ABSTRACT:

An eighth-century Shiva temple at the center of Kanchipuram’s Kailasanatha temple complex provides a rare opportunity to study a set of sculpted figures and the verbal text that was meant to go with them. A Sanskrit poem has been carved into the stone of this temple, wrapping all around the building, and running right beneath the feet of large sculptures of Shiva and goddesses. Scholars often wonder if a text survives to explain the visual imagery on other monuments, but here we know there was a text and we still have it. Word and image were carved at the same time, on the same structure, under the same patron (the Pallava king Narasimha II Rajasimha). You see them at the same time. They are a matched pair.

And they coordinate closely to present the king as a descendent of gods and valiant kings, a charming lover, and a hero born to rescue the world from the Age of Strife, the Kali Yuga. But the sculptures and inscription tell this same story in their own, quite separate ways. The inscription is not a caption for the sculptures, nor do the sculptures illustrate the text. Neither is subordinate to the other, and neither is less true. Instead, word and image interact like the dancers in a tango, working together but not in unison, each picking out its own rhythmic steps as the two peel apart and then swirl back together.