About an hour into her lecture on Cambodia’s temples at the Tattvaloka Auditorium on Eldams Road, Dr. Chithra Madhavan says she has something exciting to show on her next slide. The audience waits with bated breath. At first one sees a photo of one of the many entranceways into the Banteay Srei Temple in the Angkor region of the south-eastern nation. Dr. Madhavan moves to the next slide - a slightly zoomed-in version of the same picture. “Do you see it?” she asks. Slowly, the audience starts to recognise the slightly worn-out central figure carved into the pink sandstone: Lord Siva frozen in the midst of his Anandatandava, the celestial dance.
But that’s not the interesting bit. “Who do you see at the bottom left?” she continues to quiz her listeners. The focus shifts to the next zoom-in, to the bottom-left: a frail old lady watching with eyes wide open. Her hairstyle is distinctly Cambodian, as is her attire — atleast from what can be seen.
“That’s undoubtedly Karaikal Ammaiyar,” Dr. Madhavan says, as the audience responds in surprise. She shows two more photos from closer home of Lord Siva in his Nataraja avatar, in the Thiruvalangadu Temple (about 65 kms west of Chennai) and also one from the Chola temple in Gangaikondacholapuram and sure enough, there’s the same old woman carved on the bottom-left with hands folded.
This tradition of depicting Karaikal Ammaiyar along with Nataraja is ingrained in Chola-period architecture, Dr. Madhavan says. Ammaiyar belonged to the list of 63 saints (the Nayanmars)—and was also one of the only three lady saints — who influenced the worship of Siva in the Tamil country during the Bhakti Movement. And this tradition has been duly transported across the sea to Cambodia.
“Your best bet on finding an image of Karaikal Ammaiyar outside of Tamil Nadu lies here,” Dr. Madhavan points out. “This is how you reconstruct history,” she says. ”Because the temple architects could’ve carved only what they saw.”
The Tamil connection doesn’t stop there. Dr. Madhavan had already spoken of how, sometime in the eighth century, important people from Kanchipuram set out in search of a prospective candidate who could take over from their heirless ruler. The verandah of the Vaikuntaperumal Temple in Kanchi offers clues about this, according to her. It contains what is probably the most comprehensive narration about the kings of the Pallava dynasty—their births, deaths, coronations, wars, victories, building commissions—up until the life of a certain Nandivarman II, who is said to have succeeded Parameswaravarman. Who was this man? Where did he come from? What the carvings tell us, Dr. Madhavan says, is that some people from Kanchi went to a faraway place, crossing mountains, rivers and forests and reached out to a king named Hiranyavarman (a distant relative of the dead Kanchi ruler). Hiranyavarman had four sons, and only the last one, Pallavamalla alias Parameswara, accepted the offer and was coronated as Nandivarman II back home in Kanchi.” Unfortunately one still does not know where this ‘faraway’ place was. Historians are divided over the question of whether this was Kambuja Desa (Cambodia) or somewhere else,” Dr. Madhavan says.
This is what makes her lectures interesting: the uncertainty, the gaps waiting to be filled, which promises that the lecture that answers today’s questions will ask more tomorrow.
For the time being, Dr. Madhavan still commands attention furthering the India connection through a series of familiar motifs: the heavily Sanskritised names of the Khmer kings (Jayavarman, Suryavarman, Yashovarman) and their cities (Shambupura, Ratnagiri, Mahendraparvata), the combined effect of Nagari script, Sanskrit and Khmer languages in the edicts and the similar meters they follow in verse when compared with their south Indian equivalents and more. Yet, they all have a distinct style, be it the choice of dress for Siva and Parvati, Narasimha’s stance while tearing into Hiranyakashipu’s entrails or the window grills that look like stacked up Tibetan prayer wheels.
These are relatively small details when compared with the grandiosity of the bigger picture, but are exactly the things that deserve equal attention, according to Dr. Madhavan.
She points out something unusual on a stone column in the Ta Prohm temple, an engraving bordered by a circle that’s just a bit larger than an average coffee-mug coaster. Many people have noticed it and have argued about it. It’s an animal for sure, a boar or some sort of a mammal. But it is its ridged back and tail that stuns the audience. Could it have been something as exotic as one of the last dinosaurs? Or something as mundane as a pangolin as others have pointed out? One doesn’t know for sure.
One thing that Dr. Madhavan does speak of with certainty is the Cambodians’ pride in their heritage, which symbolises the zenith of Hinduism in what is predominantly a Theravada Buddhist nation today. Their national flag depicts the imposing Angkor Wat. It’s a shared sense of pride for us, apart from the Hinduism angle, because some of this heritage is jointly maintained by the Archaeological Survey of India.
The common thread running across Dr. Madhavan’s slides during her lecture was this exact feeling of shared cultural pride. Sample this connection between Kulen Mountainin Cambodia and a town near Sirsi in the Uttara Kannada region in India: a river bed carved with a1000 shivalingas! “It does something to you when you look at something like this miles from your native place!” she says.
Perhaps familiarity doesn't breed contempt at times.
