Coromandel: A Personal History of South India

by Charles Allen

Vishnu and Shiva, so dominant in later centuries, are all but insignificant to the early Arya. Vishnu merits six hymns in the R-V while Shiva is entirely absent under that name, although part of his multifarious character lurks there as Rudra, ‘the howler’, god of wind. What is also apparent is that the composers of the R-V had no time for the worship of Shiva in his prime form, the linga, since linga-worship is unequivocally condemned in the R-V.16 This injunction points to linga-worship already being an established local practice, seemingly as shocking to the Arya as it appeared to the Victorians three thousand years later.

For many Hindus, there is only one version of Rama’s journey and that is Valmiki’s Ramayana, written in Sanskrit, although many Tamil-speakers would be quick to argue that their version – Kamban’s Ramayanam, also known as Ramavataram – is far superior, being the work of a thirteenth-century court poet from Thanjavur, and first read out by him in the precincts of the vast Sri Ranganathaswamy Vishnu temple on the outskirts of Trichy.

One particular goddess now began to emerge as the first clearly identifiable female deity to appear in Indian art. She is habitually described as the goddess Lakshmi but it would be more accurate to describe her as the rice-providing deity Shri, who has claims to be a genuinely Vedic divinity, rising out of the first churning of the milk-ocean as radiant light to make her mark in the Atharva-Veda. She is always shown being lustrated by two elephants while seated or standing on a lotus, which the Buddhists first sought to claim for themselves as the symbol of Buddhist dharma, so her first appearance in Indian art is as a bringer of good fortune to the followers of Buddhism (see illustrations overleaf).15

Lord Vishnu’s presence was initially much less evident south of the Narmada divide but he too begins to assume physical human form at this same time, dramatically coming into his own in a great surge of popular belief that had its beginnings in the Tamil South in the seventh century and spread northwards, replacing Brahminical Vedism with the popular Hinduism that so many millions follow today.