Konarak is a royal palimpsest. Like most great monuments the world over, it has accumulated tales upon legends upon myths till it is difficult to know where one ends and the other begins.
Tourist guides will patter on about how a huge magnetic stone crowned the soaring temple tower, drawing ships to their doom. Then there's the legend about a king's comely son being stricken with a disfiguring disease and building the temple to cure himself of his affliction. The profusion of sringara sculptures of beguiling sensuousness is sometimes explained as talismans to ward off the evil eye, or lightning.
There's also the factual description given by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) of the seven, superbly sculpted, prancing horses drawing the twelve-wheeled chariot of Surya, the Sun God: an equestrian deity imported from Iran. The horses represent the days of the week, the wheels exemplify the months of the year. As in most folkloric accounts, there seem to be small cores of authenticity in the tales.
Even the most powerful loadstone would not have had an effect on wooden ships. Scholars believe that a shining brass or gold ball had been installed atop the tower of the temple. Moonlight reflecting off this could have led unwary navigators astray. This, in turn, probably angered the sea-born forces of invaders particularly if they belonged to faiths that had a traditional apathy to women.
Misogynists would have found the sculptures in the temple deeply offensive. There is a strong local tradition that the initial damage to the great temple was inflicted by the armies of the legendary iconoclast Kalapathar.
Sun power
Belief that sunlight cures skin ailments is an old-established one. The striking image of Surya does wear riding boots, contrary to established Hindu iconography, and could have been an Iranian deity worshipped by Magi. There is also strong reason to believe that the original Sun Temple was in present-day Multan, though it is not clear why the legends of that temple were appropriated by Konarak, nor is it clear why the dancing hall was built a fair distance in front of the temple.
These structures, including the plinth and entrance, are all that remain of the original temple. They are, however, so richly embellished by carvings and sculptures that they riveted our attention.
To start with, the fact that the dance hall is detached from the main temple is curious. Traditionally, the Nata Mandap is an adjunct of the sanctum so that dedicated devadasis could entertain the installed deity. Moreover, there are literally hundreds of images of dancers and musicians, an abundance not seen in many other temples. Finally, as pointed out by scholar Dhirendranath Patnaik in his very informative book Odissi Dance , this dance hall has an unusual, named, sculpture of a Dance Master holding a pair of cadence-keeping cymbals. All this gave us the impression that this dance hall was built for the entertainment of an elite audience, and not of the installed idol.
After this, other perceptions began to fall into place. Very few of the carvings and sculptures depicted the lives of common people. They captured wars and hunts and a plethora of voluptuous mithuna couples and sringara . The emphasis was clearly on the pleasures of the flesh and not the pursuits of the mind and spirit. Religious themes were also significantly absent, apart from the main one of the Sun God riding his chariot. Not even the temples of Khajuraho devote so much attention to depicting of the delights of kama . We skimmed through the Archaeological Survey of India's booklet on Konarak, seeking an explanation. We found a very revealing comment. It said: “…the edifice is the realization of the dazzling dream of an ambitious and mighty king, secular to the core and with immense zest for life…The vision of the king, whose personality has been fully reflected in these secular sculptures, has thus been completely fulfilled.”
Smaller one
There is also another significant fact. To the west of the temple stands a second, smaller temple now called the Mayadevi Temple. According to the ASI, “This temple was meant originally for Surya.”
Clearly, however, if a rich and powerful monarch wants a great boon from his deity, he has to make a suitable gift. King Narasimha was also known as langulia: “One having a tail.” Some people are born with a protuberance jutting out from the base of their spines: A vestigial, and enormously embarrassing, tail. It is more than likely, then, that the Nata Mandap was the pleasure dome of the monarch. Later, he built the great temple behind his evocative dancing hall to placate the powerful Surya, begging the Sun God to rid him of that mocking appendage! A tail must have repelled those with whom the monarch shared his vigorous “zest for life”!
