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Trying my hand at short movies on Hindu
temples in Tamil Nadu,
© 2014 Wim van Binsbergen
In February-March 2012 my wife and I made a
tour of the Hindu temples in the state of Tamil Nadu, south-east
India had played a considerable role in my
undergraduate and graduate training at Amsterdam University in
the 1960s under Wim Wertheim and his co-workers such as Carla Vreede-Stuers,
but after turning down the offer of doing well-endowed PhD
research on the retail trade in Mumbai, India, I had decided to
become an Africanist under my main teacher of anthropology,
André Köbben besides specialising on popular Islam, with
introductory Arabic and first, short fieldwork in the highlands
of Tunisia, North Africa, 1968. When I was an adolescent,
travelling to
In 2012 my situation had considerably
changed. Since 2004 I had been actively involved in the
international revival of comparative mythology, which had always
had a strong Indological orientation (Max Müller!), and whose
then epicentre was the Harvard Institute for Sanskrit and Indian
Studies, under Michael Witzel. (As a member of Witzels
conference circuit I would visit and revisit
The five temples (panchalinga) of
Shiva as Lord of the Elements are:
element |
lingam |
locality |
name
temple |
video
already available? |
Fire |
Agni
Lingam (Jyothi Lingam) |
Tiruvannamalai |
Arunachaleshvara |
Yes
(2014): http://youtu.be/goDbc4HWT7Y
|
Water |
Appu
Lingam (Jambu Lingam) |
Srirangam
/ Thiruvanaikaval (near Trichi) |
Jambukeshvara |
Yes
(2014) http://youtu.be/iXt0J0VbZvc
|
Earth
/ land |
Prithivi
Lingam |
Kanchipuram |
Ekambareshvara |
yes,
and already uploaded to YouTube in 2012: http://youtu.be/8kQWJUoQkhk
|
Air
/ wind (Vayu) |
Vayu
Lingam |
Kalahasthi,
state Andhra Pradesh (north of Tamil Nadu) |
no,
and not forthcoming either |
|
Sky
/ Aither (Akasha) |
Akasha
Lingam |
Chidambaram |
Nataraja
/ Chit Sabha or Chitambalam |
no,
but forthcoming |
The
Clearly, on our
trip we have missed out on the Air lingam temple, which
finds itself outside Tamil Nadu. Meanwhile, our temple tour was
not entirely limited to the panchalinga series, nor to
Shiva temples and some of my short movies deal in some
detail with other sanctuaries not in the above list: the
magnificent Ranganatha temple at Srirangam / Tiruchirapalli (Trichi);
the Brihadishvara temple at the major town of Thanjavur; and the Brihadishvara
temple at the ruined town of Gangaikondacholapuram near Trichi,
the latter being an ancient replica of the former of the same
name. Finally, my data on the Minakshi / Shiva main temple in
In my forty-five years of anthropological
practice I have learned that the best way to gain a working
knowledge of an initially alien cultural complex is to observe in
detail its sensory manifestations, then to try and give a
coherent account of these however basic against the
background of the available literature, scholarly and otherwise.
If I were to recognise and appreciate such South Asian influences
on sub-Saharan Africa as decades of African fieldwork in
combination with substantial exposure to Asian and comparative
mythological studies were beginning to suggest to me, I would
have to overcome my regional inhibitions as an Africanist, and
try to produce accounts of Asian cultural and religious
manifestations as I had begun to do in regard of the
Chinese aspects of divination and element cosmologies worldwide,
and in regard of pilgrimage and syncretistic Sufism on Java and
Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Thailand. YouTube and small, inobtrusive
portable cameras with video function, in emergencies even cell
phones, provided the technological means and encouragement to
concentrate no longer exclusively on text production but also to
extend the accounts into photo and video applying the old
adage to the effect that a picture is worth a thousand words.
Producing coherent short videos on Shiva element temples would
force me to grapple with Hindu cultural and cultic traits as
never before, might help me ultimately to identify such traits in
Africa, or alternatively to identify Africa in such Asian traits
as well as protecting me from over-enthusiasm in the
spurious claim of such transcontinental continuities. This rule
of thumb would apply, even if my technological skills in film
making were still as minimal as my familiarity with essential
Hindu traits.
The point therefore about these Tamil Nadu
Temple Tour movies is not to add to the sum total (already
very considerable, even on the Internet alone) of common
knowledge about Tamil Nadu Hindu temples, but to force and apply
myself to Hinduism in its most accessible local manifestations
its temples open to tourists and other non-locals. I have
no illusions about the value of these accounts, and my only
reason for uploading them onto YouTube is that that compels me to
conclude the exercise to the full probably with nobody
else benefiting but myself.
I turned 65 in India, notably on the Andaman
Islands which have played such an inspiring role both in early
social anthropology (Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), and in recent
microbiological genetics seeking to unravel the early migratory
history of Anatomically Modern Humans after venturing out of
Africa 80,000 to 60,000 years ago. We were almost stuck on the Andamans,
for Kingfisher Airlines with which we had booked our return
ticked to the mainland was on the brink of bankruptcy, could no
longer maintain its regular services, and finding ourselves
stranded in the middle of the Indian Ocean we had to buy a
replacement with another airline at thrice the original price.
Shortly after our return from
Now, two years later, and while much other
material from heterogeneous provenances has been accumulating, it
is time to return to these drafts of two years ago. I found I had
initially shunned working on the two most complex and rewarding
contexts: the temple of Nataraja (Shiva as Lord of the Dance) in
Chidambaram (where the akasha / aither lingam is
kept, and where during out visit many young girls, with their
parents, came from Jennai to give a dancing tribute to Shiva),
and on the magnificent Minakshi temple in Madurai, in the South
of Tamil Nadu, where our journey had ended, and where easily
accessible rites including musical celebrations at nightfall
accompany the daily transfer of Lord Shiva to the section of the
temple reserved for his female companion, Minakshi.
Overlooking my 2012 draft films now, across
a distance of two years, I am sometimes pleasantly surprised by
the fool-proof tools that present-day camera and software
technology put in the hands of cinematographic newcomers and
Hindu near-ignoramuses like myself. Some small sections do begin
to convey the sense of beauty, devotion, communitas (Victor
Turners term for boundary-effacing sense of fellow-humanity
in ritual), piety that we felt during our temple visits
which often spilled over into personal devotion and offering,
never mind whether we would consider ourselves Hindu or not
(brought up in Christianity and with, on my side at least,
considerable exposure to Islam, our current inclination is rather
towards Buddhism; meanwhile, the dhrupad classical Indian
music we study emerged half a millennium ago from Hindu hymns
played by Islamic musicians).
Admittedly, even in 2012 I was not a total
newcomer to Internet cinematography. Of the many videos I
recorded in Zambia in 2011 during the annual festival of the Kazanga
Cultural Association (since a quarter of a century a major
cultural and artistic expression of the Nkoya people, whose lives
I have shared since 1972), a dozen were provided with key words
and a short description and uploaded onto YouTube that same
summer. All
these movies are available from my website, from a special page
presenting an extensive report on my 2011 Nkoya fieldwork in
Zambia. Some of these obtained more than 3,000 viewings, one
even 10,000 viewings but the fact that the klatter movie
shows two pre-pubescent girls of about 10 years of age
dancing in public and in full daylight view before a crowd of
several thousand people with bare, budding nipples in a
demonstration of the Nkoya female puberty rites, may have
attracted not just enthusiasts of African traditional culture
but, inevitably as a dimension of present-day Internet culture,
also perverts...) And a video I recorded in Western Java
(visiting my Indonesian PhD candidate now Dr Stephanus Djunatan
during his local fieldwork), of a Sunda village pilgrimage
musically underlined by local musicians, attracted over 3,000
viewings and a few enraptured comments, even in the Sundaminority
language, before a hassle over copyright of the popular song
performed by these folk musicians brought YouTube to temporary
(?) suspend the availability of this movie. The point is not that
through YouTube I am reaching, with a low threshold medium, an
additional audience that would never read my scholarly work even
if osted on Internet . The point is that through YouTube I can
mobilise additional means of discharging my life-long insistence
on the counter-hegemonic, intercultural representation of people
in the global periphery, and their cultural and religious
achievements and representing them at the imaginary and
now virtualised rich and powerful centre of the world. However,
such lofty goals are, so far, hardly reached in my Tamil Nadu
Hinduism little movies, with perhaps sporadic exceptions when
something of the architectural and sculptural beauty, or
spiritual intensity and communitas, happens to come across
despite all my ignorance and clumsiness.
I would not be rewriting all my papers at
least six times before and after publication, and yet be happy
with these very initial 2012 film results. I would like to make
very drastic revisions of all my six Tamil Nadu Temple
Tour films so far, but I find that the intuitive and
pedestrian software used (Windows Movie Maker and Googles
Picasa3) only allows for revision of the initial results if, and
only if, the basic graphic documents are still on the computer in
exactly their original location and arrangement, and no new file
names have been given to intermediate and final products. After
prolonged illness and a computer crash in 2012, these conditions
can no longer be met, and the only way to make the revisions I
would prefer now would be to start all over again from scratch. I
cannot bring myself to do this, realising finally, for the first
time in my life, that my days are numbered no less than those of
my fellow humans.
So I see no alternative but to present the
2012 films here in their original form. There are a few points of
content that I particularly regret, especially in the Ranganatha
piece. There, temple sculptures of groups of denuded young women
are presented, no doubt of the Gopis (cow girls) who, according
to common[1] myth, are Lord
Krishnas playful companions; but while I rhetorically
in an only all too familiar stance of knowing better
exclaim, in the subtitles, but where is Krishna
then?, I failed at the time to identify the blue boy in the
tree who could be no other than Krishna. Such are the traps into
which an Africanist may fall when finally trying his hands at
Elaborate
painted sculpture on one of the gopuras (ornate towers) of
the Ranganatha temple: the naughty Krishna (conventionally
represented with a blue skin) had hidden the Gopis (cow
girls) clothes when the latter were taking a bath, and he
himself hides in a tree or course the myth is to be seen,
mainly, as a metaphor of metaphysical enlightenment.
For my own delight as well as that of the
readers, let me quote the relevant passage in full:
Sukadeva Gosvami
said: During the first month of the winter season, the young
unmarried girls of Gokula observed the vow of worshiping goddess Katyayani.
For the entire month they ate only unspiced khichri. My dear
King, after they had bathed in the water of the Yamuna just as
the sun was rising, the gopis made an earthen deity of goddess Durga
on the riverbank. Then they worshiped her with such aromatic
substances as sandalwood pulp, along with other items both
opulent and simple, including lamps, fruits, betel nuts, newly
grown leaves, and fragrant garlands and incense. Each of the
young unmarried girls performed her worship while chanting the
following mantra. O goddess Katyayani, O great potency of
the Lord, O possessor of great mystic power and mighty controller
of all, please make the son of Nanda Maharaja my husband. I offer
my obeisances unto you. Thus for an entire month the girls
carried out their vow and properly worshiped the goddess Bhadrakali,
fully absorbing their minds in K???a and meditating upon the
following thought: May the son of King Nanda become my
husband. Each day they rose at dawn. Calling out to one
another by name, they all held hands and loudly sang the glories
of K???a while going to the Kalindi to take their bath. One day
they came to the riverbank and, putting aside their clothing as
they had done before, happily played in the water while singing
the glories of K???a. Lord K???a, the Supreme Personality of
Godhead and master of all masters of mystic yoga, was aware of
what the gopis were doing, and thus He went there surrounded by
His young companions to award the gopis the perfection of their endeavor.
Taking the girls garments, He quickly climbed to the top of
a kadamba tree. Then, as He laughed loudly and His companions
also laughed, He addressed the girls jokingly. [Lord K???a said:]
My dear girls, you may each come here as you wish and take back
your garments. Im telling you the truth and am not joking
with you, since I see youre fatigued from executing austere
vows. I have never before spoken a lie, and these boys know it.
Therefore, O slender-waisted girls, please come forward, either
one by one or all together, and pick out your clothes. Seeing how
K???a was joking with them, the gopis became fully immersed in
love for Him, and as they glanced at each other they began to
laugh and joke among themselves, even in their embarrassment. But
still they did not come out of the water. As Sri Govinda spoke to
the gopis in this way, His joking words completely captivated
their minds. Submerged up to their necks in the cold water, they
began to shiver. Thus they addressed Him as follows. [The gopis
said:] Dear K???a, dont be unfair! We know that You are the
respectable son of Nanda and that You are honored by everyone in Vraja.
You are also very dear to us. Please give us back our clothes. We
are shivering in the cold water. O Syamasundara, we are Your
maidservants and must do whatever You say. But give us back our
clothing. You know what the religious principles are, and if You
dont give us our clothes we will have to tell the king.
Please! The Supreme Personality of Godhead said: If you girls are
actually My maidservants, and if you will really do what I say,
then come here with your innocent smiles and let each girl pick
out her clothes. If you dont do what I say, I wont
give them back to you. And even if the king becomes angry, what
can he do? Then, shivering from the painful cold, all the young
girls rose up out of the water, covering their pubic area with
their hands. When the Supreme Lord saw how the gopis were struck
with embarrassment, He was satisfied by their pure loving
affection. Putting their clothes on His shoulder, the Lord smiled
and spoke to them with affection. [Lord K???a said:] You girls
bathed naked while executing your vow, and that is certainly an offense
against the demigods. To counteract your sin you should offer obeisances
while placing your joined palms above your heads. Then you should
take back your lower garments. Thus the young girls of V?ndavana,
considering what Lord Acyuta had told them, accepted that they
had suffered a falldown from their vow by bathing naked in the
river. But they still desired to successfully complete their vow,
and since Lord K???a is Himself the ultimate result of all pious
activities, they offered their obeisances to Him to cleanse away
all their sins. Seeing them bow down like that, the Supreme
Personality of Godhead, the son of Devaki, gave them back their
garments, feeling compassionate toward them and satisfied by
their act. Although the gopis had been thoroughly cheated,
deprived of their modesty, ridiculed and made to act just like
toy dolls, and although their clothing had been stolen, they did
not feel at all inimical toward Sri K???a. Rather, they were
simply joyful to have this opportunity to associate with their
beloved. The gopis were addicted to associating with their
beloved K???a, and thus they became captivated by Him. Thus, even
after putting their clothes on they did not move. They simply
remained where they were, shyly glancing at Him. The Supreme Lord
understood the determination of the gopis in executing their
strict vow. The Lord also knew that the girls desired to touch
His lotus feet, and thus Lord Damodara, K???a, spoke to them as
follows. [Lord K???a said:] O saintly girls, I understand that
your real motive in this austerity has been to worship Me. That
intent of yours is approved of by Me, and indeed it must come to
pass. The desire of those who fix their minds on Me does not lead
to material desire for sense gratification, just as barleycorns
burned by the sun and then cooked can no longer grow into new
sprouts. Go now, girls, and return to Vraja. Your desire is
fulfilled, for in My company you will enjoy the coming nights.
After all, this was the purpose of your vow to worship goddess Katyayani,
O pure-hearted ones. Sukadeva Gosvami said: Thus instructed by
the Supreme Personality of Godhead, the young girls, their desire
now fulfilled, could bring themselves only with great difficulty
to return to the village of Vraja, meditating all the while upon
His lotus feet. Some time later Lord K???a, the son of Devaki,
surrounded by His cowherd friends and accompanied by His elder
brother, Balarama, went a good distance away from V?ndavana,
herding the cows. When the suns heat became intense, Lord K???a
saw that the trees were acting as umbrellas by shading Him, and
thus He spoke as follows to His boyfriends. [Lord K???a said:] O Stoka
K???a and A?su, O Sridama, Subala and Arjuna, O Visala, V??abha, Ojasvi,
Devaprastha and Varuthapa, just see these greatly fortunate
trees, whose lives are completely dedicated to the benefit of
others. Even while tolerating the wind, rain, heat and snow, they
protect us from these elements. Just see how these trees are
maintaining every living entity! Their birth is successful. Their
behavior is just like that of great personalities, for anyone who
asks anything from a tree never goes away disappointed. These
trees fulfill ones desires with their leaves, flowers and
fruits, their shade, roots, bark and wood, and also with their
fragrance, sap, ashes, pulp and shoots. It is the duty of every
living being to perform welfare activities for the benefit of
others with his life, wealth, intelligence and words. Thus moving
among the trees, whose branches were bent low by their abundance
of twigs, fruits, flowers and leaves, Lord K???a came to the
Towards the end of the same movie, I imply
that Hindu fundamentalism was the main factor in our being
refused, as non-Hindus, into the Ranganatha temples inner
sanctum (whereas at several other temples in the series we were
granted full or qualified access). On second thoughts, of course,
this had little to do with fundamentalism, if we define the
latter as the socially negotiated attitude based on the claim of
having exclusive access to religious and cosmological truth. A
similar refusal may be met by anyone doing research on sacred
places anywhere in the world. As an anthropologist of religion I
have personally met with such refusals dozens of times during
fieldwork, for reasons that do not need the (implicitly
reproachful) recourse to the concept of fundamentalism,
especially where the latter concept has globally acquired
overtones of fanaticism and violence in recent decades. For
instance, in my 1983 fieldwork on the psychotherapeutic
effectiveness of local treatment among the Manjacos of Guinea
Bissau, West Africa (memorable because it was the first fieldwork
Patricia and I shared), for months I had been promised access to
the Sacred Forest, a nearby ecological sanctuary where my
landlord (the regions major land priest) brought all
supplicants offerings including my own to be partly libated
and partly consumed there with his elderly male fellow-initiates.
This was not an encounter with fundamentalism either, because the
implicit truth of Manjaco beliefs was hardly ever articulated
verbally or debated in everyday life, it was a set of tacit
representations that were simply not questioned and that were
re-enacted and thereby tacitly confirmed through the
world-creating capability that is at the heart of belief systems,
and that constitutes their principal social significance
by every new ritual offering, prayer, diagnosis, or curative act.
If I resented that the promise of being granted access was not
honoured, it was not out of a researchers curiosity (I knew
from other sources what went on there and what there was to see
the typical emptiness around which secrets are build), nor
out of an intellectual combat over truth of the kind of debates
Jews, Muslims and Christians staged during the Middle Ages (I was
not excluded because I was taken for a non-believer, in fact,
that every morning I, as member of the priests household,
was obliged to share in the tumblers full of rum as one of the
ways in which supplicants offerings were dispatched, showed
(tacitly but beyond reasonable doubt) that I was a believer, and
had been accepted as such to a considerable extent my
resentment came from the fact that exclusion is socially hurtful,
admission socially gratifying (and that because of childhood
experiences I am oversensitive to exclusion). The situation is
really very simple, and was brought out over a century ago
eloquently and elaborately by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim
(Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, Paris: Alcan,
1912) while, surprisingly, my published scientific
work is dotted with references to this immensely powerful and
influential theory, on which for instance my entire analysis of
popular Islam in the highlands of Tunisia has been based. Anyway,
here goes: Since the invisible, non-human entities referred to
in religious contexts can hardly be claimed to have any tangible
manifestations in our sense world, sacredness is not an intrinsic
quality but must mainly be in the eyes of the beholder.
Sacredness therefore largely depends on a mental, logical
operation that separates between sacred and profane. Such
operations are implemented, and kept alive in human interaction,
by the imposition of boundaries and prohibitions, on access,
movement, the discharge of bodily functions, etc. Denying the
legitimacy of the enforcement of such boundaries, or resenting
them, explodes the very essence of religion as a human mental
construct, and is unbecoming for someone who considers himself a
social scientist of religion, even when he is allergic to
exclusion, and even when he makes his first little movies on
Hindu temples! Perhaps Vishnuism (as the less dominant
version of Hinduism) is simply more insistent on boundaries than Shivaism.
The point is related to my overlooking the repeated
representation of
Finally, a word about the musical
backgrounds to these movies. Present-day viewers are used to
images being supported by music, which in itself may scarcely
register consciously. It stands to reason that movies on
With these reservations and disclaimers, I
can now safely present my little movies on Tamil Nadu temples for
what little they are worth. If their main merit is that now I
feel slightly more confident writing on African-Hindu relations
in protohistory, they will have served their purpose.
[1] The myth is so common
that it is repeated all over the secondary scholarly and popular
literature without an original Sanskrit source ever being given.
After much searching I found it in the 10th chapter of the
Sanskrit classic Srimad Bhagavatam, or Bhagavata Purana;
cf. Dasgupta, S. N., 1992, A History of Indian Philosophy, I-V,
Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, first published Cambridge 1922, Delhi
1975, IV, ch. 24; Prabhupada, His Divine Grace A C Bhaktivedanta
Swami, no date [ ca. 2010 ] , Srimad Bhagavata: Complete
Commentary and Translation, no publisher stated [
International Krishna Consciousness Publishers ] : no place, also
at Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/SrimadBhagavatam_251
[2] English translation
from: Srimad-Bhagavatam, at: Bhagavata Puran.a, Bhaktivedanta
Vedabase: A treasure of spiritual knowledge, at: http://vedabase.com/en/sb , ch.
10, section 22, with thanks.
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