Celebration

5 Ratha’s, Mahabalipuram (600 AD)

When you stand in front of the “5-Rathas” in Mahabalipuram, they do not hit you with the 1st impression of grandeur that we are used to seeing in the architecture of the Red Forts, the Qutab Minar or the Taj Mahal. Rather, just as these thoughts have passed your mind, you sense a gesture of certain humbleness that tells you that here the architects, sculptures and artists were never on a mission to impose their Gods.

The simple postures of the "Lord Shiva” in dancing, eating, making love, and sleeping positions, convey a rather different vision on how people in the 600 BC looked at gods, to the centuries that followed in the temples in Tanjor and the other parts of southern India. The idols suggest a much closer relation to the daily activities of the common man; they presumably believed in celebrating the form- ‘life’, with a common man’s icon -“the Shiva”. He was what a man was to be - a Giver, an Organiser and a Destroyer, all the powers that every man would hold in his lifetime on earth. The architecture hence celebrated a gesture of being, with simplicity in form and rhythm but with a new kind of design.

In an early morning walk to these off shore rock-cut structures, the noise of the waves accompanies you along with the visual delight. At a closer look, some seem unfinished, while others are carelessly done, compared to the rock cut caves of the Ajanta and Ellora that predates this by over 500 years. But, this is where the south-Indian temples found their style of architecture that has followed ever since. (The stepped roof that is seen all over with carvings and statues that are sometimes engraved but mostly stuck onto the different roofs and gateways.) With a transformation to seeing God in a completely different perspective-the almighty, the ‘Gopurams’(gateways) grew larger and larger and the shrine ‘mandappa’ got wealthier while the priest’s and kings arose as a power houses, later forming a different society altogether.

We can possibly analyse a building by the help of the next 3 catagories:

1. FACE: The grandeur or its form

2. HEART: The details or reasoning (response to climate, site, function, craftsmanship, materials, light, spaces etc)

3. TRAIL: The thought behind a building or the concept that lasts long after your visit that makes a place in memory.

The structures of Mahabalipuram do not have a face to boast about, they do have a heart that pumped the architecture of Dravidian temples till date but surely they leave a massive trail that needs to be rejuvenated. A thought that gods are not descendants from heaven who possess supernatural powers, but humans just like you and me. And it is this celebration of such a supreme thought in 600 BC that makes these structures so unique. They built for a simple pleasure in building: the act of doing, with ideas of celebration. Their thoughts were similar to the first man who ever made fire- he never invented it for us to light a gas stove but just his want to do it which gave him his own satisfaction. The people of Mahabalipuram did no different, they had a kind of thought that all of humanity still strives for.


-Subharthi Guha
10th May 2008