Every stone has a story to tell

Ashok Kulkarni travels to Somnathpur and is captivated by the temple, its wonderfully-carved pillars, and the craftsmanship and engineering of the builders of yore.

After visiting Belur, Halebid temples some years back, I wanted to complete the triad with Somnathpur. I was curious about the Somnathpur temple because the structures here are all mentioned in the same breath as Belur and Halebid. At Harihar (elsewhere in Karnataka), there is a Kannada inscription which refers to Somnathpur Temple and says that the village attached to the temple there “was so full of learned men that even the parrots were capable of holding discussions in Mimamsa, Tarka and Vyakarana!”

Leaving Mysore rather late in the morning and passing through Tirumakudlu-Narsipura, I reached the place around noon. I had followed the Bangalore-Mysore-T Narsipura route instead of the traditional Bangalore-Mandya-Bannur route as dictated by the road condition.

Restoration in progress
The temple is ASI managed and a present-day village surrounds it. The open space could have been beautified through landscaping. Not many visitors were to be seen even though it was a Sunday.

As I entered the temple, we were greeted by the sight of the collapsed quadrangle on the right with restoration work in progress. There is a huge stone inscription at the entrance which records the temple endowments. The contents graphically describe the events “as if they had happened yesterday.”

The temple is smaller than what I had imagined from the photographs. It felt cool and pleasant to be inside. I looked with awe at the wonderfully-carved pillars. After admiring the craftsmanship and engineering of those times with the tools available then, I proceeded to see the three deities. They are housed in their separate garbhagrihas.

Venugopala statue
On the left is the statue of Venugopala. I have not come across a more beautiful vigraha of the deity anywhere else! The serene expression, the traditional pose and the perfect proportions made me bow with piety before the Lord and pay a silent and heartfelt homage to the sculptor Ruvari Mallithamma who created it. Surrounding the statue are the cows in three rows. Above these are the gopikas and rishis in additional rows. The beauty of the scene where the statue of Krishna stands under the kadamba tree alone deserves a poem.

Reluctantly, I moved from Venugopala to the Janardhana chamber, located on the right side of the temple. One immediately notices the differences in style and skill of the artist who created this sculpture.

Two styles
True to this feeling, history records that another master sculptor created this wonderful masterpiece. It would require hours of study and comparison to bring out the style differences between Venugopala and Janardhana, the two outstanding statues at the temple.

It is at the sanctum-sanctorum that one encounters the tragic legacy of the temple, the original vigraha (idol) has been replaced ! Two other vigrahas have been left intact. Even as one wonders how that happened, one can imagine the other-worldly beauty of the missing masterpiece. I could have spent hours gazing at these vigrahas but I was afraid I might draw attention to myself by that kind of behaviour.

After relaxing on one of the stone platforms, I turned my attention to each portion of the hemispherically-shaped ceiling enclosing an abstract lotus flower in inverted position. Some of these flowers have an intertwined chain-like ornament carved out of the original monolith.These reflect the artistic zenith reached by the builders of the temple. The visual experience is akin to viewing a 3-D fractal.The builders went to great lengths in achieving perfection over multiple magnitudes of scale.