Southern India - 7 February 2012 (3)

Tanjore (continued)

Once reunited with our shoes, we returned to the bus and set off for the palace.  Lukose said that there wasn’t much to photograph and it didn’t justify the cost of the permit, so I left my camera on the bus.

The palace held three rooms of bronze statues dating back as far as the 9^th century CE, but mostly from the 10^th and 11^th centuries.  Lukose took this opportunity to show us the main gods, in particular Shiva and Vishnu, their roles and the items they carried.  Gods have at least four arms to show that they have power.  Some statues have eight or even sixteen and the most powerful have sixty-four.  I think four arms would come in very useful for all sorts of things.  The statues were so realistic and life like, with an amazing level of detail and beautiful hands, not at all like European art of the same era, with its wooden looking saints and Normans.  It was getting very hot in the rooms and I stood beside a fan, which was blowing on the lady who was keeping an eye on us.  She stood up and invited me to sit on her chair, so we started talking.  She said that she enjoyed her job and had been working there for fifteen years.  She didn’t look old enough!

It was possible to go up the tower in the palace, so most of the group made the climb.  I didn’t bother because I wouldn’t have been able to take any photos and because I felt too hot for such exertion.  I waited with Pat and Lukose and asked if I could go ahead and look at the library museum.

I was so glad that I did this because Pat and I only just got in before the museum closed for lunch.  We had a quick look round at the books.  Most were in display cabinets and left open at important pictures.  One corner had paintings which tried to show how various types of human face morphed from different animals.  Another corner had pictures of Chinese tortures, so I didn’t look in that direction to avoid any nightmares.  I liked the prints of places in both India and London which were on the walls.

A thali meal

When we were thrown out, we rejoined the group and went for lunch at the Star Residency.  Lunch was a traditional thali.  This was a large round dish, covered in banana leaves, with small pots containing a variety of dishes round the outside and a piece of naan in the centre.  Later they brought a curry and rice as well.  Nearly all the dishes were really tasty, though they did include some desert which was a surprise when I inadvertently started to eat it with the main course.  The meal and soft drinks like my lime soda were included, so only the beer drinkers had to pay anything.

After lunch, the queue for the single ladies toilet was holding up Lukose’s schedule, so he asked them to open up a hotel room so some of us could us the bathroom.  The room looked very nice and the bathroom was very clean, so I was impressed.

Before and After Bronze Statues

Next stop was to a place where they made bronze statues in the traditional way.  We walked through a shop and met our guide at the back.  He introduced us to his uncle, a master statue maker, who was sitting on the floor of a small rickety outhouse, busily tending a fire.  It was a hot day anyway, but the fire made things almost unbearable.  The guide explained the manufacturing process: the wax model, the clay mould, pouring the liquid metal and the final filing, smoothing and polishing of the statues.

Pouring the Metal

Statue Fresh from Mould

Then came the drama.  The uncle got a crucible out of the fire and poured the red hot molten metal into a mould just behind where I had been standing.  It seemed so dangerous and the uncle looked so frail.  Our guide said that he had several scars himself from burns from the molten metal.  He then broke a mould of a statue which they had poured earlier to reveal a rather scruffy, dull statue.  He showed us the range of files he would use to turn it into the final polished article.

Then we headed into the shop for the usual hard sell.  The statues were lovely, especially the elephants, but they were so heavy and expensive that I managed to resist temptation.  Two couples in our group ended up buying items, but the second couple only did so because he ran after them onto the bus with the statue and made a much-reduced offer they couldn’t refuse.