These beautiful terracotta horses have a long history in Tamil Nadu, although they seem to be found today in mostly off-the-main road places. We saw a small set of litle horses near an enormous banyan tree that we visited. The tree was at least 400 years old.. A beautiful elderly woman lives near the tree as its caretaker and tends the little shrine there. She performed a ritual there and then blessed each of us. She told us that many birds and animals find refuge in the tree including a sacred cobra (which I did not see).
Later we came upon a collection of horses at the foot of an enormous volcanic rock, where Jain monks once carved their beds out of solid rock near the top, They slept with a stunning view of the surrounding valleys.
The largest collection of horses we visited was at a small village shrine in a part of the woods that is protected. They formed two long lines leading to the shrine. No one is really sure about the origins of these horses, although they are thought to be ready and waiting when the village protector gods need to ride out on their missions. What I love about them is their obviously rollicking sense of humor. Many of them are guffawing. Some of the horses are very old, others are new. Even today when some folks ask the gods for help they may promise to offer a horse at the shrine if their wish is granted.
You can't help but notice that many of the horses are falling apart. Their heads have been knocked off. Of course, they are decomposing due to age, wind and rain. But the real culprits at work are the monkeys who live in the area and play among the horses. They are the ones who knock the heads off. And no effort is made to protect them either. The monkeys live there and probably lived there before humans, so they are left to run free as they wish.
This seems to go against our American sense of order and need to control. I was reminded, though, of how the pueblo people of New Mexico let their adobe homes decompose naturally. At least this is what they did for most of their history. No big repairs made, what came from the earth returned to it. Part of the rhythm of life. Maybe you built a new home if you needed one and the old one had collapsed.
In stark contrast to these ways of living is the damage we have viewed at so many of the temples in Tamil Nadu: where invaders—be they Muslims, Christians, Europeans, whoever... attempted to destroy the images carved into rock by the ancient peoples of this area. Faces knocked off, arms broken, bodies dug out—in one case the entire temple complex was razed by Muslim invaders in the 1300s. This is destruction of a different kind—or at least it seems so to me: the attempt to control and to assert one's own way as THE only way. And, perhaps in the case of the temple art, there was a fear of the beauty and sensuality, and the “otherness” of the images and the gods they represented. This reminded me of the attempt in New Mexico by the French-born church authorities to destroy all of the devotional art that had been carved and painted by the people of the area. The idea was to bring in “true” art from France. Hispanos in New Mexico had to hide their devotional objects—what they didn't hide was destroyed—by those who knew “better.”
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| Portion of one of the Great Chola Temples, 11th century |
Tamil Nadu has been invaded and governed by foreigners many many times over its long history, and there has been much suffering and loss over those years. All cultures experience loss and there aren't many that have escaped the influence of others, but there seems to me a difference between the loss of the horses' heads, the demise of the adobe dwellings versus the destruction of the temple art of Tamil Nadu and the devotional folk art in New Mexico.
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