Unearthing the past

 

Apart from being storehouses of wealth, power and spirituality as well, Tanjore’s temples were also rich in history and historical records. And though Tanjore did not leave much to be unearthed, the past had not yet been understood though it was available to everyone, everywhere - inscribed on the walls, floors and pillars of temples. It required the genius of men who could read old scripts – people like Eugen Hultzsch and V. Venkayya, to decipher the inscriptions of Tanjore’s temples, most importantly, the Big Temple or Brihadeeswarar Temple and publish them in hardbound volumes sponsored by the Archaeological Survey of India.  While Kumbakonam’s temples had been embroiled in politics, Tanjore’s were comparatively free of their influence. The Brihadeeswarar Temple, the only temple of note in the city, was still administered by the charities of the erstwhile Mahratta royal family and archaeologists like Hulztsch had ready access to it.

The first to use the Brihadeeswarar Temple for research was William Lambton who famously installed his theodolite on top of the gopura and as anticipated, both theodolite and part of the gopura came crashing down.[1] After this misadventure, the Brihadeeswara remained largely impervious to the depredations of the curious mind in the name of research and the temple remained almost unmolested for nearly a hundred years save for the odd tourist or photographer who felt content with disturbing the surroundings alone with their tripods and equipment. And then, not that research alone causes harm. In fact, European materialism first encountered Indian mysticism not through its surveyors or photographers but through its Red-coats during the Carnatic wars. In fact, during those troubled times, temples like Srirangam were used as bastions by both the British and the French who felt the the huge walls of these temples could serve as an effective shield from enemy guns. But miraculously, many of the big temples in Tanjore and Trichinopoly survived, though battered by mortar and artillery fire that left gaping holes in the walls and overturned gopuras which were only restored after the contest of power was decided. And then, decades later, as Pax Britannica dawned, a German professor arrived with his assistant - a Brahmin scholar descended from the 16th century philosopher Appayya Dikshitar, and the duo toiled day and night under the monstrous Nandi to unlock the mysteries of this architectural masterpiece and uncover the entire life and legacy of a great monarch whose power and majesty the monument singularly reflected.[2]

Shortly before Hultzsch, the Brihadeeswarar Temple was visited by Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant-Duff, the then Governor of Madras. Grant-Duff records his impressions

Its general effect is not less imposing than, though very different from, that of Edfou or Denderah. The temples of Benares filled me with something akin to disgust, but this is very different. The famous black bull is a grand beast, of Egyptian proportions and benignity[3]

Born in Dresden in 1857, Eugen Hultzsch was educated at Leipzig and Bonn, where he aspired to follow in the footsteps of the indefatigible Max Mueller by becoming a Sanskritist.[4] Hultzsch worked as an Assistant Professor of Sanskrit for a few years, but fate had something else in store for him. He was offered a job by the Archaeological Survey of India. [5]So, instead of reading and translating Sanskrit classics, Hultzsch ended up deciphering inscriptions mostly in Tamil and Asokan Prakrit and interpreting them. As a result, Hultzsch for his scientific study of epigraphs was isolated from the mainstream by ideologies and politics and would never become as famous as Max Mueller for his championing of Sanskrit and romanticization of its classical Vedic heritage. But archaeologists like Hultzsch were as much important to the study of India's past as Max Mueller and though relegated to a mere footnote by most historians, it is undoubtedly to Hulztch and Venkayya that we owe the reconstruction of South Indian history.

And more importantly, Hultzsch discovered and groomed Venkayya. V. Venkayya hailed from Valaiyattur near Arni in the then North Arcot district. Born in 1864 to Appa Sitarama Ayyar, a Tamil scholar, Venkayya graduated in Physics from the University of Madras before being selected as Assistant Epigraphist by Hultzsch who almost instantly recognized his proficiency in Sanskrit. After intense training, Venkayya could embark on field work. The two worked on the inscriptions from late 1887 onwards and completed the task by 1890 when they were published in five parts of volume two of ASI's South Indian Inscriptions series.[6] The epoch in which Hulztsch and Venkayya worked were miserable times for the Archaeological Survey which was living a frugal existence on a shoe-string budget the epigraphical work of Hulztsch and Venkayya in the south and Burgess in the north being the sole saving grace. [7]

Venkayya died prematurely at Mambalam in what was then the district of Chingleput in the year 1912 and a teary-eyed Hulztsch by now the editor of the ASI's journal Epigraphica Indica dedicated volume eleven of the series to him.

But Hultzsch and Venkayya were, by no means, the first to work on the Tanjore inscriptions. As early as 1859, two years before the Archaeological Survey of India was formed, those mysterious writings on the walls had sufficiently impressed Sir Charles Trevelyan, the then Governor of Madras for him to order part of the inscriptions to be photographed and published by the Madras government.[8] In 1871, the celebrated epigraphist Arthur Coke Burnell, who was then serving as a District Judge in Tanjore, had the inscriptions copied by his assistant Madurai Muthia Pillai.[9] In fact, Burnell’s work in Tanjore district went far beyond beyond epigraphy and during his service in the district, the longest in his career, he delved deeply into the district’s rich history and culture and published an index to the Sanskrit manuscripts at the Tanjore Saraswati Mahal Library.[10] This laudable initiative was, allegedly, the brainchild of Lord Napier whose drive to preserve the Tanjore library motivated Burnell.[11] Burnell concluded that most of the inscriptions in the Brihadeeswarar Temple were the work of a ruler named Vira Chola who reigned (according to him) from 1064 to 1114.[12] In 1880, a Curator of Ancient Monuments (Captain Henry Hardy Cole) was appointed and as part of his official duties, he toured Kumbakonam and Tanjore and submitted a report on the conservation status of the monuments in those two towns.[13]  But Burnell died young, exhausted by his work with the Palace Library. Little further headway was done till Hultsch and Venkayya arrived on the scene.

With the early 1900s, Hultzsch felt his work in India drawing to a close. He returned to native Germany where he resumed his teaching position.[14] Hultzsch died in 1927 at the age of sixty nine, half a dozen years before Adolf Hitler came to power. [15]Meanwhile, even as Hultzsch was busy deciphering Raja Raja's inscriptions, a Tamil pundit at the Kumbakonam College had embarked on the mission of a lifetime - to retrieve surviving palm-leaf reproductions of the earliest Tamil literary works, some of whom were a thousand years older than the Brihadeeswarar Temple and already forgotten by the time Raja Raja assumed his throne. It was the like of which few had attempted before and it made Mahamahopadhyay U. Ve. Swaminatha Iyer, a contemporary of Hultzsch, a legend. The history of the Tamil country was pushed back by almost a millenium and the Gajabahu synchronism and Kharavela's inscriptions gave a date - the first century BC. Tanjore, too, shared in the joy of these discoveries. It was the centre of one of the three great kingdoms referred to in the newly-discovered works though it would be a long wait before archaeological evidence was to come by and when Kovalan's Poompuhar was excavated in the 1960s, U. Ve. Swaminatha Iyer was already long dead.

The most famous archaeological discovery made in Tanjore, however, was a chance one. On the 8th of April 1931, S. K. Govindaswami, a professor of history at the Annamalai University, stumbled upon paintings of the Nayak period as he inspected the circumambulatory passage surrounding the sanctum-sanctorum, the garba-griha. [16]As he examined the murals in detail, he made an even more important finding. He found that they had been painted upon frescoes of an earlier time.  The underlying paintings, it was proved later, belonged to the Chola period and one of the figures is even believed to be that of Raja Raja, himself. [17]An excited Govindaswami quickly dashed off a letter to The Hindu.[18] However, understandably, his discoveries have been far less publicized than the inscriptions (ostensibly to safeguard the fragile paintings) and very few have actually seen the crumbling masterpieces.

[1] Keay, John (1981). India Discovered. William Collins. pp 185-186.

[2] Subrahmanian, Nainar (1980). Tamil Epigraphy: A Survey. Ennes Publications. p 31.

[3]India Pictorial and Descriptive, London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1888, p 210.

[4] Biography of Eugen Hultzsch at the Archaeological Survey of India website.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Pillai [1958](1935). The Great Temple at Tanjore,  p 25.

[7] Keay John (2011). To Cherish and Conserve. Archaeological Survey of India. pp 103-104.

[8] “Appendix”. Preservation of National Monuments – First Report of the Curator of Ancient Monuments in India for the year 1881-82. Shimla. 1882.

[9] Ibid                                                                        

[10] “Arthur Coke Burnell: Obituary”. The Annual Register Volume 124. 1883. p 156.

[11] Burnell says:

It is due entirely to the scholarlike and lively interest taken in the past of India by Lord Napier that this invaluable collection has been saved. (Rees, J. D.(1891). Narratives of Tours in India made by His Excellency Lord Connemara, Governor of Madras 1886-1890. Madras, p 325)

[12] “Appendix”. Preservation of National Monuments – First Report of the Curator of Ancient Monuments in India for the year 1881-82. Shimla. 1882.

[13] Ibid

[14] Biography of Eugen Hultzsch at the Archaeological Survey of India website.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Pillai [1958](1935). The Great Temple at Tanjore,  pp 20-25.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

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