A late 18th-century painted textile, kalamkari, likely produced near the city of Madurai in the deep south of eastern India depicts a temple dedicated to Murugan, son of the great god, Shiva, at Tiruparankunram. Close inspection of the work, now in London at the Victoria and Albert Museum, shows how this kalamkari is exemplary of early modern temple paintings, which in form and subject mirror the concentric enclosing walls of the Hindu temple and describe the distinctiveness of its resident deities with mythic, historic, and geographic specificity.
Representations of landscapes proliferated in the 17th and 18th centuries in southeastern India, not only in paintings and maps, but also in courtly poetry, histories of sacred sites, and pilgrimage literatures produced by newly powerful patrons, such as members of monasteries, landowners, and merchants. At the same time, writing itself attained an unprecedented importance, and by the 18th century, temple paintings on walls and large textiles almost always included textual inscriptions. This kalamkari includes all of these elements: mythic stories, a plan of the temple and its environs, and written label inscriptions.
The outmost border in this kalamkari contains both decorative and narrative elements: we see yogis doing penance, discoursing, and resting in hammocks. Peacocks and deer march across the top. An elephant leads a procession of devotees, some with kavadis, literally “burden,” a heavy yoke worn by Murugan’s devotees, walking toward the entrance to the temple on the right. A chariot used for the magnificent elaborate processions of early modern period stands left of the entrance, an undyed and visually open space that invites us to cross into the temple. This crossing is defined by the polka-dot borders that separate the narrative from iconic elements of the total image, while also becoming the wall that marks sacred from mundane space—labels identifying it as prakara, temple wall, make this clear. One of the distinctive features of the southeast Indian Hindu temple in the 16th and 17th centuries was the development of the so-called “expanded temple,” a striking set of concentric passages and walls that converge on the focal points of worship, facilitating a mode of worship in which pradakshina, or circumambulation, is fundamental. Within the temple, new, larger spaces accommodated large festivals, performances, recitations and explications of texts that in turn strengthened sectarian, social, and political identities. We see reflections of these developments in the painted textile, such as the chariot used for festivals, and the multiple halls featured and labeled.
The interior of the temple is represented schematically, showing how the gateway tower, (labeled gopuram), festival hall (mayil mandapa), flagpost (kotimaram), door guardians (dwarapala), and multiple sancta of the temple relate to one another. The god Murugan, his wives Devayani and Valli, the goddess Durga, and the god Vigneswara (popularly known as Ganesha), are all depicted and labeled within individual cells, reflecting the physical reality of the cave temple in which each is sculpted from the living rock of the mountain.
The mountain of Tirupparankunram is labeled just above the shrines of Murugan and Valli. A white path that shows places of importance to pilgrims winds up the hill, beginning just right of the Tiruparankunram inscription, where two figures stand within a rock-cut shrine. The inscription identifies the left figure as Tandayutapani, a name of Murugan; a devotee wearing a kavadi stands on the right. A traveler on this path next encounters a small temple with a Shiva linga next to a pond; the inscription identifies this as the shrine of Shiva as Kasi Visvanatan Suvanata Swami. The path continues up the mountain, next coming to a small roofed pavilion hung with textile curtains and a figure seated on a platform. The inscription, sanniyasi, identifies the figure as an ascetic who has renounced worldly pleasures and attachments. Turning to the right, the path terminates at another figure, marked as Muslim by the white skullcap he wears, seated before an Islamicate building labeled pallivasal. This is the tomb of Sikandar Shah, the last sultan of Madurai in the 14th century, who is still venerated today. Insofar as the central image is concerned, then, we have an image of the site that evokes its natural geographic features as well as its human circulation and ritual topographies, both Hindu and Muslim.
The narrative images that surround the sacred hill and temple are drawn from the temple’s talapuranam, a genre of literature that relates the mythic, hagiographic, and historic narratives of the site. Together, the stories explain how and why the place is sacred, always insisting on the primacy of the shrine, and ever negotiating the universality of God with his specific embodiments in particular places. It is the stories of deities and saints, natural features, and architectural distinctions described in the talapuranam that are most often depicted in temple paintings.
Here we see stories from the talapuranam of Tirupparankunram depicted around the central image of the temple. The first scene on the left—the direction one might walk were one to enter the temple and proceed clockwise in circumambulation (pradakshina)—explains why Murugan has made a home at Tiruparankunram: Six brothers were cursed to remain fish in a pond until they receive the grace of seeing Lord Murugan. Upon seeing him and gaining release from their icthyous forms, they begged him to stay at that sacred place. Hence, Murugan has a temple built for himself here. Above, in scenes on the left and right, Murugan engages the demon Surapadma in battle at the coastal village of Tiruchendur. This same site is featured in another kalamkari at the V&A, currently misidentified as a temple dedicated to Shiva. After defeating the demon at Tiruchendur, Murugan came to Tiruparankunram, where he married the god Indra’s daughter, Teyvani, shown in the upper right. Here, the god and goddess of Madurai, Shiva as Chokkalingaswami and his wife, Parvati, in the form of Meenakshi Ambal, are labeled and seated on the right side of the image. Characteristically, the paintings insist on the specificity of deities at their sacred places. Similarly, a kalamkari misidentified as showing Vishnu in his heavenly abode, Vaikuntha, actually shows him at his terrestrial home on the island of Sri Rangam, surrounded by the Kaveri river and among the deities, saints, and festival vehicles associated with that temple. The images and stories shown on kalamkari temple paintings physically enclose the image of the god; they provide reason for his divine presence at that particular place, as well as highlight the features of the sacred site—places to which devotees are encouraged to go.
The different parts of the painted cloth function in complementary ways to each other, and to the mural tradition to which they closely relate. The outer border shows activities exterior to the temple but that fall within the sacred space circumscribed by procession of the temple deities, expressed through the procession of devotees and festival chariot. The large undyed space of the gopura doorway invites the viewer inside, into the space of the temple. The narrative images around the temple contain stories of the talapuranam, explaining how the deities came to inhabit the site and why natural features, such as the pond, are sacred. Proceeding through the temple, the viewer/pilgrim emerges on the mountainside. Here, following the path provided by the artist, the pilgrim visits other major shrines, including an Islamic monument, located on the mountain.
Temple paintings are generally found on the walls and ceilings of circumambulatory passages around the deities’ shrines; behind and around the deity within the sanctum; or on the ceiling of the hall that precedes it. The devotee encounters the paintings as he enters the temple and encircles the sanctum, drawing ever closer to the deity—similar to the composition of the kalamkari, which also proceeds narratologically in the clockwise order of ritual circumambulation and which envisions the journey of the devotee through the sacred landscape of the temple. Mural and kalamkari paintings did not simply decorate the space; they created with the devotee the discursive and geographic space in which the deity participates and resides. The movement of the devotee through such a space twines together individual worship with poetic, hagiographic, and commentarial literature; sectarian landscapes; and the corporate body of sectarian affiliation.
The content and form of temple paintings transform the usual relationships between story, setting, and characters that we expect from narrative. In the paintings, place is not the context for narrative; rather, narrative provides context for the sacred place. That is, narrative makes meaningful the presence of the deities, saints, and people who are part of the history of the site and its devotional traditions. Kalamkaris surround the central icon with narrative images that elaborate its specificity and constitute the physical, devotional, and mythic world in which the icon is situated. In this, the structure and function of the kalamkari is consonant with temples’ architectural form and decoration. Narrative conceptually and physically frames the deity, whether located at the center of the kalamkari cloth—or at the center of a temple enclosed within the sanctum and preceded by murals.
Anna Lise Seastrand is associate professor of art history at the University of Minnesota.