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.

Kailasanatha Temple, Ellora, India

It has been a very long time since I posted in this blog. I have been meaning to resume but the longer the break the tougher it is to get back. An unexpected break from work today motivated me to post something to get started once again.

A few days ago I made a quick impressionistic pen and ink sketch of the Kailasanatha Temple, at Ellora, in Maharashtra, India. The sketch is based on a photograph in Good Ideas' album Hindu Temples on Facebook. 

This is a rock cut temple carved out of a single rock, and one of the biggest of this kind. It is approximately 1300 years old and there is an interesting story about the construction, or should I say the sculpting, of this temple.

The king of the region was seriously ill and his loving queen prayed for his recovery. She made a vow that if the king was cured she would not only build a temple, but also fast until the topmost part of the temple was in place. 

In due course the king recovered and it was now time for his queen to keep to both her promises. But every temple architect who was consulted said that it would take years for a befitting temple to be constructed. And surely the queen could not survive fasting for such a long period.

But one temple architect came up with a very clever solution. He proposed carving a temple from a huge rock and working from the top downwards. This would allow him to sculpt the top of the temple in about a week, allowing the queen to fulfill her vow.

Whether this story is true or not in all its details, experts are of the opinion that this temple was indeed sculpted out of a single rock, and also that it was carved from the top downwards!

Queen Mary's College, Chennai - Centenary Celebrations

Yesterday I attended one of the events connected with the centenary celebrations of the Queen Mary's College, Chennai. This was the first college exclusively for women in Chennai and probably the third such college in India. It is administered by the Goverment of Tamilnadu which controls the purse strings and the faculty appointments. At present around 7500 students study here in two shifts.

The college was established in July 1914 and therefore the cebrations had started a year ago and were just culminating at the end of the centenary year. My wife studied here over forty years ago and has very fond memories of how it used to be then.

About a year ago she had arranged for the members of Chennai Weekend Artists to visit the campus on a Sunday morning and sketch on location. I spent most of that morning wandering around the campus and therefore made only a few quick sketches which I am posting here.. It was my first visit to the place and I was struck by the air of decay and neglect. Despite some efforts to spruce up the place in view of the occasion, that air still prevailed yesterday. 

In fact one of the guests at the function remarked to me about this and asked asked why on earth anyone in authority would want to deliberately run down the place, for that is what seems to be happening. To me the answer seems very simple and obvious. The people in power obviously do not care either about heritage or education. It must be a source of very great irritation to them that such a prime site facing the Marina Beach, and with a sea view from almost every part of the campus, is not exploited to its full commercial value.

Some years ago there was a proposal to shift the Government Secretariat to this location and relocate the college to a much smaller site. But there was enormous resistance to this idea, not only from the students and some of the staff, but also from the general public. Ultimately the court intervened and the government was compelled to drop the idea. One would have thought that the authorities in power would have been gracious enough to then take up the upkeep of the college in all sincerity, but that has not happened so far. Is it too much to hope that there will at last be a change of heart and that the government will do everything in its power to restore many of these buildings, use them appropriately so that the buildings are alive, and also maintain the grounds which have the potential to be a beautiful campus but  alas, at present, resemble a dump or a thorny scrubland depending on which part of the campus you are in? 

India's National Musical Instrument - The Veena

The veena is India's national musical instrument. The musical notes emanating from this instrument are rich and very pleasing. And the musical concerts by veena vidwans (expert players) draw huge crowds. But all this has not resulted in any benefit to the skilled makers of this musical  instrument. This fact was the central theme of an article in today's issue of The Hindu, one of India's national newspapers.

I was very distressed to read this article. Unfortunately we seem to be losing a lot of crafts and skills that have been honed and perfected over generations. If this is the plight of something as glorious as veena music I can only wonder what would happen to very many other less popular but equally precious links to our heritage.

There was one more reason for this particular article catching my attention and moving me. My wife is particularly fond of veena music. She initially learnt to play this instrument when she was a teenager and continued to learn and train well into her late 50s from her aunt Vidya Shankar, a reknowned musicologist and veena vidwan. 

My taste in music is very different and for most of my life I have given carnatic music performances a miss. But about a year and a half ago my sketching friends in Chennai Weekend Artists and I were asked by the editor of a local newspaper if we could attend the December music concerts all over Chennai, that this city is famous for, and make some on the spot sketches. I therefore attended a few concerts at different venues and a very remarkable thing happened.

On earlier visits (that I had been compelled to make despite my protests) to these concerts, my focus had been on the music and an attempt to appreciate it, which I found very difficult to do. But now, with my entire focus on the sketching, the music was only something in the background and I found it very pleasing and soothing. By the time the month long musical concert season was over I was a convert and now I am more than happy to sit through some performances, with or without a sketchbook in hand.

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.

Chennai Weekend Artists

I have not posted in this blog for several months but I have been fairly regular with my Sunday morning location sketching. I am still part of the same sketching group that I joined in Sept 2012 but we now have a new name: Chennai Weekend Artists (CWA) hosted by the art community Pencil Jammers.

Chennai, which was known as Madras until 1996, celebrates its founder's day on the 22^nd of August every year. It suddenly occurred to us that by visiting different locations within the city we at CWA were actually celebrating Chennai/Madras round the year. We therefore presented our work and several of us spoke about our activities at a function held as part of the Madras Day celebration this year. The event was very well received and soon after that we found our membership surging.

Earlier we had a membership of around 30 or 40 with not more than ten members ever getting together at one time. Now our membership is in three digits and we regularly get around 30 persons participating every Sunday morning. The participants vary in age from 6 to 60+ and it is therefore now a challenge to choose locations which will meet a variety of sketching interests.

So far we have visited a number of locations within our city and our sketching itself has been confined to only a pre-lunch session every Sunday. But I think the group is now ready to spread its wings. We are considering locations outside Chennai and perhaps one day we will even think of journeying overnight to our sketching locations.

Starting from the top these are 1. A corner of the General Post Office Building on Rajaji Salai ("Salai" means "Road"). 2, Kapaleeswarar Temple, at Mylapore. 3. The State Bank of India Building on Rajaji Salai. 4. Valluvar Kottam at Nungambakkam.