A Bronze Lineage: Kannagi/Pattini and Karaikkal Ammaiyar of Polonnaruwa

“Not everything is metal, but metal is everywhere. Metal is a conductor of all matter … and thought is born more from metal than stone…” Deleuze and Guattari, A 1000 Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Perhaps one needs to have a propensity for seeing movement in seemingly static forms like sculpture, to view Tissa’s Kannagi as if it were a film, an image in movement. For that to happen, the mind itself will have to become filmic in some sense. What is the Potential energy exchanged between these two Lankan sculptures of Tamil Hindu saint-poets, who were worshipped as mother goddesses, across epochs? Kannagi’s rage filled contemporary lament (1984) and Karaikkal Ammaiyar’s ecstatic singing (11th century). One is by Sri Lanka’s preeminent modern sculptor and the other by an unknown craftsman, among many such in our deeply syncretic historical past. To begin to respond to such a question I think we need to go even deeper into Indian art and cultural history in a non-linear manner. In fact as far back as to the Dancing Girl of the Indus Valley civilization of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. She is the by-now famous, tiny bronze figure, just above four inches tall (in the National Museum, in Delhi), bedecked in ornaments, lots of bangles and necklaces, naked, with hair held in an elaborate bun. Her arms are disproportionately long. The tubular right arm forms a large triangle by the placement of the hand on her hip. This triangle is the aniconic sign of the yoni, an abstract form encoding female sexuality predating the Aryans and Hinduism.

We see such a triangle formed by one of Kannagi’s arms held up high in a gesture of lament in Tissa’s bronze too. Similarly, but more strongly, with Karaikkal Ammaiyar, depending on the angle at which one views the figurine, we see her tubular arms forming two large symmetrical triangles with her upper body, even as she plays the cymbals and sings in an ecstatic mode. This triangular form of the yoni is dynamic, produced through movements and gestures. In contrast, a later Hindu version of the yoni as hole in which the stone lingam sits has a binary structure, a weighty symbol without any movement. According to Kosambi the terracotta figurines found in the pre-Aryan Indus valley civilization prove that the worship of the mother-goddess to have been prominent there. It is reasonable to surmise that the little bronze Dancing Girl is a product of this ancient matriarchal culture. Deleuze and Guattari’s comment that ‘thought is born more from metal than stone’ makes perfect sense here.All three female icons exhibit a high degree of abstraction therefore of poetic energy. That is to say, their capacity of suggestion (dhvani), is manifold. None of these three sculptures of female figures can be theorised within an idea of an aesthetics of the beautiful. Rather, trying to theorise them through a theory of rasa at least opens up a way of engaging with them as dynamic forms where their powers of suggestion vary according to the degree of urgency and creative energy we as artists, critics, and theorists might bring to our engagement with them. That they are all engaged in modes of performance is central to the kinetic dynamism they display. The triangulated arms of the dancing girl, the singing musician, and the lamenting woman are expressive. Their precise, formalised, highly abstract gestures (angika abhinaya), address us eloquently. The lone dancing girl is now part of an aberrant bronze lineage of older exemplary iconic female poets expressing three ages of life. They offer three angles of perception not strictly geometric but rather more organic and yet abstract enough in bronze, for aesthetic thought to wrestle with. A threesome is more suggestive of dynamism than the strict binary structure of the stone phallus in the stone hole. Also to be able to see an old woman not as a witch or a hag but as a vital figure singing, is most exhilarating.

While the vocabulary of the precise traditional mudras (gestures), are unavailable to contemporary artists, the arms and the hands when formalised might provide an experimental field for movement. And here we might think of what Bertolt Brecht said about gesture or ‘gestus’, both gist, as well as an intensive condensed utterance, as in Mother Courage’s silent scream, when she realises that while she haggled for some money in the midst of war, her daughter was killed. That silent cry was produced by Helena Weigel, the great Brechtian actor, through a bodily posture producing extreme tension in the entirety of her spine. Even in these essentially silent forms we can synesthetically feel their sound, their eloquence. Bronze is close to brass, also an alloy, and music and rhythm have a metallurgical origin too. These two saint-poets of India were indeed poets, devotees of Shiva Nataraja, they sang in the vernacular, local languages to make sense of their predicaments as women and against caste and other hierarchies enforced by the Brahmin priests who controlled their access to temple and ritual. Akka Mahadevi, for example, was among the most popular of Indian saint-poets whose poetry has been made into popular songs across modern India. And it is no accident that the first feminist collective press in English, in India, was called ‘Kali for Women’. Indian feminists also have Durga in her iconic form as an ‘Ashurmardhani’. While Kali and Durga are canonical, their folk origins and propensity for violent action make them outsiders in the canonical order of the universe of male Hindu gods. Anger and rage appear not to be traits of Pattini perhaps because she has been created to assuage male psycho-sexual anxieties. She is what psychoanalysis calls ‘the good mother’.

Certainly Sunil Ariyaratne’s take on her as Kannagi and her legend is neo-traditionalist in the extreme, a film with lots of pretty cloth, lovely costumes and mass spectacle and even some professional Indian dancing thrown in, done by an Indian duo, with archaic Sinhala dialogue from once upon a time when patriarchy reigned. Ariyaratne’s skill as a Professor of Sinhala literature has been wasted in creating this anachronistic feudal language at a time when young Sinhala speakers are inventing a new vernacular, mixing with panache English and Sinhala, to express complex ideas and slang too. In sharp contrast to Ariyaratne’s Kannagi, Tissa Ranasinghe with Gananath Obeyesekere have, decades ago, opened up a way to approach an archetype for contemporary rewriting, rewiring. One wonders what happened to Ariyaratne who directed Sarungale with Gamini Fonseka as a Tamil Clerk. Fonseka was loved by Tamil proletariat fans, just as much as by the Sinhala ones, they would have known that he spoke Tamil and wanted to be popular like MGR! I gather that Ariyaratne studied Tamil while living in South India and I have read a wonderful informative essay he wrote (Divaina, 8/5/94), on the bronze statues that guard the magnificent oceanfront Marina in Chennai, while he was living there. He tells us that there is one of Kannagi there, which is reproduced in his essay. It shows her standing tall and strong, stepping out with one hand extended in front with an accusatory index finger against the king of Madura and the other raised holding her famous anklet, ready to dash on the ground. He tells us that she is there among other bronze statues of male poets and the famous female poet Avvaiyar, who have all contributed to Dravidian culture. Further more, that all of these bronze artists and the epic heroine Kannagi and Fr Pope, an English missionary who translated Tamil classics into English, stand facing Tamil Nadu rather than the Indian ocean, unlike Lankan ones of politicians in front of the old Parliament house now the site of digital projections of political slogans. The Tamil bronze statues of poets and the highly valued English translator of Tamil, he says, are addressing the Tamil people. This metallurgical imagination of India and Sri Lanka can teach us not only the importance of cross-cultural exchanges but also what Walter Benjamin called, ‘Epic Memory’, as distinct from personal remembrance or ‘novelistic memory’. That distinction would require another essay to get at its richness. The lineage of bronze feels still alive, I am discovering much to my surprise and it would appear that we can’t afford to forget it.

The ecstatic, old, ascetic, Karaikkal Ammaiyar, sitting playing her cymbals and singing is still full of spiritual energy and power because she shows that to create one must be able to transmute base metal into energy (the rhythmic sound of her cymbals), by playing with fire. Young women artists, not just an old scholar like me, may get some feel for her creative energy by observing how the singing ascetic Bhakti poet, Karraikkal Ammaiyar of Polonnaruwa, has been forged in fire by an unknown craftsman-artist. Her spiky headdress with flowers, framing her face, appears to be like her hair and also rays of the sun. Though her eyes are wide open she also appears to be floating in her full-throated song. Though she appears as a singular figure in this one remnant sculpture, in the small relief sculpture decorating Shiva Nataraja’s large pedestal, she is part of a small musical ensemble, playing in unison with the cosmic dance. She is an agent of epic memory.

Concluded