The Brihadisvara Temple in Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu

IN a remarkable feat performed in the face of overwhelming odds, two

officers of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and a young
photographer have photographed in minute detail four huge frescoes
found in the Brihadisvara temple in Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu. What makes
their work all the more creditable is the difficult location of the murals,
their enormous size and their reflecting surface, all of which posed big
challenges.
 The passage around the sanctum sanctorum where the murals were
found.

The murals, each 15 feet tall and 10 feet wide (4.5 metres x 3 metres),
are about 1,000 years old. They are located in the narrow and dark
passage around the temple's sanctum sanctorum. The great Chola king
Raja Raja I built the Brihadisvara temple between AD 1000 and AD
1008 and the paintings were done between AD 1008 and AD 1012.
 CAPTURING THE MAGNIFICENCE. A single-frame, out-of-perspective
picture of the mural depicting Siva as Nataraja.

If most visitors had hitherto no access to these paintings because of

their location, they can now relish the paintings' exact photographic
reproductions, which are on display at the newly opened Interpretation
Centre on the temple premises. The photographs measure nine feet by
six feet.

A montage gives a more accurate reproduction of the mural.

The credit for photographing the murals in exact detail, capturing their
texture and colour, goes to the team comprising Dr. T. Satyamurthy,
who was Superintending Archaeologist, ASI, Chennai Circle, when the
project was executed; P.S. Sriraman, Assistant Superintending
Archaeologist; and N. Thyagarajan, artist and photographer.

Rishi and Rishikumara in the Dakshinamurthy panel.

The four paintings depict Siva as Dakshinamurthy, the story of Tamil

Saivite saint Sundarar, Siva as Tripurantaka, and Raja Raja Chola and
his family worshipping Nataraja (Siva) at the Chidambaram temple. The
paintings, rich in detail, offer a lot of historical information. While all
the frescoes in the Brihadisvara temple together occupy 660 square
metres, these four paintings alone take up 110 sq m.

Village elders reading a document in the Sundarar panel.

Photographing the murals was extremely difficult because they are
painted on both walls of the dark, dingy and narrow passage, which has
no ventilation. The space between the two walls is less than seven feet,
so there is not much space for the photographer to step back and
capture images. Since the paintings are 15 feet tall, one must crane
one's neck to look at the top portions. Most visitors are not allowed to
see these paintings because of the narrowness of the passage and the
poor light and ventilation.

Royal ladies in the Nataraja panel.

Satyamurthy said: "The ASI, Chennai Circle, therefore, undertook a

project to photograph the murals, prepare photographic reproductions
and display them in almost their true size and original colours. This
effort required special techniques because of paucity of space, poor
lighting and the enormous size of the murals. They had to be
photographed in many small frames and then joined to make one
frame. This effort needed high skill."

Vishnu in the Kalyanasundaramurthi panel, in the Ajanta tradition.

Sriraman said: "What is seen in the paintings is seen in the frames. We
have assembled the photographs without loss of perspective. Anybody
can see the paintings in their original dimensions in our photographs."
He explained why the ASI decided to go public with the paintings:
"Documentation is important because people of the next generation
should know that these paintings existed. Recopying is important. In
photography, you get accurate reproduction."

A demon and his consort in the Tripurantaka panel.

What prompted Satyamurthy and Sriraman to get the murals

photographed was that while a number of books had been written
about the Ajanta and Ellora paintings and research done on them, there
was virtually no publication on the Chola paintings in the Brihadisvara
temple.
It was in 1931 that these four, and other, murals in the temple were
discovered by S.K. Govindaswami of Tamil Nadu. He wrote to The Hindu
about it. The relevant news item in The Hindu of April 11, 1931, reads:
"Thousand years old Chola frescoes Reported discovery in Tanjore Big
Temple

SIVA AS TRIPURANTAKA, who subdued the three demons.

Close upon the discovery of the Pallava paintings in the

Kailasanathaswami Temple at Conjeevaram by the French savant, the
indefatigable Prof. Jouveau Dubreuil, it has been my great good fortune
to bring to light the hitherto unknown frescoes of the Imperial Chola
period, in the Brihadeswaraswami Temple, popularly known as `The
Big Temple of Tanjore'."
When Govindaswami visited the temple in 1930, he found "in the dim
religious light of a small oil lamp... the existence of some kind of
paintings on the walls on either side of a dark, narrow
circumambulatory passage around the sanctum sanctorum".
When he returned to the temple in 1931 and examined the place
thoroughly with the help of a "Baby Petromax", he found that the bright
light indeed revealed paintings. "But paintings of an undoubtedly very
late and degenerate age, whose linear contortions and chromatic
extravagances shattered in a moment all my wonderful dreams of
discovering there the best and the only example of the art of Chola
mural paintings. Still I chose a part of the western wall for close
inspection and found the painted plastering there cracked all over and
threatening to fall down. A gentle touch and the whole mass crumbled
down, exposing underneath a fine series of frescoes palpitating with
the life of the other days."

THE INTERPRETATION CENTRE at the temple complex, where the

photographs are on show.

Govindaswami went on to describe the paintings in his letter to The

Hindu, adding: "The discovery of these paintings is of great importance
to the history of South Indian art. Hitherto, the Pallavas held
exclusively the palm for mural paintings in the Tamil country. The
Cholas may now be believed to divide the honours equally with the
Pallavas not only in the South Indian architecture and sculpture but
also in South Indian painting. For I have little doubt, judging from the
excellence of the drawings, the colour scheme and the fresco-
technique, that these paintings belong to the best period of Chola rule,
to the glorious reign of Raja Raja the Great, and contemporary with the
building of the Great Temple at Tanjore."
The paintings with "linear contortions and chromatic extravagances" of
the "very late and degenerate age", which covered the Chola murals
before Govindaswami discovered the latter, were those of the Nayakas
and were done in the 16th and 17th centuries.

In terms of the area they occupy, the Chola paintings in the

Brihadisvara temple rank next only to the Buddhist paintings at Ajanta
in Maharashtra. While the murals at Ajanta come under the tempera
variety, those at the Big Temple are called frescoes. The artists at
Ajanta applied a coat of plaster on the wall of the caves and did the
paintings after the plaster dried up. The paintings survive to this day
because the painting material holds together the pigment in it and the
plaster.

But the Chola-age artists used a more difficult technique at the

Brihadisvara temple. They applied lime plaster on the wall and painted
the murals on the plaster while it was still wet. This demanded that
they should do the sketches and complete the painting before the lime
plaster dried up. This is not easy given the humidity conditions in Tamil
Nadu. In this technique, the paintings formed part and parcel of the
thin lime plaster. Sriraman said, "Here both the plaster and the painting
integrate together. The frescoes are, therefore, more durable but their
execution is very difficult."

In the 1960s, Subbaraman, the Superintending Chemist of the ASI,

discovered a technique by which he stripped the Nayaka paintings that
covered the Chola paintings in such a way that the Nayaka paintings,
too, could be saved. Subbaraman removed the Nayaka paintings and
pasted them on another mount.

When Satyamurthy and Sriraman contacted Thyagarajan about

photographing the Chola frescoes, he accepted the assignment because
of the challenges that the work presented. Thyagarajan, a 31-year-old
post-graduate (Master of Fine Arts) from the Government College of
Fine Arts, Chennai, knew how difficult it was to make a mural because
he was an artist himself. The technical difficulties he faced in
reproducing the murals in the form of photographs involved their size,
their location and their reflecting surfaces. "We solved the problems
one by one," he said.
Thyagarajan used the technique of montage in photography to deal
with the enormous size of the paintings. "The only solution to the
problem presented by size lay in photo montaging," he said. He took 40
to 50 frames of each painting, using digital photography, and
assembled them in a computer to reproduce the whole painting.

A ROYAL LADY in theKalyanasundaramurthi panel. It is reminiscent of

the Ajanta tradition.