On Thursday 17 May 2007 10:12 pm, Deepa Mohan wrote: > And...it was interesting to watch the White Man's Take of > ...er..."lost temples, shrouded in secrecy" ...and realize that the > narrator is talking about Madurai and Thanjavur!
The video is a documentary from a channel that I don't recognise - "TLC" and basically deals with facts about Indian temples - most Souther India - where they still exist as they were when they were originally built. In a sense the commentator is right and Deepa is wrong. The facts he speaks of about the Tanjavur and Madurai temples are certainly "lost and shrouded in secrecy". These are data points that tell you that some 75 or 100 Taj Mahals can fit into the temple complex or that the area covered is big enough to accommodate the Kremlin, Westminster and some other European city-centers in and era when those city centers were yet to be created (or some such factoid). More stone appears to have been hefted in creating the Thanjavur temple than in creating the Pyramid at Giza, and evidence exists as to how that stone was hefted - including taking 40 ton blocks several hundred feet up to the top of a temple tower. But relevant to this thread is the theory about why these temples, with their intricate art remain "lost" to the West. The commentator says that in eighteen hundred something a Brit rediscovered the Khajuraho temple with their erotic carvings. The discovery was sensational in the sense that in the Victorian society of the day it was not even possible to talk about the sculpture in Khajuraho in "polite" company. The Brits, says the commentator were far more comfortable with the symmetry and beauty of the Taj Mahal - which they could talk about, rather than the vastly bigger and more intricate Hindus temples that would have required them to talk about things that even the spam filters in the email chain of silk-list censor, to ensure that I don't receive my own messages in which I have used words like "c*nt" and "pen*s" shiv
