Screening Photographs: Global Tourism and Cultural Heritage in South India
Figure 1. Book cover of Architecture of Sovereignty: Stone Bodies, Colonial Gazes, and Living Gods in South India (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Gita V. Pai.
As I returned the folder entitled “INDIA: Madras, undated” to box 69, an archival storage box containing photographs of Indic temples and artwork, I noticed two folders that followed alphabetically according to location: “INDIA: Madura, ca. 1930.” I had been examining the correspondence, research notes, and photographs of renowned scholar of Ceylonese and Indian culture Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947) stored in ninety-two boxes at Princeton University Library’s Special Collections. I was interested in Coomaraswamy’s work on Shiva in his dancing form or Nataraja (lord of dance). His seminal essay “The Dance of Śiva” has popularly influenced how the West interprets the meaning and iconography of the Hindu god’s cosmic dance since its 1918 publication.[i]
Madura—often the colonial British name for the southeast Indian town of Madurai—or its famous Minakshi-Sundareshvara temple do not figure in my current research. They are, however the topic of my recently published book, Architecture of Sovereignty: Stone Bodies, Colonial Gazes, and Living Gods in South India (2023) in which I devote a chapter to nineteenth-century British photography (Figure 1). Therefore, I was curious: could there be a photograph of the Madurai temple’s intricately-carved hall called the Pudu Mandapam (new hall), the focus of my book?
I pulled out the first folder and found black-and-white photographs of the temple tank with the south gopuram (gateway) hovering behind it, and the painted murals of the temple’s tala puranam (place history) lining the hallway to the goddess’s shrine, the temple’s west gopuram looming behind street shops and pedestrians, Hindu adherents gathering at the large teppakulam (temple pond), and the sculpted Shiva Nataraja on a granite pillar standing near the god’s temple sanctum.
A few images retained the residual black paper when detached from a photo album so archivists could slip them into protective sleeves. A self-taught art historian with a Ph.D. in mineralogy, Coomaraswamy collected these photographs of Madurai for his ongoing research on Indian art and religion. Although Coomaraswamy visited Madras (present-day Chennai) in 1921 to purchase south Indian bronze sculptures as curator of Indian art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, he obtained these photographs a decade later possibly from the Madurai photographer whose purple-ink stamped name and qualifications appear on the reverse side:
R. P. Sundararaj Pillai,
Artistic Photographer, &
Bromide Enlargement Under-Taker
Madura, S. India.
I had better luck with the second folder when I stumbled upon a photograph of the unfinished Raya (king) Gopuram and another of the Pudu Mandapam. These two architectural objects constitute the temple expansion project that Madurai’s early modern ruler Tirumala Nayaka (r. 1623-1659) began near the east gateway during the seventeenth century. The long hall’s 124 figural pier sculptures of Hindu deities like Minakshi as a warrior princess and Shiva in his various forms, equestrian figures on rearing horses, mythical lion-headed creatures called yalis, and life-size, full-figured portraits of the Nayaka kings and queens. Tirumala Nayak built the Pudu Mandapam to conduct specific rituals for Minakshi (the fish-eyed goddess) and Sundareshvara (the beautiful god), considered local manifestations of Parvati and Shiva.
Coomaraswamy penciled the photographer’s name on the back of the Pudu Mandapam print (Figure 2). To capture the pillared hall’s front facade, Sundararaj Pillai stood to the right of its east entrance slightly above street level, perhaps atop the nearby incomplete gateway. Woven thatch screens, hanging fabric, wooden cabinets, and corrugated metal sheets that vendors and tailors erected to block the sun and demarcate their space dominate the foreground.
Figure 2. R. P. Sundararaj Pillai, Entrance to the Pudu Mandapam at the Minakshi-Sundareshvara temple, Madurai, ca. 1930s. INDIA: Madura, ca.1930s, Folder 39, box 69. Subseries 6B: Photographs of Indic Temples and Artwork, 1906-1948, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Papers C0038, Special Collections, Princeton University Library.
The ca. 1930 image reminded me of a similarly shot photograph by an unnamed Archaeological Survey of India photographer about thirty years earlier around 1899-1900, now featured on my book cover (Figure 3). The higher vantage point and farther distance give greater prominence to the east gopuram aligned axially behind the Pudu Mandapam, while the minimal presence of one tall cabinet and three leaning screens at the entrance’s left side allows us to perceive, albeit hazily, some commercial activity inside.
Figure 3. Archaeological Survey of India, General view of the Pudu Mandapam from the north-east, 1899-1900. Photo 1008/4(355), © The British Library Board.
Comprising the first photographic documentation of the site, British photographer for the Madras government Linnaeus Tripe’s 1858 image of the east front for his Photographic Views in Madura exhibits a modest row of three petite screens strung between two pillars (Figure 4). Collectively, these three photographs document the progressive growth of commerce at the Pudu Mandapam.
Figure 4. Linnaeus Tripe, “East Front of the Puthu Mundapum,” 1858. Linnaeus Tripe, Photographic Views in Madura. By Captain L. Tripe, Government Photographer. Part II. With Descriptive Notes, 1858 (Madras: Madras Presidency, 1860), plate 1. J. Paul Getty Museum 84.XO.1363.2.1, courtesy of Getty’s Open Content Program.
For over two hundred years, traders and tailors operated within the pillared hall’s perambulatory colonnade that surrounds a gated central nave reserved for Nayaka-initiated religious festivals. Retailing began when a few stalls sprang up after the British ousted the Nawab of Arcot in the late eighteenth century: members of the ruler’s disbanded military became merchants, converting the concentric aisle into a commercial complex for purchasing kunkumam (red vermillion powder), manjal (yellow turmeric root), and saris (garment worn by women). These men auctioned the space to other vendors, whose successors eventually unionized in the twentieth century.
During my visits since 2001 when I observed the rituals performed to the temple gods in the internal space, examined the sculptures of Hindu deities and mythological scenes, and witnessed tailors hunched over black sewing machines and shopkeepers selling colorful textiles and cheap trinkets in the densely packed corridors, I could not overlook the makeshift screens that vendors affixed to the Pudu Mandapam (Figures 5-8).
“… getting rid of commerce from the religious site has reformulated it into something allegedly pristine and appealing to visitors, especially tourists, and has erased the history of the hall as inhabited and experienced for centuries.”
Nor could the British in the nineteenth century. Curator of India’s ancient monuments Henry H. Cole called the “tatties and screens” a “disgrace” in an 1883-1884 report of his Madras Presidency tour.[ii] An 1882 photograph by Madras-based Nicholas & Co. confirms what Cole confronted when he surveyed the site (Figure 9). In his 1870 notes to accompany photographs of south Indian architectural antiquities, Edmund David Lyon, a professional photographer commissioned by the Madras administration, wrote that the stalls “detract” from the beauty of the hall, which should be “clear of all such encumbrances.”[iii]
Figure 9. Nicholas & Co., Entrance to the Pudu Mandapam, 1882. Photo 1003(2302), © The British Library Board.
Efforts to expel the Pudu Mandapam’s nearly 300 tailors and merchants gained momentum in 2010 when global tourism promoters, heritage conservationists, Tamil Nadu state government officers, and Madurai local businessmen argued that shopkeepers should be removed because they were damaging the historic structure. The 2018 fire that broke out in a different pillared hall called the Viravasantarayar Mandapam hastened the slow-moving removal process. When faulty electrical wiring destroyed that 400-year-old hall’s sculpted piers and shops vending plastic toys and items of worship, temple authorities closed the Pudu Mandapam as a precautionary measure and evicted its inhabitants. Stitching and selling resumed after a five-month legal battle while vendors waited for an alternate building to be constructed. Commercial activity ceased inside the Pudu Mandapam by mid-2022 when its traders, tailors, and their things were shifted around the corner to the newly built Kunnathur Chathiram.
Curious to see the Pudu Mandapam stripped of its function as a buzzing marketplace and to meet the relocated shopkeepers in their new setup, I made a quick detour southward to Madurai during two research trips in southeast India last year. On my first afternoon, I encountered an eerily empty and quiet Pudu Mandapam with a parked traffic police truck, yellow metal barricades, padlocked gates, and a security guard hindering my entry (Figure 10).
Figure 10. Eastern entrance, Pudu Mandapam, 2023. Photo by author, © Gita V. Pai.
The following morning, I discovered temple workers busily cleaning inside the Pudu Mandapam that had been unlocked for the final day of the annual beautification ritual to goddess Minakshi that takes place during the Tamil month of Margali (mid-December to mid-January) (Figure 11). I eagerly accompanied the priests, musicians, devotees, police officers, and men carrying the metal embodiment of Minakshi as they entered the east opening and processed to the granite stage at the far end of the central nave (Figures 12-13).
When the religious ceremony concluded, I stealthily slipped away to glimpse the aisle along the perimeter before the Pudu Mandapam’s closure. The security guard’s beige plastic chair was the sole object in the north side (Figure 14). The dark slanting shadows on the south side reminded me of Tripe’s 1858 photograph (Figures 15-16). Tripe certainly evacuated the corridor of people and paraphernalia for his image of an immaculate-looking hall.
Lyon’s 1868 photograph of the same aisle also displays no “encumbrances” (Figure 17). In contrast, Italian-run Del Tufo & Co., Madras’s 1890s photograph provides a snapshot of a corridor populated with male vendors and wooden cabinets brimming with saris (Figure 18).
Figure 17. Edmund David Lyon, “Madura, Trimul Naik's Portico, The Side Aisle,” 1868. ACP: 97.33.0028, The Alkazi Collection of Photography.
Figure 18. Del Tufo & Co., Madras, “Interior of Puthoo Muntapam, Madura,” c. 1890s. Author’s private collection.
Reminiscent of Tripe and Lyon’s nineteenth-century photographs, the Pudu Mandapam’s once bustling and thronging corridors are now barren and desolate, a consequence of the twenty-first century eradication of mercantile activity for modern audiences. If commodification in contemporary society entails sanitizing and purifying objects and spaces to make them palatable, then getting rid of commerce from the religious site has reformulated it into something allegedly pristine and appealing to visitors, especially international tourists, and erased the history of the hall as inhabited and experienced for centuries.
The locked and vacant Pudu Mandapam—in particular, its inaccessibility to tourists and visitors long after the 2022 eviction of merchants—motivated a Madurai attorney to file a public interest litigation petition with the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court. He wanted the pillared hall to be immediately renovated and inaugurated as a heritage site. Temple authorities assured the High Court in June 2023 that a state-level committee of experts inspected the Pudu Mandapam and made its recommendations. In July 2024, the High Court directed temple authorities to complete the hall’s renovations by December.
Conservation is underway, and the hall is opened briefly to the public only for certain annual rituals that occur in the central nave (Figures 19-22).
Before exiting, I spotted a woman who had taken advantage of the Pudu Mandapam’s rare opening to enter inside and walk to the southwest corner. There, she devoutly lowered her head and reverently touched the feet of goddess Kali carved on the monolithic pillar (Figure 23). Previously, religious prayer had coexisted alongside the stalls engaged in sales because the daily worship of deities did not disrupt the everyday business in the aisles, evident in the earlier photograph of another woman praying to the same goddess (Figure 24). Devotional practices, such as the hand that touches the goddess’s left foot and the offered flowers that caress it, produce not only a corrosive effect on the stone material, but also resist the tendency towards sanitization and purification that local boosters, temple authorities, and state officials are likely to desire when the Pudu Mandapam is converted into a revenue-generating museum.
“Devotional practices, such as the hand that touches the goddess’s left foot and the offered flowers that caress it, produce not only a corrosive effect on the stone material, but also resist the tendency towards sanitization and purification.”
Figure 23. A woman prays to goddess Kali, 2023. Photo by author, © Gita V. Pai.
Figure 24. A woman prays to goddess Kali, 2018. Photo by author, © Gita V. Pai.
While the pillared hall is being rehabilitated into a heritage tourism venue geared primarily for international visitors, I wonder: when finished, can the gods who inhabit the Pudu Mandapam be venerated? And will the local populace be permitted their personal, day-to-day religiosity?
Notes
[i] Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Śiva: Fourteen Indian Essays (New York: The Sunwise Turn, Inc., 1918).
[ii] H. H. Cole, Preservation of National Monuments. Third Report of the Curator of Ancient Monuments in India, for the Year 1883-84 (Calcutta: Printed by the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1885), clvii.
[iii] Capt. (Edmund David) Lyon, Notes to Accompany a Series of Photographs Designed to Illustrate the Ancient Architecture of Southern India, ed. James Fergusson (London: Marion & Co., 1870), 11.
Citation
Gita V. Pai, “Screening photographs: Global tourism and cultural heritage in south India,” PLATFORM, December 9, 2024.
