The Thief Who Stole My Heart by Vidya Dehejia

Author:Vidya Dehejia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2023-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 6.8. (a) Dancing Shiva, Gangaikondacholapuram, Ariyalur district, Tamil Nadu, ca. 1030. (b) Detail of pedestal of Dancing Shiva (fig. 6.8a), depicting woman saint Karaikkal Ammaiyar seated at far left.

Figure 6.9. Detail of Saint “Mother of Karaikkal” along pedestal of Dancing Shiva, Polonnaruwa Museum (see fig. 6.4).

Figure 6.10. Saint “Mother of Karaikkal,” Tiruvalankadu temple, ca. 1030.

In the signature verse of her second poem in this mode, she describes herself as “Karaikkal pey who has sharp teeth and a fiery mouth.”55 Both the stone image on the mainland and the Polonnaruwa bronze capture the essence of the saint’s own bizarre verbal portrayal of the forest ghouls who watch Shiva’s dance, and of her own ghoulish self.

At Polonnaruwa, Karaikkal Ammaiyar is also portrayed as a less forbidding tiny figure to the far left of the pedestal of the large Dancing Shiva, where she squats sideways, gazing up at her dancing lord and sounding her cymbals (fig. 6.9). Four of Shiva’s dwarfish gana attendants, who sit facing forward, provide further accompaniment for their master’s dance; one blows a conch shell, a second plays the flute, a third sounds the ghatam (earthen pot played as a drum), and the fourth sounds the cymbals. This more sympathetic portrayal of the saint is closer to the tone and feel of the bronze in the temple at Tiruvalankadu on the mainland, located beside the forest where Karaikkal Ammaiyar’s poetry locates her dancing lord (fig. 6.10). Sitting cross-legged with sharply delineated collarbones, depleted breasts that hug her rib cage, and raised knobbly shoulder joints, her face reflects a peaceful calm as she sounds her cymbals. In this portrayal, her shrunken body accords more closely with the tale of a beautiful young woman deprived of her fleshy contours, rather than a fearsome ghoulish creature.

In their difficulty in portraying the typical tri-bhanga or “triple-bent” contrapposto, Sri Lankan bronzes of Uma present us with yet another example of the sculptors’ misinterpretation of a major aspect of Kaveri basin imagery. A mere glance at the Tiruvenkadu Uma whom we examined in the previous chapter clarifies that tribhanga requires Uma’s crowned head and lower limbs to be posed at the same angle, while the torso moves in the opposite direction (see fig. 5.2). The artist of a powerful Polonnaruwa Uma, standing over 3 feet tall together with pedestal, appears to have found this a baffling concept. His Uma’s head and torso are at more or less the same angle; for the viewer standing in front of the image, they both slope to the left, while the lower body is more or less vertical (fig. 6.11a, b). The result is an uncoordinated and somewhat ungainly effect that is especially evident through comparison with Kaveri delta images. It is intriguing though to compare this Polonnaruwa Uma with a second Uma from Polonnaruwa whose sculptor better understood the triple-bent posture and created an image that is more appropriately balanced (fig. 6.12). Images of Uma are to be found in both categories, raising the identical issues revolving

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.