers, also
known as the Tamil Saints, promoted a new kind of devotional Hinduism.
They're renowned
because they travelled through the Tamil country singing
the praises of the god Shiva in the most extravagant and wonderful way.
Their poetry today is still even in translation, is intoxicating.
Yes, it is quite wonderful.
And why are they so keen on Shiva?
Well, it's obvious, isn't it? I mean, he's about power.
He's both creator of life and of the cosmos and he's also the destroyer.
He's totally different in that respect from Vishnu who
sits in the middle who's the ideal husband, the ideal king,
the lord of settled society.
Shiva is... Dynamic. Very often dynamic and at the extremes.
So he was very seductive.
Yes, if you're interested in an exciting life.
Yes.
Life was getting exciting for these Hindu revolutionaries,
their teaching was beginning to win a sizable following.
While Europe was groping through the Dark Ages,
in India Hinduism was moving slowly towards the light.
HE SINGS
The hymns written by the saints were central to their success.
The Nayanmars are said to have sung the Buddhists out of India,
and their songs are still sung in the temples today.
The Nayanmars offered a path to salvation that was open to all.
Their great attraction, that they shared with Islamic Sufism which was
developing around the same time in Northern India, was that a personal
expression of devotion was the way to become one with the divine.
Many of the rituals associated with Hinduism today,
such as the chanting of the names of the deities
and pilgrimages to holy sites, were established by the Nayanmars.
But in a practical sense the goal was also to give Hinduism
a popular face.
The fantastic array of gods meant that everyone could find their
own personal deity and set them to work on behalf of their soul.
But what they were striving for was a structure for Hinduism.
A way to formalise and codify its disparate rituals,
to give it order and therefore authority
and to do that they needed to write it all down.
Hinduism is not a "religion of the book."
There is no central source of authority like the Bible or
the Koran to refer to, to promulgate the absolute word of god
but that doesn't mean there is any shortage of scripture.
The whole cannon of Hindu philosophy thrives on debate
and spiritual enquiry, much of it delightfully contradictory.
If you tried to collect it all together it would fill
a myriad libraries.
What was added to
this at the time of the Tamil Saints was a far more rigorous
set of instructions for the devotee, the Agamas.
The Agamas are a set of rules to guide the Hindu devotee.
They are incredibly wide ranging,
offering advice on temple construction, on the intricacies
of the guru-disciple relationship, on meditations on the nature
of Lord Shiva, covering every moment of life from waking to sleeping.
This is the library of the French Institute in Puducherry
where 8,000 bundles of palm leaves have been
collected on which the Agamas are inscribed.
And how did they do the writing?
The palm leaf is scratched by the stylus
and then soot is rubbed onto the surface where it bonds with
the sap to leave the finely intricate script.
Once state-of-the-art technology, the palm leaf manuscripts
were painstakingly recopied every 100 years or so to
preserve them, but these copies lead a pampered life, stored in an
air conditioned library and are regularly
painted with lemongrass oil
to maintain their subtleness and prevent them being eaten by insects.
HE RECITES FROM PALM LEAF
The Agamas originated in Tamil Nadu
and are written in the ancient Tamil language.
All 8,000 bundles are now being translated before being
photographed and digitised allowing them to be accessed online.
The Agamas now gave Hinduism a formal structure that is
still a keystone of its practice today.
In the wake of this change, we begin to see a significant
decline in the Buddhist presence in India.
Buddhism, a faith that had once counted itself as the main
religion of India and had been successfully exported to China
and across Asia, was now destined to disappear
from the land where the Buddha
had sat under a tree and attained enlightenment.
Why this happened is still a matter of fierce debate.
The two religions share many central beliefs
and there is some evidence to suggest that Hinduism simply
absorbed many adherents of Buddhism by borrowing their ideas.
There may have been some persecution
but there was no major conflict, just an increasingly rapid
acceptance of the newly invigorated Hindu teaching.
Towards the end of the 9th Century a new dynasty established
itself in Tamil Nadu.
From their origins on the banks of the Kaveri River the Cholas
quickly gained control of peninsula India
and spread their influence into Sri Lanka, ultimately becoming
the principal military, economic and cultural force in southern Asia.
Once established,
they turned their attention to the glorification of their new
capital, here at Thanjavur, and they certainly left an incredible legacy.
The Chola dynasty produced many notable kings but perhaps
the greatest came to the throne at the end of the 11th Century.
Raja Raja Chola was a rare combination of both
empire builder and patron of the arts,
but perhaps his greatest legacy
is as a builder, and this is his greatest triumph.
This building was completed in 1010 so has not long
since celebrated its 1,000th birthday.
It was started and completed in one continuous
push during the lifetime of
Raja Raja Chola, and in the immediate
aftermath of the Hindu revolution sparked by the Tamil Saints.
Its 300 years since the Shore Temple at Mahabalipuram
was built but we can clearly that a great leap forward has occurred.
It sheer size speaks of a building created for a dominant faith.
Inscriptions in ancient Tamil tell us
that Raja Raja Chola was instructed to build the temple in a dream,
but the real inspiration was surely the architecture of power.
It is, of course, dedicated to Shiva and the message is clear,
Raja Raja and Lord Shiva were two sides of the same coin.
As a work of art it established a distinctive Chola style, both in
design and ornamentation, which was to last for the next few centuries.
The multi-faceted columns
and their projecting square capitals were widely copied, but it
was the height of the central tower over the shrine, the vimana and its
monumental gateways, the gopurams that were its greatest innovations.
The temple gopurams that Raja Raja
built were more opulently embellished
and on a far grander scale than had been attempted before.
In the flat Tamil landscape these mighty stone doorways came to
dominate the view, announcing the presence of this colossal building.
So we're entering through the great stone gopuram of Raja Raja...
Dr Nagaswamy was formerly
the Director of the Archaeological Survey of India
and took a particular interest in this building.
He probably knows more about its construction than
Raja Raja Chola ever did,
starting with the very first marker peg the builders set in the earth.
When the sun rises the shadow will be
thrown on the western side that will be marked, and then on the same
day when the sun sets they draw the central line, exact central line.
The central axis is the basis of the sacred geometry of the temple.
Along this line the location of the main shrine is determined
and this point directly below the finial on the central tower,
the vimana, becomes the focus from which the entire complex is plotted.
Now in this plan,
you see the central vimana of the main tower...
And the inner sanctum.
Now this is exactly in the centre of this outer square.
This outer square which you call the back square is the original
cosmic diagram on which it is laid out and then that is doubled.
In many ways Raja Raja Chola was only doing what had been
done before on a monumental scale.
The vimana is only a few feet shorter than Westminster Abbey.
But Raja Raja couldn't just do as he pleased here,
he was bound by the rules laid down in the Agamas.
They prescribe that you must prepare the measuring scale.
So what are the measurements of this based on?
The central finger of the builder Raja Raja Chola.
I imagine it would take quite a few multiples of Raja Raja's
middle finger to reach 216 feet to the top of the vimana here,
but he seemed to have his finger in every aspect of the temple.
This inscription which says the King Raja Raja
covered the entire tall vimana at the back with gold.
Tower is called Maha Meru. Maha Meru means the golden mountain
beyond the Himalayas which is a mythical mountain
but that was the place where Shiva is said to reside.
Yup. Shiva's mountain abode.
The inscriptions are extraordinarily comprehensive.
Just like the Tamil Saints who preceded him Raja Raja was
codifying Hinduism, recording the operational practices of his temple.
Every detail fully transparent, how much money
he was given, for what purpose and then he says at the end
so long as the sun and the moon lasts this gift must be protected.
The rules of temple architecture which are laid down in the Agamas
were followed by Raja Raja Chola when he came to build this temple.
But though he was a man of refined aesthetic taste
he was also an able administrator.
Raja Raja created a multi-layered system of government
in which the temple was the central authority,
and the largest employer, with a vast permanent workforce that
included priests and ceremonial officers, financiers,
maintenance teams, cooks and kitchen staff, but also the most
talented youngsters in the arts of poetry, singing and dance.
The Temple dancers were apprenticed at an early age,
and usually for life.
The disciplines of classical Hindu dance come from a 2,000 year
old work called the Natya Shastra, and remarkably, it is
still being taught today.
Classical dance is a comprehensive study.
It is not only the movement of your body, it is a total
union of all your senses.
Your body, mind and soul.
SHE SINGS
One obvious way in which these skills are still
evident in modern Indian culture is in the dance
routines of Bollywood films, but the complex vocabulary of gestures
that these students are learning has been refined over centuries.
It's kind of hard because of subtle emotions.
In today's other art forms which are more popular
like commercial art forms there is no
place for subtle emotions. It's all very blatant and very strong.
But here you can see how subtle can be strong.
SHE SINGS
We also need to have that divine connection,
for people who really believe in it. There are dancers who really
believe in, you know, connecting with the temple.
It is very important that it goes beyond cast, creed,
nationality because ultimately it's a language.
Yes, it has come out of the temples but now it's a totally
different scenario. We have festivals organised by the temple authorities
where dancers are invited to dance in the temple precincts.
Classical dance is one aspect of temple culture that has
found its way into mainstream Indian life
and is now invited back inside the temples to participate
again in the sacred rituals that originally inspired it.
Beyond its function as a community centre, workplace
and school, the primary purpose of a temple was spiritual
and right at its centre is the shrine of the main
deity where the devotees come to receive darshan.
This is the route of circumambulation,
and it leads us to a powerful image at the heart of Hinduism.
We move from profane to sacred space as we approach the central shrine.
In this most potent place is kept a phallic symbol, the lingam.
The lingam is a smooth column of stone rising out of a circular
base that represents the female.
Here we have one in one of the side shrines,
which shows the yoni, the female yoni,
with Shiva rising as progenitor of the universe, from the centre of it.
The lingam represents the presence of Shiva,
and to gaze on it is to receive darshan.
The room where it is kept is the direct descendant of the
recess in the back of the cave that we saw back in Mahabalipuram.
The surprise is that inside there is no embellishment,
no grand design, no incredible ornamentation that you
see on the exterior of the temple -
just a simple potent space where the devotee can be one with the divine.
Unlike a church there is no congregation, no liturgy.
Every temple has its own tradition
and everyone is on their own journey.
The Nayanmars concept of supreme personal devotion to
a god like Shiva, meant that you travelled
together on your journey through life, but even with Shiva's
guidance where your journey led you was largely up to you.
Reincarnation is a central tenet of all the religions that
originate in India and your behaviour during this life
will determine how you return in the next.
The intensely personal nature of Hinduism made it very
attractive to people of different needs and aspirations.
Each chose their own journey and selected the gods from whom
they would seek guidance.
The object of the journey was to accrue good karma,
behavioural brownie points, and to ultimately obtain
release from the endless cycle of birth and rebirth.
In pursuit of that supreme challenge we can see how the
form of this remarkable building evolved, channelling worshippers
towards the central shrine and the presence of the divine.
It's a long way from a forest clearing.
By the time it was finished the basic precepts of Hindu worship
were set in stone, but though this building was the peak of Chola
artistic achievement their lasting legacy was not in granite at all.
More than 1,000 years ago it was discovered that the
sand at this particular bend in the Kaveri river had a purity
that was supremely good for bronze casting.
It was in bronze that the Chola craftsmen
established their artistic heritage, creating beautiful
works of sculpture that are still being replicated today.
Just like the stone masons in Mahabalipuram the main subjects
for the bronze sculptures made here are likenesses of the Hindu deities.
Today the furnace is powered by this venerable old motor which
began its working life under the bonnet of an Ambassador taxi,
but in most other respects nothing has changed here for 1,000 years.
The figures are made using an ingenious process called
lost wax casting and the first step
is to make a wax version of the sculpture.
The material in this heated basin is actually a mixture of beeswax
and resin and part of the skill is the constant warming of the wax
while it is being worked.
The team all have their own specialities
and they develop extraordinary speed and dexterity.
In fact, they make it look so simple I thought I'd have a go.
OK? Let's go.
Mine doesn't look like yours
Ah.
Then you get the thumb.
I have to admit, I had a little bit of help.
Now this is where the all-important mud comes in.
The wax sculpture is encased in a mould made from Kaveri river
sand, making sure all the details are retained.
This is then allowed to dry out.
For every mould we make two holes and then I put it in a potion
and we cover it with iron strings to become more strong. Sure.
Then after we heat the mould the wax will be lost here
so we get a negative hollow inside the mould.
In the furnace area the moulds are gently
cooking on a fire on one side of the room to drain away the wax,
while the bronze is being brought up to temperature in the fire pit.
Trusting only in the protection of their cotton lunghis the team
begin to pour the metal.
There's something incredibly captivating and primordial
about this fire and also the way all these men work together.
Even after the moulds have cooled
and are broken open there's still plenty to do cleaning up
the figures rough edges, but the end result makes it all worthwhile.
This is magnificent, look at this.
This was also made out of one mould.
Yeah, this is about 800kg.
Like the stone Shiva lingam in the temple shrine,
this is another manifestation of Shiva.
Known as the Nataraja this is an avatar, originally a Hindu
word for an incarnation of the deity when they descend to the earth.
In this form Shiva is the cosmic dancer, creating the universe
while stamping down the dwarf of ignorance.
This is the cycle of time? Exactly.
The universe and this is the fire circle also
and it is dancing in the fire circle.
So how do you achieve this kind of balance?
In the wax we make the measurement, even though
the circle is also coming in to everything is a single mould.
So you create the whole figure in wax?
In wax. Exactly.
So part of preserving the tradition is not just
preserving the product but also the process.
Exactly.
These bronze deities are made in every size, from the largest
temple figures to the smallest domestic gods for a bedroom shrine.
The material allows for a fluidity of movement, softer expressions
and gestures, communicating messages of benevolence and forgiveness,
and the more beautiful and refined the bronze god is the more
likely the spirit of the real deity is to inhabit the sculpture.
The other great advantage to a sculpture
cast in bronze as opposed to stone was that it was portable.
For centuries the stone gods in the temple shrines were a fixed
and immoveable presence, drawing the faithful to darshan,
but the advent of portable bronze figures meant that the
deities could leave their shrines.
This is Madurai, one of the great temple cities of South India.
The figure on the palanquin is, once again, Shiva.
He is being taken on a nightly excursion around the temple
and this ceremony shows how devotional practices
changed in the period after the Tamil Saints.
The bronze statue of Shiva is hidden from our view behind the curtains
but for the priests carrying him he is very real.
He is being taken to spend the night with his consort, Parvati,
known here by the name of one of her avatars, Meenakshi,
and the tryst will take place in her shrine.
These golden footprints represent Shiva
descending from his palanquin to enter Meenakshi's shrine.
The local legend tells us that Shiva
and Meenakshi were married in Madurai in a ceremony performed
by Vishnu and after a long and happy life together as rulers of the
town they assumed divine form and she became the deity of this temple.
There may seem to be an element of mystical pantomime here,
an elaborate masque in which the divine couple make
out behind closed doors, but their mortal followers are being
shown an activity that they can relate to their own lives.
The veil of illusion becomes translucent.
The marriage of Shiva and Meenakshi is consummated anew
every night, and at dawn Shiva slips away, back to his own shrine.
Madurai is in the deep south of Tamil Nadu.
It's over 2,500 years old and was mentioned by Greek travellers
when the paint was still wet on the Parthenon.
The sprawling complex of halls
and courtyards that make up its labyrinthine temple cover an
area the size of 25 football pitches and it has no less than 14 gopurams.
The gopura came into its own at the great temple of Madurai
and it was here that it became a defining feature of temple
architecture of the south.
The vimana underwent a corresponding shrinking process
and was now barely visible from the ground level.
The other very visible feature is the colourful
riot of sculpture on the towers.
These plaster figures proclaim to the faithful just what
an army of deities are working away on behalf of their soul,
but the lurid choice of colours is a fairly recent addition.
The custodians of the temple,
the priestly class who manage the building and its day-to-day
affairs, are Brahmins - the top rung of the Indian caste system.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, are "untouchables",
not considered worthy to enter the temple shrine, but they too need the
opportunity to experience darshan.
The city of Madurai developed
according to a division of labour and the model on which it is based
is said to be like the unfurling petals of a lotus flower.
At its centre is the temple where the Brahmins officiate.
In the surrounding streets the warrior caste,
the Kshatriyas are found.
The next layer is for merchants and landowners, the Vaishya.
And in the outlying districts live the Sudra, commoners or peasants.
On the fringes of the city are those without a caste.
There are 160 Brahmin priests working at this temple
and it is through their good offices that access to the main
shrine is regulated.
In theory they minister to all without fear or favour.
Rich, poor, able, disabled, there is
no discrimination among the people to worship
those who are coming.
'Things get slightly uncomfortable
'when it comes to equal access to all areas.'
How about people who want to go to the inner sanctum?
Can anybody go?
Not anybody, because we are the medium for them you know.
So you're saying there's a system.
There is a system, a principle, all cannot easily go in.
For the untouchables who are not permitted to enter the shrine,
and for those who simply feel they can navigate life without
the guiding hand of a Brahmin priest, there are alternatives.
In a corner of the main temple courtyard,
genuinely accessible to all, there is a small shrine to Ganesh,
the remover of obstacles, which is extremely busy.
These worshippers are allowed to touch the deity,
to make their own offerings and to conduct their own personal
rituals but by doing so they remain very much part of Hindu practices.
Familiar religious images are now emerging from the temples
and becoming part of mainstream Indian life, a process that began
with the advent of cheap colour printing in the late 19th century.
The painter Raja Ravi Varma became hugely popular by portraying
the deities in a contemporary western style using oil paint.
The performance artist Pushpamala has recreated his familiar
image of the goddess Lakshmi, casting herself as the deity.
Lakshmi is of course the goddess of wealth
but Ravi Varma also created this kind of fair-skinned
aristocratic ideal Indian woman.
Pushpamala has also made work based on a series of photographs
taken by British ethnographers in the 19th century that sought
to categorise the races of India.
These images, being regarded as scientific,
are not concerned to disguise the darker skin of their subjects.
In fact the Andamanese Islander picture comes
from a very famous study and they were doing it in all the colonies
and that was in the sense to control and understand, so that was to kind
of really, you know, get a grasp on the world
which was rapidly expanding.
In fact, the term Hindu only came into widespread
use during the British Raj and these religious and ethnic classifications
certainly contributed to the rigidity of the Indian caste system.
But once these religious stratifications had been
formulated they became a welcome badge for those they labelled.
The temple is still the focus for the religious
life of Hindu communities, but the younger generation are
growing up in a country where their government now wears this religious
badge and religion is more present in everyday culture than ever.
The intensely expressive sculptures that adorn
the temple gopurams now appear in a new guise.
The Hindu legends are retold in comic book form
and these graphic novels have become immensely popular.
But for a group of young comic book enthusiasts,
working in a small apartment, these home-grown efforts retelling
the familiar stories of Shiva need a bit of updating.
Here's their take on the marriage of Shiva
and Meenakshi that inspired the night ceremony in Madurai,
but the scene has now become a mash up of Gotham City and Middle Earth.
I used to read comics, you know, Superman, Batman.
I love the graphics in those comics.
Then I read a few comics from Indian publishing houses, the stories
were good, but the graphics were a little bit obsolete basically.
I just see Marvel and
I see the difference, so I said why not bring these three
together where I have graphics which are universal and bring in stories
which touch our Hindu legends and bring in the art of narration
from Tolkien and make graphic novels with these three elements.
Although the style of the graphics and the narration are new,
for a true Hindu there is very little room for innovation
when it comes to the stories.
It doesn't make any sense to deviate
because if the story is there, existed, a lot of people,
especially the young ones or the youth of today or the
Y-generation, whatever you may call it, in our country and abroad,
don't know much about the story and the story itself is so interesting.
Why do you want to deviate and rock the boat?
As keen as these guys are on sticking to the authentic
stories, they have some interesting ideas about Hinduism.
Hindu was never a religion, I believe.
My personal view, it is a culture.
It was a way of living.
All of the answers are there in the past.
You know children from all ages look at the graphic novel
and get attracted. "This is such appealing art. I love it.
"It's so awesome. It's so cool." OK and then he starts to read
and that whole process he understands the story.
That's where we come in.
However adroit Hinduism is at adapting
itself to the modern world Hindu philosophy is still difficult
to reconcile with western notions of religious experience.
One of the most fundamental disconnects between eastern
and western thought is represented by Shiva Nataraja,
and his ring of fire.
Time is cyclical and all opposites are reconciled in Shiva.
Today, in many fields India is leading
global technological progress.
So how does it reconcile scientific advances with
ancient myths and legends?
Victorian Christianity was severely tested by the theories
of scientists like Charles Darwin and many evangelical
Christians still cannot accept the scientific truth of evolution.
Hinduism, it seems, has no such issues.
Outside the CERN Particle Research Centre in Geneva
a Shiva Nataraja, donated by the Indian Government, celebrates
the involvement of many Indian tech companies in the project.
Whether you call it the
Large Hadron Collider or Shiva Nataraja,
the fact that the origins of the universe lie in a ring of
cosmic energy is just confirmation of something Hindus already knew.
What took science so long to catch up?
Does being a Hindu allows you a certain
freedom of enquiry?
It does
because I can be a Hindu without having to subscribe to a particular
god, to a particular book or to a particular religious practice.
Which means that I can be completely independent,
I can have my own view of the world, I can have my own
view of the universe and I can accommodate different
views from different systems and synthesise them in my mind.
For a Hindu the black water, the Indus river or
the Indian Ocean mark the boundaries of their homeland.
In the days before mass travel to cross the black water
and leave India was to cease to be a Hindu
and the rise of Hindu nationalism has reinforced the idea that
to be Indian is to be Hindu, and vice versa.
But Hindu nationalism is directly at odds with its inclusive
tradition and as India emerges as a major economic force
at the forefront of globalisation the role of Hinduism in its
society is becoming incendiary.
It's total chaos here.
This is the festival of Karthikai Deepam,
and since we're in the Tamil heartlands of southern India
we have yet another festival which celebrates the multi-faceted Shiva.
The central story tells how, in a moment of celestial
competitiveness, Shiva appeared to Vishnu and Brahma as an endless
flame of light and challenged them to find his head and his feet.
To cut a long story short, and it is a long story, they fail
and Shiva remains supreme.
Like so many other elements of Hinduism,
this festival offers the devotee a bewildering array of choices.
The basic tale has become freighted with other cargo, competing
traditions that obscure the central meaning with excess baggage.
In one tradition the oil lamps ward off evil forces
and bring prosperity and joy. In another the relationship of
brothers and sisters is remembered and siblings exchange gifts.
Yet another tale is the alignment of six stars at this
point in the year, said to represent the six faces of Murugan,
the Hindu god of war.
The complexity that results from this
amalgamation of myth and celebration makes it impossible to give
a simple answer to the question, "What is this festival for?"
Perhaps there is no answer,
and perhaps there doesn't need to be one.
It means something different to each person,
but everyone can enjoy it together.
And in this simple fact lies the secret to Hinduism's success.
The temples are as busy as they have ever been and as their
traditions spill out into mainstream Indian life once more,
their devotees are still seeking answers to questions
that are eternal.
The many different religions that have vied for the souls of
the faithful over the centuries have left a rich legacy in these lands.
The haunting relics of the Buddhist culture are now just ruins
but their beautiful devotional art reminds us
of their remarkable achievements.
The great mosques and mausoleums of the Mughal
conquest are architectural masterpieces,
venerated around the world and the skill of their painters and their
musical heritage are as cherished today as they have always been.
5,000 years ago,
when the first great urban settlements grew up on the banks
of the Indus River, the citizens had to devise ways of living together
in some of the world's first cities and they face similar problems now.
But as we know, in the Hindu world-view time is cyclical,
not linear.
The cities of these lands today have to find new
strategies to support vast populations but they have a genius
for coping with immense challenges, and as they strive towards solutions
it is perhaps some comfort to know that they have been here before.
In the West, time marches on, but here, what goes around comes around.
MUSIC: I'm Free by The Soup Dragons
# I'm free to do what I want
# Any old time
# I said I'm free
# To do what I want
# Any old time
# Don't be afraid of your freedom. #