The Tanjore Trip - 4

Darasuram - Where Stones Speak and Sing

In Darasuram, we missed the gods for the temples. The Shiva temple at Darasuram [which is closer to Kumbhakonam town than to Tanjore] is said to have been built by Raja Raja II, the grandson of Raja Raja Cholan, in the 12th century. Shiva is worshipped as Airavateswarar here. The temple is much smaller than the other two UNESCO Living Chola temples but far more exquisite in its sculpture.

Outside the only Vaasal of the temple is a tiny Nandi facing the great big wooden door.

Every wall and every pillar, even the steps leading up to the shrines are copiously sculpted and the tiniest of figurines - often not more than a few inches in height - has the graceful body structure and finely chiselled details that we associate with Chola art. Look at the profusely sculpted pillar below.

Note the tiny panels below the sculpted figure and the sculpted arch above it. Note the figure itself. You can almost say the garment separate from the body.

This is an elaborately ornate temple, as you can see, though not as gigantic as the other two. I wonder if it would be right to say that here we see a shift in the Chola artistic vision from design to detail, from architecture to sculpture, from the spiritual to the aesthetic?

If the Tanjore temple is a monument of triumph or a religious monument that works through rousing one's sense of beauty, then the Darasuram temple is a monument to artistic beauty, where a rapturous aesthetic experience itself becomes a near spiritual experience.

If in the Tanjore temple, we could feel the invisible footprint and echoing stride of that colossus among kings, Raja Raja, here I could almost hear the incessant knocking of chisel and axe on stone, and almost see the chips and shards fly in showers of sparks and clouds of dust, as figure after figure bloomed alive.

And as if the sculpture weren't enough of a visual feast, there are murals on niches in the external walls of the shrines, which though somewhat faded and jaded with time are still good enough for details to be visible and colours evident. We couldn't help wondering how the temple must have looked in its heydays, with its brilliant sculpture and the complementary murals glowing in the summer sun.

The motif below will be familiar to temple architecture buffs: look closely and you can see a bull on the left and an elephant on the right.

Entire war scenes and complete stories from mythology have been empanelled on pillars at Darasuram.

Several shrines in the Darasuram and Gangaikondacholapuram complexes lie in ruins today. Some lack vimanams, others are just foundations whose walls lie in heaps of broken stone. Local people say a lot of the solid rocks were carried away to build a stone bridge [Lower Anakkarai] across a river nearby. Some say it was during the British rule that the structures were first brought down. Whatever the truth is, I find it perplexing that the beautiful living breathing sculpted rocks failed to stir and move their destroyers who had the heart to use them to lay a  bridge for town buses and bullock carts.