South Indian Bronzes: A Historical Survey of South Indian Sculpture with Iconographical Notes Based on Original Sources c6.38

c6.38

When Agastya led the first Brahman immigration to the Dravida countries he did not do so merely as a missionary or advocate of Aryan art. His object was to introduce into South India and to transport bodily the Aryan system of thoughts and culture in all its branches and to envelope and overlap the Dravidian civilization which had already attained a high degree of development quite independent of Aryan influence. The shrines and places of pilgrimages were localised and sanctified following their prototypes in the North; the rivers Godavery and Kauvery were clothed with the same spiritual efficacies as the Ganges and the other sacred rivers in Upper India. The existing popular lore and the religious ideas of the Dravidian races were adapted and woven into a new body of *paurānic* literature with special local associations; and, lastly, the primitive Dravidian gods which had then become subjects of worship were adopted and admitted into the new pantheon clothed in an Aryan dress and changed under a new name. In this way many of the female deities formerly associated with the earlier forms of worship were accepted as consorts or *sakti* of the various Aryan Gods. So we find that in many of the Southern temples the original deities are associated with a consort who has no counterpart in the North Aryan pantheon. Thus *Kārtikeya* or *Subramannya* has two wives, one of whom is the original *Deb jāni* and the other is the *Balliramayee* who is never mentioned in the northern *purānas*. So the names of *Minākshi* and *Siva-Kāma-Sundary* as consorts of Siva are never heard of in North India. Those that could not be accepted as in any way related to, or associated with, the North Aryan deities were tolerated as *grāma devatās* or village deities and have been all along venerated and worshipped under their old Tamil names side by side with the orthodox image-worship prevailing in the main temples. In this process of adoption and amalgamation the question of preserving and perpetuating the identity and integrity of the Aryan deities in their new association and strange environment was of supreme importance to the Aryan iconographer. One may well understand the necessity of securing the permanence of the forms and conceptions of the deities which have been done possibly by Agastya and his followers in the various *dhyāna mantras* or contemplative verses descriptive of the images, and these *dhyānas* have become indispensable chapters in all the handbooks for image-making current in South India. The canons and rules given as to the construction of images are considered as a sort of commentary giving the *lakhana* or precipe as to how the deities conceived in the contemplative verse are to be translated and ‘bodied forth’ in the shape of images, the object of the canons being to prevent a degeneration in form and type of the original conceptions of these deities in the hands of Dravidian artists, brought up, as they were, in a system of thought alien and in some sense antagonistic to those introduced by Agastya and his followers. It is impossible to say if the system and the canons of image-making which Agastya introduced in South India were identical with those prevailing in North India at the time. It is quite possible that various modifications and adaptations had to be made in the canons of the *silpasastras* to suit local conditions and types. But from most of the examples which we to-day meet with in the South, we find that in their general technique and convention they recall the best traditions of the North Indian style which seems to have been adopted in South Indian images in connection with the most important temples and shrines. There is no doubt, however, that all that represented the best in the religious art of North India was introduced in South India by Agastya and his followers and has become imbedded in and has remained as part of the art practices of the South.