ABSTRACT
During the Chola reign, religion, arts and politics were inextricably intertwined. The incorporation of different religious images and a progressive change in the architectural design of the temples served as “a metaphor for a royal power […] and also as an ideological tool for the Chola monarchy”. As R. Champakalakshmi (2011:465) rightly pointed out, art as a disseminator of ideological ideas and “a transmitter of messages to the audience” is “constructed by and it constructs cultural and political perceptions”. By the end of the 9th century, mutually inclusive processes of the politicization of religion and the aestheticization of politics reached its peak in the construction of royal temples, such as Chola Chidambaram. As a result, the original shrine consisting of a little wooden thatched hut located in the midst of Tillai forest was gilded with a golden roof and increased spatially six times to its previous size. Along with the policies of temple construction projects carried out on a massive scale in Chidambaram, the Chola kings launched their political spectacles that inspired a revitalization of a literary genre of the processional poems written in Tamil, known as ula and introduced a new feature of aesthetic politics: festival parade, documented in epigraphic inscriptions. The festival parade subjugated the aesthetic to the demands of domination: it conflated political action with principles of religious experience and aesthetic mode of sense perception in order to consecrate expressions of power as auratic presences and aesthetic attractions. In my chapter, I argue that the architecture of Chola Chidambaram that allowed to introduce a new cultural practice of festival performance rested on the conscious manipulation of visual perception in which external appearance took hold of the inner self and was a part of the ruler’s tactic to create the society of spectators. This was accomplished through the deliberate construction of gaze that reinforced the performer-spectator dialectics, in which the beholder was brought under the influence of the powers that dwelled in the auratic presences of the aesthetic objects and spectacles. In my chapter, I intend to show how the architectural design of the Nataraja Chidambaram Temple was continually evolving under the Chola reign, how it was assigned to new causes, what role it came to play in the imperial formation of the Cholas and how the ideologies of aesthetic politics became encoded in the visual display and architectural design of the temple.
