Shiv Shastry wrote:
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".
. Well, Shiv, what I disagree with in the video is the assumption that if the facts are unkown to the West, they are "lost". Most of us "southies" know the facts about Madurai and Thanjavur temples; iin fact the the Tirunelveli temple are is even larger than that of the Madurai Meenaksh temple. And these sculptures often deal not just with sex in the abstract but their effect on life, too... In the temple complex at Tirunelveli, there is a most evocative sculpture of a woman with a bulging belly...her head is in her hands and she is the picture of despair...unwanted motherhood, depicted in such a small figure! The region surrounding Madurai has a plethora of temples, some of which also have explicit erotic art (eg the temple to Andal at Srivilliputhur, one and a half hours drive from Madurai. Andal, like Meera realized God through Shringara or romantic love, and I loved seeing the incredibly beautiful sculptures on the temple pillars.The yogini-yogi combination you mention is found there, too....I remembered that "yoga" is actually "union") But indeed it is worth examining how our "morality"code has changed to the point where we seem so obsessed with covering everything, from nude statues onwards. So keen is this need to cover everything, that shops sell covers for washing machines and food processors. It can't be only for the dust: these machines are used everyday and dusted and wiped, and then...er...religiously covered! Deepa. On 5/18/07, shiv sastry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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
