A glittering homage

It was a splendid celebration of aesthetics. Even the signage was not a freeze-frame from the past. The  ‘signs’ were a dramatically live, holographics steeped in the Ananda (bliss), of dance. Against the backdrop of mellifluous music and soulful hymns,  pulsed a rare Rasa (nectar) which perhaps overflows only once in a 1000 years.

This profusion of ‘signs’ that brilliantly lit up the night sky from the sprawling courtyard of the 216-feet tall Brihadeeshwara Temple in Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu on September 25,  was  about more than just  celebration.

It was a coming together of thousands in the heart of the Cauvery delta to witness a divine confluence of dancers to mark the finale of the millennium year celebrations of the temple whose construction was completed in the year 1010 AD.

With a grand dance  offering of  ‘Brhan-Natya-Yagna’,  over 1000 dancers (led by the veteran Bharatnatyam danseuse, Dr Padma Subrahmanyam) showed their gratitude to the Raja Raja Chola who had  built this stupendous living monument in granite.

To the reverberations of ‘Om, Om, Om’, the dancers in their pretty traditional costumes took positions in neatly formed rows on the elevated enclosure adjoining the ‘Nandi Mandapa’ facing the huge sanctum of Lord Brihadeeshwara, to pay their tributes. An hour-long singing, preceding the dance, from the Thirumurai (devotional hymns in praise of Lord Shiva) by Oduvars  gently wafted in the air.  

The gigantic Nandi itself, a 3.36 meter  tall,  “prodigious monolithic sculpture of realism and beauty” as the temple historian Dr Kudavayil Balasubramanian puts it,  was the cynosure of all eyes.

“My Pranams to all our Gurus,” Dr Subrahmanyam opened modestly on behalf of the ‘Association of Bharat Natyam Artistes of India (ABHAI), as the dancers radiated pride, justifiably so as they were a part of the celebrations at  an engineering marvel, declared by UNESCO as a world heritage site.

“We dedicate this Punya Karyam to God and to the Raja who built this temple,” she said in an emotion-choked voice, as the  dancers assembled from different parts of India, USA, Singapore, Malaysia and Sri Lanka, looked on.

The performance began with the customary invocation called Ganapathy Kauthuvam. Then came the centre-piece, a delectable dance rendition of Thiruvisaipa in 11 verses, composed by Karur Thevar, a close confidante of Raja Raja Chola. And finally the artistes offered salutations with a Shiva Panchaakshara Sthuthi of Adi Shankara.

The choice of the compositions for the dance magic was a perfect mix of the Dravidian and Aryan roots of India’s integral culture. 

The august gathering included Ranganayaki Jayaraman, Anitha Guha, Roja Kannan, Ambika Kameshwar, Sri Kala Bharat, Swarnamalya, Gopika Verma, Jayashree Rajagopalan, Padmini Radhakrishnan, Priyamvada Murali, Rama Venugopalan, Prakurthi Hoskere and Tripthi Bhupen.

“This temple  was meant to be a prestigious symbol of the King’s generous patronage of the arts and symbolic of the lofty devotion to the Supreme,” says another famous Bharat Natyam artiste, Lakshmi Viswanathan.

A book, Epigraphical Record of Raja Raja on Dance and Dancing Girls (written by retired State Archaeologist, Dr R Nagaswamy) that shows how the Chola monarch had nurtured the fine arts by turning over two entire streets in Thanjavur to 400 Devadasis, was also released.

There were key sub-texts too to this grand dance festival. The State School Education and Culture Minister Thangam Thennarasu’s bid to get two bronze icons of Raja Raja Chola and his wife Lokamadevi, from the private collection of the Sarabhai Museum in Ahmedabad, for a splendid exhibition based on the Chola era as part of the dance festival, made no headway.

But an old, time-worn tradition of classicism was  smashed when a Tamil folk artiste, Thenmozhi Rajendran got the opportunity to showcase her Karagattam folk dance as the first performance of the festival. 

While ABHAI networked with all the 1000 artistes to get them to participate in this festival, the Brahan Natyanjali Foundation, Thanjavur, provided all the logistical support to them, said its Secretary S Muthukumar.

In a noble gesture, the artistes themselves paid for their travel to Thanjavur. After the event, each artiste was presented with a pearl chain with a dollar on which the ‘Big Temple Gopuram’ was embossed.

Weeks before the programme, Dr Padma Subrahmanyam had designed the entire format along with the music and choreography when modern technology came to her aid. At a workshop in Chennai, she met all the well-known dance Gurus and presented them with the DVDs of the planned performance in Thanjavur. The Gurus in turn went back to their students and trained them with the videos for the September 25 finale.

“It was the most spiritual moment in my life,” said Vineeth, one of the 25-odd male dancers who participated in the festival. “It was just fantastic; we were very much thrilled and privileged to participate under the guidance of Dr Padma Subrahmanyam; we felt a divine spiritual presence when we danced at the big temple,” summed up well known classical dancer Janardhana who took part with eight of his female disciples from Karnataka.

Nobody is sure whether after another millennium, this dance-offering by a ‘stupendous army’ of 1000 dancers at Thanjavur will be remembered.

But Dr Padma Subrahmanyam fervently,hopes that the Tamil Nadu government will sculpt an inscription and place it in the temple to tell the posterity about this rare homage which comes but once in a 1000 years.