Was Nataraja inspired by the stars?

In the FAQ section of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research’s website, one social media query used to recur: “Why does CERN have a statue of Shiva?” The question was understandable. A six-and-a-half-foot bronze South Asian deity, at first glance, appears incongruous within a European scientific campus. CERN’s answer explained that the “deity was chosen by the Indian government because of a metaphor that was drawn between the cosmic dance of the Nataraj and the modern study of the ‘cosmic dance’ of subatomic particles”. Shiva has danced at CERN only since 2004, but the philosophical and aesthetic association between Nataraja and the metaphors of science is neither recent nor sudden.

The Nataraja became a symbol of India’s antiquity and civilisational sophistication from the early 20th century, a nationalist symbolism contemporary scholars believe was catalysed during the colonial era by the controversial art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy’s 1912 essay The Dance of Siva. The figure later gained global visibility through physicist Fritjof Capra’s bestseller The Tao of Physics, which is quoted both in CERN’s old FAQ response and on the plaque accompanying the Nataraja on site. Yet, alongside the philosophical interpretations attached to it, the figure’s iconography itself invited wonder: one leg bent, the other raised and crossed at the hip, four arms extended, each hand poised in a distinct gesture.

For those curious about this cosmic character, the Bronze Gallery of the Government Museum in Chennai offers a chance to behold iterations across several centuries. At the far end of the lower floor, against a printed backdrop of a night sky, looms a massive 11th-century Nataraja from the village of Kankoduttavanitam. The height of a tall adult, he presides dramatically over the area, his verdigris patina bespeaking a thousand-year vintage.

The very bhangas (postures) and mudras (gestures) that qualify the cosmic characterisation in modern discourse may be linked to a prescientific imaginary. Around the time the Indian government gifted the CERN its Shiva statue, archaeometallurgist Sharada Srinivasan of Bengaluru’s National Institute of Advanced Sciences proposed an intriguing theory developed with the late astrophysicist Nirupama Raghavan. In the 2006 paper The Art and Science of Chola Bronzes, Srinivasan posited “an exciting iconometric link between Nataraja and the constellation Orion”. By mapping star charts onto images of Nataraja sculptures, she explored the form’s “astronomical and astrological connotations”. Superimposing an 800 CE star chart of Orion onto what she says is the earliest known Nataraja sculpture, she found an “astonishingly good fit”, suggesting a stellar inspiration for the icon, “at least at its inception”.

Cosmic cycle

To contextualise Srinivasan’s celestial speculation, one must understand the changing history and semiotics of the idol. In her 1999 essay Shiva Nataraja: Shifting Meanings of an Icon, art historian Padma Kaimal challenged Coomaraswamy’s influential reading of the dance as the ananda-tandava – a dance of furious bliss displaying Shiva’s “mastery over the cosmic cycle and his promise to enlighten the faithful”. Critiquing him for relying on texts written long after the emergence of the form, she instead situates Nataraja within a contemporaneous textual field that supports the inference of a darker, tamasic choreography of destruction befitting the “Dancing Lord of the Charnel Ground”, as he was known at his most sacred residence of Chidambaram, about 234 km south of present-day Chennai.

Kaimal’s iconographic examination of the nascent Nataraja emphasises his saturnine aspect: the preponderance of snakes; the lifted, crossed-leg pose denoting the bhujangatrasita, meaning “frightened by a snake”; the drum in the upper right hand beating rhythm; and the flame in the upper left perhaps evoking the funeral pyre. The dwarf Muyalakan or Apasmara beneath his feet, long thought to personify ignorance after Coomaraswamy, could in fact be an assistant. Kaimal cites art historian David Smith’s observation that the “Chidambaramahatmya, the legend-book composed by temple priests at Nataraja’s cultic home between the 10th and 12th centuries, refers to Apasmara as a dwarf (bhuta) rather than a demon”.

Freestanding bronze Nataraja sculptures, such as those at CERN and the Government Museum, belong to a highly acclaimed group of medieval artefacts. Art historian Vidya Dehejia, one of the world’s leading scholars on these objects, described the tradition as representing “the most spectacular works of Indian sculptural art” in her catalogue essay for the exhibition The Sensuous and the Sacred: Chola Bronzes from South India. Produced between the 9th and 13th centuries CE in present-day Tamil Nadu, these bronzes originated during the Pallava dynasty as smaller-scale forms – one example being Srinivasan’s case study – but Dehejia maintains that monumental bronze sculpture as a specialised art “rose to prominence only with the patronage, direct and indirect, of the Chola rulers”.

Created using the lost-wax metal-casting technique, or madhuchhistavidhana, these bronze images, Dehejia informs us, would have been portable incarnations of the erstwhile fixed stone versions, themselves successors to wooden forms. Kaimal supposes the use of geometric patterns or yantras in the making of the sculptures, discerning a radial composition realised through a wheel-shaped diagram underpinning the form. In his book Indian Sculpture and Iconography: Forms and Measurement, master temple architect and builder V Ganapathi Sthapati records a belief among some poets that the Nataraja image is based on star positions or asterisms: Nataraja’s associated nakshatra (one of the 27 divisions of the lunar zodiac) is Thiruvadirai or Ardra (Betelgeuse), a red supergiant member of Orion imagined to be surrounded by six white stars, symbols of the god’s dance signifying “the six basic anchors of creation”.

Astral knowledge

In a 2016 essay, Nataraja, Natesa and Orion: Archaeometallurgical and Archaeastronomical Insights into Dancing Siva Images, Srinivasan elaborated on findings from her and Raghavan’s first mapping of the Pallava-era Nataraja, venturing the possibility that the iconography may have been “inspired by the outline formed from the positions of stars in the Orion constellation and those around it in a circular aureole”. She further observed that Ardra fell on his right shoulder while, somewhere near the dwarf demon Muyalakan, lay the constellation Lepus below Orion.

The bronze Nataraja idols were meant to be taken out in procession so that the god could grant devotees public darsan – what art historian Diana Eck called “a visual apprehension charged with religious meaning”. One such processional festival at the Nataraja temple in Chidambaram is Margazhi Thiruvadirai, celebrated when the full moon passes through the Ardra nakshatra. In her 2006 essay, Srinivasan cites Raghavan’s opinion that the historic Crab Supernova close to Orion may have influenced Chola culture. Another Nataraja festival associated with the supernova is Ani Thirumanjanam, which has marked the moon’s transition through the Uttara nakshatra since the 11th century. Using software to calculate the likely date of the moon’s passage through Uttara in 1054 CE, Raghavan deduced that it would have coincided with the very date of the supernova. Thus, the link between Orion and Nataraja appears to have long formed part of an astro-mythography surrounding the Lord of Dance.

This association may even have predated the Cholas. Srinivasan reports that Raghavan first used star-chart plotting in 2006 to theorise about possible connections between the Orion constellation and the Gangadhara panel at Kanchipuram’s 8th-century Pallava Kailasanatha temple, publishing her findings in a paper titled Is Siva Iconography Inspired by the Stars? Srinivasan wrote about Raghavan’s second exercise in star mapping a decade later, taking as its subject the very 11th-century Kankoduttavanitam Nataraja now displayed in the Government Museum. A star chart of 1054 CE, the year of the Crab Supernova, was plotted onto the image of the sculpture, revealing correlations with the positions of stars in Orion as well as Sirius. Srinivasan posits that the supernova itself lies above Nataraja’s head, its explosive force echoing the thunder of the tandava, while his foot points toward Sirius, the Dog Star long used for navigation.

Indeed, for the seafaring rulers of the Tamil coast, knowledge of the stars would have been necessary. “Correct reading of stars in the skies was an essential element of the Chola sailing techniques,” writes geographer and maritime historian B Arunachalam in his book Chola Navigation Package. Ardra was a particularly important star, one of the pathfinders, whose rise in January inaugurated, through festivals at Shiva temples, a new cycle of navigation. The analogy between Ardra and Nataraja, evoked perhaps through the astral iconometry of the figure and certainly through temple ritual, may have formed part of a broader imperial ideology. While Ardra and associated asterisms guided the Cholas toward ascendancy, the proposed celestial configuration of Nataraja’s form projected sovereignty over both heaven and earth, constituting the cosmic dancer’s domain.

From the 6th century CE, writes Dehejia, southern Indian deities began to be conceived as powerful public figures – quite literally, as processional idols – akin to monarchs. By the 10th century, when the Nataraja acquired the form by which it would subsequently be recognised, the burgeoning Chola dynasty turned to Chidambaram and its divine ruler for myths and models of kingship. Through allegories of vanquishment and defeat, “Nataraja’s achievements paralleled the tasks that lay before early kings of the Chola dynasty: the subjugation of rival kings and the establishment of a geographic and psychic center for the vast dominion they aspired to claim”.

The temples of Chola queen Sembiyan Mahadevi, built between the late 10th and early 11th centuries, were the first to feature stone Natarajas in niched three-dimensional form. Kaimal argues that she was therefore the first ruler to deploy the Lord of Dance as an emblem of Chola domination, and that the distribution of her temples across the Kaveri delta suggests one of their functions was to “expand the fame of the Chola dynasty”. As Chola territory and patronage expanded, Kaimal argues, Nataraja’s image appeared in new places across the Kaveri region, visually propagating both his cult and the Chola authority for which it served as a proxy. She further reads the radial composition of the sculptures as part of a centrifugal, expansionist aesthetic: “The radial emblem paralleled the deity to early Chola kings in their aspiration to become the somatic center of a vast geographic and psychological dominion.”

Historical cosmologies

In the modern era, Nataraja was launched into the mainstream consciousness by Coomaraswamy and Capra and also into outer space aboard the Soviet space station Mir – its early medieval form now layered with 20th and 21st century meanings. Yet these newer meanings are rarely acknowledged as modern constructions. Instead, they are often presented as though fully congruent with supposedly fixed definitions inherited unchanged from the past. In her essay The Classical and the Monumental in Indian Sculpture: 1947 to the Present (2014), art historian Annapurna Garimella takes the example of the Pandyan-era Vishnu installed at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research to explore the complex relationship between the sacred and the secular, and between the classical and the modern in Indian sculpture. Her position directs attention to the deeper historiographic problem of modernising classicism: how can we look at the past without remaining oblivious to the frame of the present?

In a conversation about the discourse surrounding Nataraja, Garimella highlights the importance of focusing on the materialities and temporalities of the period, asking: “What sort of tools would there have been to empirically implement the idea of a mandalam on earth becoming joined to the cosmos and creating a divinised imperial imagination in a specific form?” Arguing against overly literal readings, she contends that once Chola artistic culture sought to imagine cosmology, gods themselves became available as acts of imagination. Yet, in some modern engagements with classical sculpture – themselves imaginative acts – there has been “a tendency to get caught up in a scientising mode”. This modernist slant is also entwined, she notes, with a history of “upper-caste male scholars marrying Copernican astronomy to Chola Shaivite thought”. Cautioning against approaches that uncritically yoke divergent historical cosmologies and create anachronisms, Garimella remarks: “You can’t talk about the universalisation of the Nataraja without, for instance, thinking about the sectarianism of the period, or about caste, as in the case of the legend of [the Paraiyar saint] Nandanar who worshipped Shiva at Chidambaram.”

Whether or not Nataraja was truly modelled on the stars, his terpsichorean connection to the heavens has endured for more than a thousand years. Standing before the Kankoduttavanitam Nataraja in the glow of the Chennai museum, one might wonder whether the backdrop of the night sky detracts from the subtlety of his kinesis, and whether the millennium-old shadows he casts behind him are enough to evoke the churn of the universe he commands.

Kamayani Sharma is an independent writer, researcher and podcaster based in New Delhi. This project was made possible under the Scroll x MMF Arts Writer Grant.