02-12-2008, 08:57 PM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The vandalisation of heritage
T.S. SUBRAMANIANÂ (The Hindu, 10 Feb. 2008)
Murals from the 14th to 17th centuries in temples across Tamil Nadu are being painted over or 'restored' gaudily by unqualified personnel. It is time we acted more responsibly to preserve these masterpieces of a bygone era, feels David Shulman, renowned Indologist. Excerpts from an interview...
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The 17th century paintings on the ceiling of Devasiriya Mandapam at Thyagarajaswamy temple IN Tiruvarur are masterpieces of south Indian cultural heritage. If they are not conserved very soon, they will be lost.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Photo: K.T. Gandhirajan
http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/02/10/images...21050210701.jpg
Neither subtle nor nuanced: The 'restored' painting (right) at the Jaina temple at Tiruparuttikkunram, near Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu.
David Shulman is a man with formidable attainments. An Indologist, he is a scholar in Tamil, Telugu and Sanskrit literature and arts. He graduated in Islamic Studies and read Persian and Arabic. He received his Ph.D. in Tamil literature for his dissertation on the sthalapuranams of temples in Tamil Nadu. That led him to study mural paintings in temples in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Dr. Shulman knows a dozen languages including Tamil, Telugu, Sanskrit, Hebrew, English, Russian and Persian. He has written several books including Tamil Temple Myths, Songs of the Harsh Devotee and The Hungry God: Hindu Tales of Filicide and Devotion, all published by prestigious U.S. universities. He is currently Professor, Department of Indian, Iranian and Armenian Studies, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel.
Dr. Shulman was in Chennai recently to attend a conference on "Painting Narratives: Mural Painting Traditions in the 13th -19th Centuries", organised by the Madras Craft Foundation and its heritage museum Dakshina Chitra. Excerpts from a conversationâ¦
You know the sthalapuranams of many temples in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. You have studied the mural paintings in temples in these two States. How did you get interested in sthalapuranams and mural paintings in temples?
My interest in sthalapuranams goes back 37 years. I was a Ph.D. student at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London under John Marr. His was a famous name in Madras (Chennai). He was my guru. John Marr was a student of a student of U.Ve. Swaminatha Iyer. In the course of looking for a Ph.D. topic for me, we began to talk about the fact that nobody had done any serious work on Tamil sthalapuranams. It was a huge literature. We know of about 2,000 surviving sthalapuranams in Tamil alone. Some of them are in manuscripts, some in printed versions. It is an enormous, rich literature and it had been hardly touched before. So it seemed to be a good topic for a Ph.D. dissertation. I studied the Tamil puranas of temples such as Tiruvannamalai, Nagapattinam, Rameswaram, Kumbakonam, Chidambaram, Kanchipuram and others.
Photo: M. Karunakaran
http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/02/10/images...21050210702.jpg
Responsibility to the past: Dr. David Shulman.
I lived with my wife at Mandavelipakkam in Madras in 1975-76. I would wander around these temples because I needed to see them. When you read the sthalapuranam, you obviously need to see the temple, the sthalavriksha (the sacred tree), the kulam (the pond) and the murthis. These are highly specific to these individual places. So I would basically roam around the Tamil country, mostly in Thanjavur district and also in the south.
In the course of my wandering, I happened to come across many beautiful mural paintings. In the Tamil country, among the hundreds of temples, many had and some still have, these beautiful murals. Some of them are quite old, some not so old, some going back to the 16th century and some to the 19th century. Pieces of these mural paintings survive all over the Tamil country.
I always thought that we should have a conference like this to bring these paintings to the attention of the public and the scholarly public so that people would begin to think about them, preserve and conserve them.
You touched on preservation. What is your impression about the status of these murals in Tamil Nadu? The paintings in Tiruvellarai temple near Tiruchi have been whitewashed. The murals in the Jaina temple at Tiruparuttikkunram near Kanchipuram have been repainted to look dazzlingly new.
I went to Tiruparuttikkunram on January 25, 2008. I saw the paintings on the ceiling. They have been destroyed by re-painting.
Are these paintings in temples on the brink?
It is not yet too late. But the problem is very urgent. If action is not taken soon, that is, immediately, these treasures of Tamil Nadu, which are part of the national heritage, will disappear. In some temples, these paintings have been preserved and they are not in such a bad shape. But in many places, they are on the verge of disappearing. Some of them have been painted over or whitewashed or repainted in such a way that it destroys the integrity of the old paintings.
For example, I was working in Tiruvarur. There was a beautiful, famous 17th century set of paintings about Muchukunda Chakravarthi on the ceiling of Devasiriya Mandapam in the Thyagarajaswamy temple at Tiruvarur. This set of paintings is well known to the public and the scholarly world. They are masterpieces of south Indian painting. That ceiling in Devasiriya Mandapam is in a miserable condition. The Mandapam has a special place in the history of Tamil Saiva literature. That is the Mandapam where Sundaramurthy Nayanar had a vision of all the 63 Nayanmars (Tamil Saivite saints). Today, people are using it as a godown. It is filled with all kinds of junk, old logs, rusting nails and dead rodents. It is a terrible situation.
These 17th century masterpieces have suffered from shameful neglect. There is now some hope that INTACH (the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage) will go into action at the Tiruvarur temple and conserve these paintings.
If you go there today, you will see that there is a long series of paintings [on the ceiling] along the window in the Mandapam. Many of the panel of paintings closest to the window, that I saw 30 years ago have now been completely lost through water damage, smoke, insects, birds nesting, cracking of plaster and sheer neglect. Some of these murals no longer exist. I want to say again that these are masterpieces of south Indian cultural heritage. If they are not conserved very soon, they will be lost.
Yesterday, I went to Sri Varadarajaswamy temple at Kanchipuram. In the enclosure wall around the main shrine of Sri Varadarajaswamy, there are incredibly beautiful paintings of the 17th century. Again, they are masterpieces. They urgently need to be preserved. Preserved means not painted over. If they are painted over by new artists, they will be destroyed. Preservation means they have to be cleaned professionally by experts who know about these kinds of frescoes. They have to be carefully treated in such a way that no further damage will take place. If somebody wants to do some new paintings, there are many surfaces in all the temples in Tamil Nadu. But let them not paint over all these old masterpieces. That will definitely destroy them. That is what has happened in many places.
That has happened at the Jaina temple at Tiruparuttikkunram near Kanchipuram, which is under the State Department of Archaeology?
It definitely happened at Tiruparuttikkunram. The paintings have been ruined by being painted over. This is quite a common thing in Tamil Nadu. If you repaint it instead of conserving it, the subtlety will be lost, the old colours will be lost. This is disaster. These paintings have to be preserved as they were at their height. The way people do it in Europe. Frescoes in Italy, France and Germany are treated by professional people, whose job is to do that. For example, in the Sistine Chapel in Rome, which has Michelangelo's famous paintings, they went through a long process of cleaning, restoring and conserving these paintings.
I heard you were denied entry to the thousand-pillared mandapam in the Thyagarajaswamy temple at Tiruvarur although it is nowhere near the sanctum sanctorum.
I don't want to say much about it. We had a letter of authorisation from the Minister for Endowments. When we came to Tiruvarur, it was still very difficult to get permission to enter the mandapam. They eventually gave us the permission. All we needed to do was to take a few photographs to complete the set of existing photographs because we had good quality pictures taken 20 years ago. It should have been a simple matter and the authorisation was there. Still it was a rather difficult bureaucratic procedure. Although in the end we were allowed to take pictures. I am grateful to the temple authorities for that. But the process was traumatic.
Whitewashing and sandblasting of paintings in temples is going on in Tamil Nadu under the name of performing kumbabhishekams. How do you sensitise the temple authorities not to indulge in vandalism like this?
Photo: M. Srinath
http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/02/10/images...21050210703.jpg
We talked about the idea of bringing some of the temples' archakas and administrators to a conference like this. Let them see and hear from experts what it (the destruction of paintings) actually means. They have control over these masterpieces but they don't always understand what this (heritage) means. They, therefore, at times too easily, as you said during the temple kumbhabhishekam or renovation, simply whitewash them away. It happened at Madurai.
Around the wall of the "Pottramaraikulam" (the pond of the golden lotus) which had murals, in the Meenakshi temple?
Across from Pottramaraikulam, there was a beautiful series of Nayaka paintings. I saw them years ago. They have been completely whitewashed away. They are completely lost. There is no way we can recover themâ¦You cannot simply wipe out a wall like this. It is a terrible thingâ¦
All of us, the general public, the archakas, the temple administrators and so on have a special responsibility in protecting these murals. We have to act now before it is too late. It is already too late for some of the paintings. Before we lose more, there should be a public awareness to properly conserve the treasures of the Tamil paintings of the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/02/10/storie...21050210700.htm
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T.S. SUBRAMANIANÂ (The Hindu, 10 Feb. 2008)
Murals from the 14th to 17th centuries in temples across Tamil Nadu are being painted over or 'restored' gaudily by unqualified personnel. It is time we acted more responsibly to preserve these masterpieces of a bygone era, feels David Shulman, renowned Indologist. Excerpts from an interview...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The 17th century paintings on the ceiling of Devasiriya Mandapam at Thyagarajaswamy temple IN Tiruvarur are masterpieces of south Indian cultural heritage. If they are not conserved very soon, they will be lost.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Photo: K.T. Gandhirajan
http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/02/10/images...21050210701.jpg
Neither subtle nor nuanced: The 'restored' painting (right) at the Jaina temple at Tiruparuttikkunram, near Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu.
David Shulman is a man with formidable attainments. An Indologist, he is a scholar in Tamil, Telugu and Sanskrit literature and arts. He graduated in Islamic Studies and read Persian and Arabic. He received his Ph.D. in Tamil literature for his dissertation on the sthalapuranams of temples in Tamil Nadu. That led him to study mural paintings in temples in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Dr. Shulman knows a dozen languages including Tamil, Telugu, Sanskrit, Hebrew, English, Russian and Persian. He has written several books including Tamil Temple Myths, Songs of the Harsh Devotee and The Hungry God: Hindu Tales of Filicide and Devotion, all published by prestigious U.S. universities. He is currently Professor, Department of Indian, Iranian and Armenian Studies, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel.
Dr. Shulman was in Chennai recently to attend a conference on "Painting Narratives: Mural Painting Traditions in the 13th -19th Centuries", organised by the Madras Craft Foundation and its heritage museum Dakshina Chitra. Excerpts from a conversationâ¦
You know the sthalapuranams of many temples in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. You have studied the mural paintings in temples in these two States. How did you get interested in sthalapuranams and mural paintings in temples?
My interest in sthalapuranams goes back 37 years. I was a Ph.D. student at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London under John Marr. His was a famous name in Madras (Chennai). He was my guru. John Marr was a student of a student of U.Ve. Swaminatha Iyer. In the course of looking for a Ph.D. topic for me, we began to talk about the fact that nobody had done any serious work on Tamil sthalapuranams. It was a huge literature. We know of about 2,000 surviving sthalapuranams in Tamil alone. Some of them are in manuscripts, some in printed versions. It is an enormous, rich literature and it had been hardly touched before. So it seemed to be a good topic for a Ph.D. dissertation. I studied the Tamil puranas of temples such as Tiruvannamalai, Nagapattinam, Rameswaram, Kumbakonam, Chidambaram, Kanchipuram and others.
Photo: M. Karunakaran
http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/02/10/images...21050210702.jpg
Responsibility to the past: Dr. David Shulman.
I lived with my wife at Mandavelipakkam in Madras in 1975-76. I would wander around these temples because I needed to see them. When you read the sthalapuranam, you obviously need to see the temple, the sthalavriksha (the sacred tree), the kulam (the pond) and the murthis. These are highly specific to these individual places. So I would basically roam around the Tamil country, mostly in Thanjavur district and also in the south.
In the course of my wandering, I happened to come across many beautiful mural paintings. In the Tamil country, among the hundreds of temples, many had and some still have, these beautiful murals. Some of them are quite old, some not so old, some going back to the 16th century and some to the 19th century. Pieces of these mural paintings survive all over the Tamil country.
I always thought that we should have a conference like this to bring these paintings to the attention of the public and the scholarly public so that people would begin to think about them, preserve and conserve them.
You touched on preservation. What is your impression about the status of these murals in Tamil Nadu? The paintings in Tiruvellarai temple near Tiruchi have been whitewashed. The murals in the Jaina temple at Tiruparuttikkunram near Kanchipuram have been repainted to look dazzlingly new.
I went to Tiruparuttikkunram on January 25, 2008. I saw the paintings on the ceiling. They have been destroyed by re-painting.
Are these paintings in temples on the brink?
It is not yet too late. But the problem is very urgent. If action is not taken soon, that is, immediately, these treasures of Tamil Nadu, which are part of the national heritage, will disappear. In some temples, these paintings have been preserved and they are not in such a bad shape. But in many places, they are on the verge of disappearing. Some of them have been painted over or whitewashed or repainted in such a way that it destroys the integrity of the old paintings.
For example, I was working in Tiruvarur. There was a beautiful, famous 17th century set of paintings about Muchukunda Chakravarthi on the ceiling of Devasiriya Mandapam in the Thyagarajaswamy temple at Tiruvarur. This set of paintings is well known to the public and the scholarly world. They are masterpieces of south Indian painting. That ceiling in Devasiriya Mandapam is in a miserable condition. The Mandapam has a special place in the history of Tamil Saiva literature. That is the Mandapam where Sundaramurthy Nayanar had a vision of all the 63 Nayanmars (Tamil Saivite saints). Today, people are using it as a godown. It is filled with all kinds of junk, old logs, rusting nails and dead rodents. It is a terrible situation.
These 17th century masterpieces have suffered from shameful neglect. There is now some hope that INTACH (the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage) will go into action at the Tiruvarur temple and conserve these paintings.
If you go there today, you will see that there is a long series of paintings [on the ceiling] along the window in the Mandapam. Many of the panel of paintings closest to the window, that I saw 30 years ago have now been completely lost through water damage, smoke, insects, birds nesting, cracking of plaster and sheer neglect. Some of these murals no longer exist. I want to say again that these are masterpieces of south Indian cultural heritage. If they are not conserved very soon, they will be lost.
Yesterday, I went to Sri Varadarajaswamy temple at Kanchipuram. In the enclosure wall around the main shrine of Sri Varadarajaswamy, there are incredibly beautiful paintings of the 17th century. Again, they are masterpieces. They urgently need to be preserved. Preserved means not painted over. If they are painted over by new artists, they will be destroyed. Preservation means they have to be cleaned professionally by experts who know about these kinds of frescoes. They have to be carefully treated in such a way that no further damage will take place. If somebody wants to do some new paintings, there are many surfaces in all the temples in Tamil Nadu. But let them not paint over all these old masterpieces. That will definitely destroy them. That is what has happened in many places.
That has happened at the Jaina temple at Tiruparuttikkunram near Kanchipuram, which is under the State Department of Archaeology?
It definitely happened at Tiruparuttikkunram. The paintings have been ruined by being painted over. This is quite a common thing in Tamil Nadu. If you repaint it instead of conserving it, the subtlety will be lost, the old colours will be lost. This is disaster. These paintings have to be preserved as they were at their height. The way people do it in Europe. Frescoes in Italy, France and Germany are treated by professional people, whose job is to do that. For example, in the Sistine Chapel in Rome, which has Michelangelo's famous paintings, they went through a long process of cleaning, restoring and conserving these paintings.
I heard you were denied entry to the thousand-pillared mandapam in the Thyagarajaswamy temple at Tiruvarur although it is nowhere near the sanctum sanctorum.
I don't want to say much about it. We had a letter of authorisation from the Minister for Endowments. When we came to Tiruvarur, it was still very difficult to get permission to enter the mandapam. They eventually gave us the permission. All we needed to do was to take a few photographs to complete the set of existing photographs because we had good quality pictures taken 20 years ago. It should have been a simple matter and the authorisation was there. Still it was a rather difficult bureaucratic procedure. Although in the end we were allowed to take pictures. I am grateful to the temple authorities for that. But the process was traumatic.
Whitewashing and sandblasting of paintings in temples is going on in Tamil Nadu under the name of performing kumbabhishekams. How do you sensitise the temple authorities not to indulge in vandalism like this?
Photo: M. Srinath
http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/02/10/images...21050210703.jpg
We talked about the idea of bringing some of the temples' archakas and administrators to a conference like this. Let them see and hear from experts what it (the destruction of paintings) actually means. They have control over these masterpieces but they don't always understand what this (heritage) means. They, therefore, at times too easily, as you said during the temple kumbhabhishekam or renovation, simply whitewash them away. It happened at Madurai.
Around the wall of the "Pottramaraikulam" (the pond of the golden lotus) which had murals, in the Meenakshi temple?
Across from Pottramaraikulam, there was a beautiful series of Nayaka paintings. I saw them years ago. They have been completely whitewashed away. They are completely lost. There is no way we can recover themâ¦You cannot simply wipe out a wall like this. It is a terrible thingâ¦
All of us, the general public, the archakas, the temple administrators and so on have a special responsibility in protecting these murals. We have to act now before it is too late. It is already too late for some of the paintings. Before we lose more, there should be a public awareness to properly conserve the treasures of the Tamil paintings of the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/02/10/storie...21050210700.htm
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