A house for Mr Vishwas

A house for Mr Vishwas
Renuka Khandekar

I met up last week with two bright women friends. One was a Punjabi Hindu and the other, a Bengali Christian. All of us were supposedly de-racinated. We bemoaned the rash of tasteless temples that are pimpling the face of North India. Meanwhile all the features of real spiritual value like God, tirthas and kshetras are being shoved aside by mechanised dolls that `eat' butter, or gazillion-foot high Shivjis and Hanumans. I said it all sounded more mela than kumbh and exchanged wry smiles with the Punjabi Hindu (a dedicated student of art history). But our Christian friend was perturbed: "All this is state-sponsored activity in the last few years", she said.

"It's a people's need that's being fulfilled!", snapped the Punjabi Hindu, truth outing from the nabhi, as it does when startled. We had a strange little conversation about the artistic and spiritual hunger in the North, a place where centuries of denial have prevailed. Our Bengali friend probably went away thinking we were a couple of Bajrangis, when all we wanted was acknowledgement of a little perspective.

I know it makes smart people angry, but please can we admit, without anyone promptly needing to get hysterical, that there was a centuries-long break in temple building in the Plains? Meanwhile, North Indian fingers forgot. They no longer worked to the sacred rules of iconic art. There were hardly any houses of God made by Hindus for Hindus, only a necropolis of tombs called Delhi or Agra or whatever.

Apropos this, I remember being vaguely troubled once that Kathak dancer Uma Sharma had nowhere to dance her annual Raas Leela except the Birla Mandir. In hindsight, I want to shout aloud here, that a distinction must be made between past and present. True, it was because of Muslim rulers that Umaji did not have a fine old temple to dance in at Delhi. But half of Umaji's musicians, who helped her, heart and soul, to celebrate Krishna's mystic dance each year on the night of Sharad Purnima, were Muslims! This is such a complex truth, it can make our heads spin. But it's our truth, to embrace as desperately as Markandeya clutched the Shivling, when Yama came noosing by.

Soon after, another dear friend (Punjabi Hindu from Peshawar) strayed into the Sun Temple at Modhera in Gujarat and then all the way to the deep South, to Brihadishwara temple at Thanjavur. One glimpse of Rajaraja Chola's great granite capstone, and Anu was undone. "I didn't know we could make temples like that", she actually wept, back in Delhi, "Anything grand in the North is Islamic. There's hardly anything Hindu left!"

Anu is right and surely all the nastiks and non-Hindus have the grace to concede this without feeling threatened. The South is spared temple-building mania because it has so much beauty and grandeur left. But in the North, with full credit to the Birla mandirs, where are the great temples? The North has lots of money now. But no taste. It is not the North's fault, though, if all kinds of unaesthetic structures have sprouted. Wayside shrines are tiled over like bathrooms. The Chattarpur Heavenly Mile between Delhi and Gurgaon looks as if Gemini Studios and VGP Silversands Resorts on the Mahabalipuram Road have been beamed up from Chennai - deliciously vulgar as amusement, but neither desi nor margi as a House of God, dash it.

The sad truth is, the North no longer knows how to make and maintain fine temples, barring a few honourable exceptions. The issue goes way deeper than diversionary questions like `Who needs temples'? People just do, that's all. It would make more sense to accept this gracefully and cleverly begin a process of aesthetic redressal.