Icons: General

The age of Sembiyan Mahadevi and Rajaraja I was one when artistic “works of individual creative power” were made by artists “who were trained in a guild tradition of imparted knowledge and followed a system of canonical proportion and technique, relying on inspiration through meditation; and yet, inevitably, their productions combine system and freedom, dream and reality to produce at once works of individual genius and awesome religious power”—these are the wise words of an outstanding art critic, Benjamin Rowland, who believed in the traditional school of art.

The icons are elaborately described. The name of the main deity and the attendant deities, where any, the composition of the metal—whether copper, brass-coated, silver, gold or alloy (bronze or bell-metal) was used for their making, the height and and weight of each unit, the number of hands and the attributes in each of them, the seat (asana or pitha) and the aureola, if they were solid or hollow, their shape and composition—all these particulars furnished in the foundation inscriptions are unique and unparalleled in the history of any ruler in our land or elsewhere.

The loss of most of these icons, the gold and to a lesser extent the silver vessels for their services during worship, the fabulous ornaments of gold and precious stones, corals and pearls of fantastic numbers, variety and value so elaborately described, is a sad tale of a vanished glory whose shadow alone we can now see and read from the mute records inscribed on the temple walls and whose purport and value has been made available to us in the pages of the Epigraphical Reports, thanks to the indefatigable labours and the mature scholarship of one of the greatest epigraphists of our period, E. Hultzsch and his able band of fellow workers.

If there is no autobiography or biography of our rulers as in the case of the Moghul emperors, and no accounts of contemporary foreign visitors as we have of Nuniz and Paes for Krishnadeva Raya of Vijayanagara, we have at least some copper plate grants and the innumerable inscriptions on the walls of temples, an invaluable source material to help us recapture, however, feebly it be, the glory that was Rajaraja I and the grandeur that was the Rajarajesvaram.