To Tirunelveli and Tamarabharani with Mystical Palmyra

Two years ago Nithya and I went along on a two day holiday trip to Tirunelveli organised by Mystical Palmyra an organisation led by Priya Thyagarajan, a young pocket dynamo with extraordinary organisational skills, and Pradeep Chakravarthy a historian and epigraphist. This was a pilot effort by the duo and around thirty of us made up the tour party. Most of us knew a few in the group, but none of us knew everyone.

Early Pandya Cave Temple, Thirumalapuram

That trip did have some glitches. We visited several temples to savour their architectural, social, and cultural content. But many in the tour group thought that worship was part of the tour agenda. This resulted in the schedule going haywire. But in all other respects the holiday was very enjoyable and we got to see and learn about many interesting facts connected with the places and regions that we visited, including the local cuisine. We also go to know the others in the group and found them to be very good company.

Steeple of hill-top church, Thirumalapuram

Before the trip ended the organisers asked for feedback from all the tour members and by the time the next tour came along in about three months they acted on most of the suggestions. It was decided that these tours would focus on the cultural and heritage aspects, and not on religious worship. Since then Nithya and I have been on all the tours organised by Mystical Palmyra, which translates to a tour every three months or so.

A structure near the rear entrance to the temple at Thiruppudai Maruthur

Typically we leave on a Thursday evening and return on Sunday morning so that we can rest and recover to face the week on Monday morning. We spend two nights on the train and one night in a hotel. And local travel in the region that we visit is in a/c coaches. And over the last two years it has got to the point where we not only look forward to visiting new places but also in getting together with familiar faces in the tour group.

Sculpture in Narumpoonathar Koil at Thiruppudai Maruthur,

The sketches in this post are from the two tours to Tirunelveli. The second one was in December last year. The first three sketches were made on location and the last one was done later using a photograph taken on the trip for reference. Over the next few posts I propose to share more of these sketches and some of the stories related to them with you.

Dakshina Chitra

Dakshina Chitra is a very popular heritage village located on the Southern outskirts of Chennai, on the way to Mamallapuram (previously known as Mahabalipuram). Some months ago I had visited this place with members of my sketching group (Chennai Weekend Artists). My friends were delighted with the sketching opportunities at this venue, and since then we have made two more visits to the place. I am convinced that we will be going there many more times.

During our second visit to Dakshina Chitra there was a performance by a troupe of drummers from a neighbouring state. In the short time available before the start of their performance I managed to do a couple of quick sketches of a couple of the artistes. These served as warm-up exercises to my main sketch of the day. This was a sketch of the Chettinad House. Chettinad is a small region in Southern Tamilnadu known for its local cuisine, architecture, and consequently its skilled masons, carpenters and craftsmen.

Our most recent visit was last month. This time there was a newly constructed building called the Chikmagulur House which caught my eye. It represents the type of houses seen in a certain part of Karnataka, a neighbouring state. As has been my practice over the last few months, I sketched this and the other sketches of the day directly in ink with a Hero 578 fountain pen.

My next sketch was of a cluster of thatched houses typical of rural Tamilnadu. We use different types of thatched roofing in this region. The roof in this cluster is made of river-bed reeds and is considered a higher quality of thatch roofing. The space under this type of roof is much cooler than under other types of thatch roofing which use the woven leaves of palm trees.

Villages in Tamilnadu have temples dedicated to a guardian deity. These temples are called Ayyanar Temples and the priests in these temples come from the potter community. As a result, the icons in and around these Ayyanar Temples are usually made of terracotta. Dakshina Chitra has showcased one such temple and my next sketch was of a white painted terracotta idol facing this temple.

After each sketching trip one of the members of the group posts a report of the visit and the other members then upload their sketches and photographs of the day into this thread. If you would like to see what others in my sketching group sketched on these visits please follow these links:

Dakshina Chitra - 1st visit.

Dakshina Chitra - 2nd visit.

Dakshina Chitra - 3rd visit.

Doll Bazaar, Mylapore

Navarathri is a festival celebrated widely throughout India over nine successive nights. In several Indian languages the word means “nine nights” and perhaps that is why the festival is called Navarathri. There are many variants of this festival and in South India, and in particular in Tamilnadu this is a time when people arrange dolls and religious icons in an artistic manner within their houses and invite their neighbours over. There is therefore a lot of socialising over these nine days.

Each family tries to outdo the others in the selection and artistic arrangement of the stuff that they display. This results in lots of doll bazaars (markets) springing up in the weeks preceding this festival and during the festival itself. Most of these bazaars sprout around temples. The vendors spread out their wares on the pavements or hawk them from pushcarts.

In even the recent past most of these dolls were made of eco-friendly material like clay, wood, reeds and so on and were made by local craftsmen. The displays therefore also served to showcase local crafts and arts. But of late I see plastic dolls of Hindu deities, made in China, flooding our markets. To me this robs this festival of much of its charm and relevance.

During this year's Navarathri I visited the area around the Mylapore Temple along with others in my sketching group to sketch the doll vendors. Although I did sketch some of them the dolls themselves were small and therefore did not figure too prominently in my sketches. But I think I did manage to capture some of the character of these informal and very chaotic shopping areas.

I sketched all four on location, directly in ink, using a Hero 578 fountain pen.

Semmozhi Poonga

While Bengaluru (Bangalore) has the reputation of being a garden city and is known for its beautiful gardens and trees Chennai, though not known for its tree cover, is also surprisingly green. Many of its roads and streets are lined with trees offering a lot of shade. But unfortunately these trees are not well kept. Chennai is also an extremely pedestrian-unfriendly city and therefore although the streets are shaded, the people out on the streets cannot enjoy a leisurely walk at any time of the day.

Chennai also has between 250 and 350 parks which are supposed to be maintained by Chennai Corporation. In fact many of them are not at all maintained, but this is something that is improving of late. The three largest parks in the city are the Guindy National Park, Semmozhi Poonga, and Tholkappia Poonga. The last two are recent additions to Chennai's park-list although both were already large open lung spaces of the city.

My sketching group from PencilJammers visited Semmozhi Poonga several times in the space of a few months. I was with them on only one of these visits and I found it to be a very pleasant place to visit. But my wife who had been there about a year earlier was very critical of the poor upkeep and felt that the place was being allowed to go to seed. Hopefully the people in charge will realise that they owe it to the public to preserve such spaces in pristine condition.

At Semmozhi Poonga I started my first sketch sitting at a shady spot, but unfortunately I had not taken the sun path into consideration. I soon found myself out of the shade and sitting directly under the hot sun. Fortunately I had already completed the skeleton of the sketch. I therefore packed up and completed that sketch at home. 

Meanwhile the others in my sketching group had selected a spot in the park that offered multiple sketching options and were engaged in a discussion on different approaches to sketching. I joined them and decided to experiment with a loose and quick gestural sketch based on suggestions from my friend Ganapathy Subramaniam (GS). Though new to this way of approaching a sketch I was quite pleased with result.

Figure And Portrait Sketching At Cholamandal Artists Village

Cholamandal Artists Village has become the fall-back venue for our sketching group. Apart from each of us choosing subjects of our choice, which we do on some occasions, the resident (professional) artists at Cholamandal arrange one or more still life compositions for us on each of our visits. They also sketch along with us to demonstrate the many ways in which we could explore each subject.

On a couple of occasions we also had people sitting for us. The first time this happened the model was a friend of one of our group of sketchers. We were told that he would be coming in a little later and therefore I warmed up by sketching the drapery that had been arranged as the backdrop for a still life composition.

Once Sumit (our model) arrived, while most of my friends attempted portrait studies I decided to sketch a full figure. I had sketched people from life only on a couple of occasions before this and was therefore quite pleased with the result. I took this photograph of Sumit after I had finished my sketch.

 

Some weeks later we had an old man sit for us. This time I tried to draw only his face and I think I did a fair job of it since the old man was very happy with it. That day a reporter from a daily newspaper had come to interview the resident artists at Cholamandal about the Sunday morning sketching sessions that they had been running for a long time and since we PencilJammers happened to be there that day, some of us were also interviewed. I was not interviewed but when the article appeared in the newspaper I was very surprised to find that my sketch had been included in the news report.

Pencil Jammers at Dakshina Chitra

Dakshina Chitra is a heritage village which showcases the art, architecture, crafts, culture, and traditions of South India. It is located on the Southern edge of Chennai on the coastal road to Mamallapuram (formerly known as Mahabalipuram). Dakshina Chitra is a very interesting place, well worth visiting for anyone, and in particular for tourists if they wish to experience a bit of many parts of South India in a short span of time without actually travelling to all the places.

My wife, daughter and I are frequent visitors but most of my sketch group friends from PencilJammers were visiting Dakshina Chitra for the first time. They were bowled over by all that was there to see and sketch, and decided that this was yet another place that the group had to visit regularly. You can see a small sample of it here.

Villages in South India have a guardian deity at the entrance to the village and in Tamilnadu this deity is known as Ayyanar. Dakshina Chitra too has an Ayyanar Temple for the benefit of its visitors and this is the place that we all met at. But while we were sketching the subjects of our choice, a procession of men in huge colourful masks accompanied by trumpeters and drummers swept past us. We were all very curious and followed them and found that this was a troupe from Karnataka (a neighbouring state in South India) who were there at Dakshina Chitra to perform a traditional masked dance.

The dance was very attractive and energetic and at the end of it the dancers took off their masks and rested for a while. Some of my friends sketched the dancers in motion and a few attempted quick portraits when they took a break. I chose to do a quick pen & ink sketch of the masks which the dancers had lined up on chairs while they rested.

After that we all went back to our orginal spots to continue on the sketches that we had started earlier. I made further progress on a sketch of the Ayyanar Temple which I had started earlier and then had to leave. I completed the sketch later that day at home.