Locating Cosmic Deities: Talapurāṇams on Tērs in Southeast India

On the penultimate day of grand temple festivals (brahmotsavams) in south India, large crowds of devotees gather on arterial roads surrounding temple complexes to pull and witness colossal “temple-cars” in jubilant processions. Temple-cars in southeast India, known as tēr in Tamil and ratham in Sanskrit, carry bronze images of gods and goddesses enthroned on a wheeled wooden base and shelter them within a temporary, fabric-clad canopy that evokes a Hindu temple superstructure (vimāna) in design. Tērs also “convey” gods in another sense: the richly carved panels that adorn temple-car bases
narrate stories that assert the presiding deity’s authority on the temple site.

This presentation examines the subject matter and arrangement of panels depicting stories of a deity’s arrival on their temple site (talapurāṇam) in the sculptural programs of some of the oldest surviving tēr bases constructed insoutheast India between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I identify two primary strategies of rendering talapurāṇam narratives and interpret them alongside coeval theological discourse and medieval Tamil devotional (bhakti) poetry on the cosmic nature of Hindu deities. I propose that sculptural programs of the region’s temple-car bases unfold a deity’s cosmic form, which is otherwise localized in their lithic bodies and temples, and conclude by demonstrating the soteriological implications of this visual logic.

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