My listening place
Do you have one of those places where you go to just sit and listen?
For me, that place is the South Indian Temple Hall at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The sound is the first thing you notice as you enter the space. Sounds of the original temple in Madurai reverberate off the columns and ice blue ceiling, while penetrating the surrounding rooms.
At such moments, the temple hall attempts to bring the listener closer to the gods depicted on the columns that surround you.
The 8-foot tall stone columns feature figures from the Indian epic Ramayana, and a series of friezes atop the columns tells the Ramayana story.
I don’t go there often any more because such indoor spaces haven’t maintained Covid precautions. Although I did see many employees wearing masks on my visit yesterday, so that’s awesome.
When I do go to the museum, I pick slow days and times to minimize my risk. I thought late on a Saturday would be fairly slow, and it wasn’t too busy.
I try to write there—trusty notebook and pen poised for inspiration—sitting on one of the cushioned benches in the center of the hall.
Lately, the words don’t flow, and all I feel is grief. Grief at everything I’ve lost, but especially my ability to travel.
Yesterday, I took photos and notes for this blog post. The timeline in the next section is largely drawn from those notes.
You might be surprised that I go to listen, but in fact the space is built for listening.
Or I should say rebuilt for listening.
In 2016, as part of the reimagining of the temple space, curator Darielle Mason included sounds (and video) from the Madanagopalaswamy temple in Madurai from which the storied stone was once thought to belong.
You can watch (and listen to!) an Indian wedding and abhisheks of the gods and goddesses without ever leaving Philly.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Let’s take a look back at how Philly of all damn places became the home of the only historical South Indian stone temple hall outside the subcontinent.
The story begins with a Pepper.
Of travel diaries and red herrings
Imagine if your daughter got married, traveled the world on her honeymoon, and bought magnificent stone pillars and other artifacts to decorate her house on Philadelphia’s Main Line.
After the artifacts arrived in Philly, your daughter divorced, World War I broke out, and the artifacts were stored in warehouse, where they remained until her death in 1918.
That’s the situation in which the Pepper family of Philadelphia found itself after the death of their beloved daughter and aunt Adeline Pepper Gibson.
To honor Adeline’s memory, the family donated the stones to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, creating the installation we now call the South Indian Temple Hall.
Yet, it took curators nearly a century to answer the most important question: where did the pillars come from?
In her 2022 book Storied Stone: Reframing the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s South Indian Temple Hall, Darielle Mason traced the history of the museum’s acquisition and installations of the pillars, offering a (hopefully) final answer to that question.
Mason is now Senior Curator of Asian Art, Emerita at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She served as the Stella Kramrisch Curator of Indian and Himalayan Art and Head of the Department of South Asian Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art until 2023.
She visited Madurai multiple times in the in the mid-2000s, including a 2008 trip with Eleanor BH Coates, Adeline Pepper Gibson’s grandniece. On that visit, Coates mentioned a travel diary, which she eventually shared with Mason. That’s when Mason learned new information about the purchase that altered not only the hall’s provenance but also her interpretation of the artifacts.
The story of the storied stones
The story of the temple hall stretches back to the 16th century. The following timeline is based on the Storied Stone book and the timeline in the gallery itself.
1550 to 1600
The rulers of the Madurai Nayak dynasty commission the construction of the temple hall. The mandapam is similar to many built during the period from the 16th to 17th centuries in Tamil Nadu.
1907
KRV Chettiar funds the rebuilding of the Kudal Alagar Lakshmi temple in Madurai. As part of the construction, they clear out granite stones and send them down the street to the Madanagopalaswamy temple.
1913
Adeline Pepper Gibson acquires 60 granite stones from the Madanagopalaswamy temple authorities. Her purchase creates a red herring for scholars, some of whom assume the stones were part of that temple complex. When the stones arrive in Philly, they are placed in a warehouse.
1918
Adeline Pepper Gibson dies of pneumonia in France, leaving the stones to her family.
1919
The Gibson family donates the stones to the museum, and Harvard-based temple expert Ananda K. Coomaraswamy is brought in by the museum to sort through the pieces.
1920
The PMA debuts the installation in the Memorial Hall building (now the Please Touch Museum).
1923
The Kudal Alagar temple construction is complete, and leaves no trace of the previous construction.
1934
Penn art history professor and PMA curator W. Norman Brown goes to Madurai, and puts forward the theory that the hall is part of Kudal Alagar temple.
1940
Brown publishes his book the Pillared Hall and opens the new wing at the current building in Fairmount Park.
1950
Stella Kramrisch takes over as curator. No new work is done on the hall except to lower the lights, which gives it a dark and mysterious feel. Kramrisch’s Orientalist approach to Indian art dominates the next 40 to 50 years of museum acquisitions.
2004 to 2008
Curator Darielle Mason is hired and travels to Madurai multiple times. She puts forward the theory that the hall stood in front of the Madanagopalaswamy temple alley.
2016
The Temple Hall is reinstalled with improved lighting and an outdoor feel as the ceiling is painted blue to resemble the sky. This change aligns with Mason’s alley theory. Mason also curates a video from the Madanagopalaswamy temple complex that highlights various religious ceremonies. This installation helps connect visitors to the religious space more overtly and more deeply than ever before.
2020 to 2021
New research sheds light on the storied stones that indicates they belong to the Kudal Alagar temple. Available to Mason for the first time, Adeline Pepper Gibson’s private travel diary outlines the complex issues with buying and shipping the stones from Madurai to Philly.
2022
Darielle Mason publishes Storied Stone. The museum updates its timeline on the wall of the gallery.
Victory City and the rebuilding of religious identity
I was deeply disappointed when Salman Rushdie’s Victory City was not nominated for a Booker in 2023.
Set in South India during the time of the Vijayanagara Empire, the book mixes historical fiction and magical realism to create a Ramayana-like mythology for South India.
Victory City reminds me of Haroun and the Sea of Stories in its playfulness but with more bite and complexity in its narrative structure. Here, Rushdie tells the story of Pampa Kampana through a translated diary.
And (mis)translation itself plays a roll in the naming of the city. The original name of the city is Vijaynagara (Victory City), like its historical inspiration. But when Portuguese traveler Domingo Nunes can’t pronounce that word, he christens it Bisnaga, which my Latin-Hindi influenced brain translates as two snakes.
Many readers outside India missed some of Rushdie’s subtler points about how Indian political and religious life merge to create a national identity. In this case, the Vijayanagara identity is created quite literally through the body of Pampa Kampana, who whispers Victory City and its inhabitants into existence.
Throughout the 247 years of her story, Pampa Kampana must build and rebuild the city as she tries to achieve her feminist utopia.
At one point, royal advisor Vidyasagar quips:
The gods have better things to do than to build temples, he said. But for men, there is no higher duty they can perform.
— Vidyasagar in chapter 5 of Victory City by Salman Rushdie and narrated by Sid Sagar.
Temples have long served as loci of political power, and Victory City is no exception as its leaders and their advisors like Vidyasagar attempt to create a New Religion infused with political power.
Madurai makes an appearance in the story when Hukka Raya I conquers the Madurai sultanate and brings it under the of rule of the Vajayanagar Empire.
The short-lived Madurai sultanate was a quarrelsome place, the eight princes following one another onto the bloody throne by murdering their predecessors, one after the other, in rapid succession, so that by the time Hukka Raya I’s armies arrived the sultan who defeated the Hoysalas—and whose daughter was now Ibn Battuta’s wife—was long gone, and since his time Madurai had been the scene of repeated power grabs, assassinations of the nobility, and public impalings of the common people, grisly acts intended to show both the nobles and the common people who was boss, but resulting in a level of hatred so profound that the army of Madurai rebelled and refused to fight, so Hukka’s victory was achieved without bloodshed, and nobody mourned the last execution, which was of the last and most murderous of the octet of bloody sultans. — Victory City, chapter 6, pages 75–76
Although the Philly temple hall was built later, during the Nayak empire, this fictional paragraph illustrates a common theme in historical chronicles from the period: the demonization of your enemies.
Pampa Kampana’s account is no exception. Did the 8 sultans kill each other in quick succession? Yes. Were they horrible to the populace? Probably. But was Hukka Raya I the savior Pampa Kampana indicates here? Mmm. That’s a story for another time.
Regardless of the political bloodshed that made the Nayak dynasty possible, there’s no doubt that the religious temples built during the period are some of the most magnificent in India.
Western scholars have long downplayed the historical importance of South Indian sculpture created after the 14th century.
As Mason notes in Storied Stone, even Stella Kramrisch, who was the custodian of the temple hall for much of its time at the PMA, stated:
Tradition survives…but its main expression, that of sculpture, completed its development during the 13th century. — Storied Stone, page 97
In 2019, Professor Christian Branfoot from SOAS gave a talk at the PMA about the context and likely history of the temple hall.
Branfoot is an expert in Madurai Nayak dynasty architecture whose work seeks to correct the misguided, Orientalist narrative that artistic development stopped in the 13th to 14th centuries.
He asserts the large, elaborate sculpted columns we see in Philly are part of a style that was “in full bloom in the 16th and 17th century.”
He points out that there’s a long history of construction, renovation, and change in South India. The Madurai temples are no exception. Rebuilding is the most likely explanation for how Adeline Pepper Gibson acquired the storied stones we have in Philly today.
When temples were rebuilt, the columns that formed the mandapams were often discarded and not reused. Branfoot argued in 2018 that it was unlikely that the columns Adeline Pepper Gibson purchased would have been reused.
He also noted that by 1910, collectors had begun to change their perception of Indian art and see it as more as fine art. Gibson’s purchase was the beginning of a wave of interest in such art. By the 1920s, just as the PMA acquired the artifacts, such purchases were increasingly common.
Historical narrative and the myth of historical certainty
As Nandita Bose so eloquently observed in the Deccan Herald, Victory City:
…demonstrates with ease how history is also a rumour, is politically charged, is given tinges of the narrator’s expectations and cultural background, and is also to be rubbished or taken in blind faith.
That’s the lesson of Storied Stone. Historical scholarship is not a static, immovable object like the stones themselves. Much of what we initially thought we knew about the temple hall was based on the historical memory of temple pujaris or on documents with incorrect information.
Historical narratives reflect the historian’s expectations and cultural experiences. Historical facts are meant to be negotiated and renegotiated as we learn new information about that past. This subtle dance in scholarship is often difficult to translate to the general public, who demand historical certainty where we have none. Branfoot admits as much when asked what we know about the South Indian temple builders. At a time when we know the names Michelangelo and Bernini are building the Vatican, we don’t know the names of the South Indian craftsmen who gave us such beautiful spaces through which we can still connect to the divine.
Historians can be wrong about the past. Theories about the Black Death were significantly reimagined after the advent of DNA testing.
In early modern Tamil Nadu, where we have so few records, either because of the impact of time or colonization, we are bound to reinterpret how we see the past as we learn new information.
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