Constructing Kanchi

In her 2021 monograph, Constructing Kanchi: City of Infinite Temples, Emma Natalya Stein traces the social life of the city of Kanchi by foregrounding the connection of the region’s physical features, its built environment, and its diverse populations to the shifting topologies of use to which the city was oriented by changing political regimes. The volume is a remarkable, if challenging, interdisciplinary study of the shifting sets of interlocking factors that enlivened the city at different periods in its long history. Thus, though Stein supplies us with a theoretical framework––the dynamic combination of kṣetra, land or region, and kṣatra, power or influence––the visions of the city that emerge in her analysis are sometimes out of focus or extend beyond the ken of her bi-focal lens. Yet this remains a, perhaps unwitting, strength of the work, for it enables the materials and structures that made the city––whether its native stores of sandstone, or the axial orientation of a central road, or indeed its temples’ boundary walls––to tell their own story. Stein’s resistance to adopting a single frame or mode of analysis enriches her study of this ancient city, which has often been reduced to one––typically the religious––element of its diverse past.

Indeed, as we move through the volume’s four chapters, our perspective of the city shifts radically. We begin with a subterranean view in the Pallava period, in which some of the city’s most memorable monuments were hewn from the city’s sandstone reserves. Alongside this description of the temples that made the Pallava capital, Stein is closely attuned to the material processes of change as well as the tropes and techniques of reuse, that emerge as mainstays of her story. She etches the rise and decline of the Pallava imperium into the sandstone of city’s towering temples. Built over, expanded, and repurposed over the centuries, the Pallava temples of Kanchi, most of which were built or converted from brick into stone in the eighth century, form the page on which Stein marshals an impressive array of evidence–­–classical Sanskrit and Tamil literary and epigraphic texts; art historical and architectural analyses; geological mapping; and interviews––to chart the vectors of Pallava-era temple-building, a study that is enriched by her close attention to the uses––ritual, contemplative, political and social––that made up the temples’ social lives.

The decline of Pallava influence and the ascent of the Chola dynasty is similarly written into stone; with the ascent of the Chola regime, the prominence of Kanchi’s imperial temple complexes waned, even as the city’s environs grew, with the new rulers turning to the granite reserves south of the city. In discussing the Chola period, Stein’s study zooms out to a bird’s eye view of the Kamarajar Salai, the arterial avenue in Kanchi that reoriented the city’s place in a wider Chola imperium. Stein follows this road to explore a variety of vectors of change. Not only did this avenue displace the Pallava period temples that, no longer on the principal avenue, fell into desuetude, but more importantly, the road enables Stein to locate narratives of Shaiva and Viashnava pilgrimage, which were circulated in texts such as the Periya Purāṇam, thereby bringing into view mutually imbricated visions––textual and physical, imagined and material––of the sacred geography of the city. As the limits of Chola dominion extended, local agents of Chola rule and the local sovereign deity emerged as the crucial instruments of governance. Brahmadēya grants, issued by local leaders, prominent families and communities, marked the steady displacement of the royal court as the sole hub in this vast network of redistribution and exchange.

From its vantage point of the arterial “axis of access,” the study zooms out further still to connect the city, through its ports and its portable religious communities and artifacts, to expansive cosmopolitan cultures across the seas. Stein’s descriptions of temples that were constructed in the region stretching from Kanchi to Māmallapuram, following the course of rivers to the sea, reveal the impressions––architectural styles, materials, deities, and even artifacts hidden underground, either by human agents or natural transformations––that a variety of cosmopolitan exchanges left on the physical and built environment. The final shift in perspective occurs in Stein’s examination of Kanchi in the colonial period which likewise left its impressions––chiefly as a theater of war––upon these very temples. At the same time, Kanchi left its own impression in the colonial imagination of the subcontinent’s religious history, principally in the emerging genre of the picturesque. Frozen in illo tempore in picturesque paintings, the colonial confections of Kanchi belied its multiple and myriad pasts and presents.

In the area of art history, Stein’s work stands as a welcome corrective to the unavoidable, but unfortunate, museumization of often living and breathing cities. Her ambitious project of recording the long and wondrous life of this still-breathing city is marred by a few deficiencies­––most obvious, the insufficient attention paid to the period between the Chola and colonial periods––yet it marks a great achievement in allowing an object, here a city, to speak on its own terms, in the hybrid language of its physical and built structures, recounting a marvelous history of the nurture of nature.  

Nabanjan Maitra is an assistant professor of the Interdisciplinary Study of Religions at Bard College.

Nabanjan Maitra

Date Of Review:

May 29, 2023