- 19 hours ago
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00In 1838, an English explorer hacking his way through dense Indian jungle discovered these beautiful temples.
00:16But as he got closer, he was appalled by what he found.
00:20He had discovered the lost erotic temples of India.
00:24Temples which even today are shrouded in secrecy.
00:30The End
00:35The End
00:40The End
00:45The End
00:50The End
00:51The End
00:55This is the face of India that the whole world knows. The Taj Mahal. One of those amazing works of art that completely lives up to its reputation.
01:14With its perfect proportions, its white marble finish and the beauty of its intricate inlay, it's consistently voted the most beautiful building in the world.
01:27It was built for love by a Muslim emperor in the mid-1600s, about the same time Versailles was being created for the kings of France.
01:40Shah Jahan built it for his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. She died giving birth to their 14th child. And as she lay dying, she made Shah Jahan promise he would build her the most beautiful tomb in the world.
01:55The End
01:58Despite having a harem of over 5,000 women, Shah Jahan was madly in love with his favorite wife, and promised to honor her wish.
02:08The emperor collected gems, so his craftsmen carved gemstones into flowers and shapes, carefully slicing thin sections of jade, lapis, amber, jasper, and amethyst, and then inlaying them into the white marble.
02:29When the Taj Mahal was finished, its perfect white marble proportions at the end of a long formal garden completely fulfilled Shah Jahan's promise to his dying wife.
02:48When people think of India, they think of the Taj Mahal.
02:52But there is a more ancient secret India, hidden deep in its tropical jungles, where one of the greatest building efforts in human history produced thousands of strange and mysterious temples.
03:07But today, they are lost and forgotten.
03:10This is India's deep south, the heartland of traditional Indian faith and culture.
03:21A land of dazzling emerald green rice fields and immense palm forests, where every few miles a temple soars above the surrounding countryside.
03:31Here, over a thousand years ago, one of the greatest kings of India, Raja Raja the Great, embarked on one of the largest building programs in the history of mankind, that still continues to this day.
03:51He and his successors moved more stone than the Great Pyramid of Giza, and his artists created some of the greatest treasures the world has ever seen.
04:02Over time, Raja Raja's temples became larger and larger.
04:06This one is so vast, that more than 200 Taj Mahals could fit comfortably within its walls.
04:13Why did Raja Raja do it?
04:18Well, it was the same motive that built Europe's cathedrals and Egypt's pyramids.
04:24He was moved by the power of faith.
04:37This is a land with almost as many gods as people.
04:41Every day at dawn, 16-year-old Kala, the eldest daughter of this family, performs the same ritual.
04:51As the sun rises, she draws intricate designs with colored rice flower outside her front door to bring good luck.
05:04Throughout southern India, women create these unique designs, called columns.
05:11A column is not meant to be permanent though, and the colored rice flower is dispersed throughout the day, only to be renewed the following morning.
05:23The rice flower goes to feed the ants and insects.
05:28Hinduism believes all life to be sacred.
05:31Even the humble insect has its place.
05:34In the larger temples, hundreds of priests carry out the thousands of religious tasks necessary to keep the gods happy.
05:46But these are not the gods of the West.
05:49Here, the priests are worshipping a phallic symbol, a stone lingam found in thousands of Indian temples.
05:56The West has never understood this erotic side of the Hindu religion, with its lingams, naked sculptures, and many-faced gods.
06:05During festivals, the gods are taken from their shrines and paraded around the temple grounds.
06:19At the end of the day, their costumes are changed, and they are put to bed for a few hours' rest.
06:28Indians believe that if these rituals are performed correctly, the gods will favor the villagers, cure their ills, protect their harvests, and bless their lives.
06:43For any religion to flourish, it helps to have friends in high places.
06:49But for Hinduism, with its vast temples and thousands of priests, it is absolutely essential.
06:56So India was lucky to have in Raja Raja, the greatest patron of arts in all its long history.
07:08And this is where he started, with this great temple at Tanjore.
07:12When it was finished a thousand years ago, it was the most amazing building in India,
07:17more than ten times taller than anything built before it.
07:22And it's not only huge, but it's all made of granite, one of the hardest stones in the world.
07:30The personality of Raja Raja is stamped all over this building.
07:34The most successful king the South ever produced had to build the greatest temple ever seen.
07:40The inner shrine under the large tower contains a large phallus, a lingam, twelve feet in height and five feet in diameter.
07:53The lingam is the symbol of one of India's most powerful and popular gods, Shiva.
07:59Every day priests wash and dress the lingam, pouring milk and other sacred potions over the stone.
08:05The lingam stood for the power and fertility of the king.
08:08So Raja Raja, as one of India's most powerful kings, created one of India's largest lingams.
08:19Until recently, we had no idea what the great king looked like.
08:22But then archaeologists made a sensational discovery.
08:26They found a narrow passageway running around the central shrine that had been sealed up and forgotten hundreds of years ago.
08:36When the excavators peered in, they found its walls covered with unique paintings from the time of Raja Raja the Great.
08:43They found the only existing portrait of Raja Raja the Great, with his bearded guru.
08:46They found the only existing portrait of Raja Raja the Great, with his bearded guru.
08:50The great king of Raja Raja was a devotee of the god Shiva, the walls are covered with scenes of the god's exploits.
08:56But there are also wonderful painted scenes of dancing girls with beautiful eyes.
09:06But best of all, they found the only existing portrait of Raja Raja the Great, with his bearded guru.
09:14As a follower of Shiva, Raja Raja's hair is piled up in dreadlocks, making him look like a Jamaican Rastafarian.
09:21He is standing behind and gazing respectfully at his guru, as well he might.
09:28For it was his spiritual advisor who was the force behind Raja Raja's insatiable appetite for building.
09:34And to build on this scale, you needed money.
09:38And the easiest way to gain wealth in ancient India, as in most places, was to grab it from your weaker neighbors.
09:46Helping Raja Raja was India's unique war machine, the Elephant.
09:51The Greatest Man
09:53The Greatest Man
09:54The Greatest Man
09:55The Greatest Man
09:56The Greatest Man
09:57The Greatest Man
09:58The Greatest Man
10:00Here in the jungles of southern India, Raja Raja's men searched for wild elephants.
10:06Docile animals born of tame parents were not good war elephants.
10:11Raja Raja wanted only the biggest, fiercest and fittest Tuskramales for his military machine.
10:17A stockade was constructed by up to 1,000 elephant trainers, or mahouts.
10:28They would then drive the herd into a funnel that led into the stockade.
10:32Once the elephants were inside, the door was shut and the training process began.
10:37As recently as the 1960s, great elephants were taken from these foothills, using the same methods as in Raja Raja's day.
10:53They picked the strongest bulls to be trained for the battlefield. The rest would become working elephants, used for Raja Raja's construction projects.
11:07A single, enraged, fighting elephant was said to have the power of 6,000 horses.
11:17So how did the mahouts control this power and make sure their elephants were ready to fight?
11:22It was simple. They got the elephants drunk.
11:24Before a battle, the war elephants were made to drink arach, fermented rice liquor.
11:31As in humans, it made the elephants ready to broil.
11:39They could literally slice their way through the opposition with razor sharp blades attached to their trunks.
11:44From atop the elephants, spear throwers, archers, generals, and even the king would rain death around the heads of the enemy.
11:56But how do you take a wild elephant and make it into a fighting machine?
12:06By the skills of the mahouts, the legendary elephant trainers of India.
12:10Mahouts have a very close relationship with the elephants they train and have a deep understanding of the animal's nature.
12:23As young boys, mahouts begin to learn the ancient traditions and secrets
12:28that will enable them to communicate with elephants by using gentle pressure of their feet and by the sound of their voice.
12:40They have a very close relationship with the animals.
12:43They have a very close relationship with the animals.
12:44The animals are very close relationship with the animals,
13:05and the animals are with the animals,
13:07and the animals are with the animals.
13:09elephants are very intelligent animals and can perform complicated tasks with amazing
13:14dexterity and strength. Raja Raja wanted every elephant he could get his hands on. He was
13:21one of the most ambitious kings the world has ever seen.
13:27No one had ever built higher in India until Raja Raja's great temple at Tanjore. In only
13:33a few years, hundreds of thousands of tons of pure granite, one of the hardest stones
13:39in the world, were hacked out of the earth to build his dream temple. The quarry that
13:45provided the granite for the temple was over 50 miles away. So how did they move this huge
13:51amount of granite a thousand years ago? They used these ancient boats whose design has not
14:01changed over the centuries. From Bronze Age Ireland to modern Tibet, the coracle is mankind's
14:08favorite boat.
14:15All you need is some flexible wood and animal hides. In some parts of India, the coracle is
14:20still used to ferry people and their possessions, goats and the occasional motorbike across rivers.
14:26But a coracle could only move blocks weighing a few tons, sufficient for much of Tanjore, but
14:33no use at all for this, the huge capstone on top of the temple. It consists of two massive
14:40blocks of granite, each weighing 40 tons.
14:46How on earth did you get a 40 ton block of granite hundreds of feet in the air in 1010 A.D.?
14:54It's a mystery that has baffled historians for years.
15:04The exotic lost temples of India are as full of mystery today as they were when western explorers
15:09first stumbled onto them over a century ago.
15:17Someone who has given considerable thought to the mystery of how ancient Indians raised
15:21massive blocks of granite to the tops of temples is the present prince of Tanjore.
15:28He's fascinated by the achievements of India's greatest king, Raja Raja the Great.
15:38He told us of a legend passed down from generation to generation in his family that might provide
15:44a solution to the mystery of the giant capstone.
15:50He directed us to the area of the town where family traditions spoke of the remains of an
15:54ancient ramp. After searching the area, we found what clearly looks like an ancient ramp,
16:00with a gentle 6-degree slope pointing towards Tanjore Temple, which stands just over a mile
16:06from this spot. A ramp from here, with this gentle slope, would exactly intersect the top
16:14of the Tanjore Shrine, 216 feet in the air. What's more, the ramp is exactly where you
16:23might expect to find it. Most Hindu temples face east to meet the rising sun, and it is
16:29to the east that all the smaller buildings are constructed. So the only direction to build
16:34an enormous ramp is from the west. And that's just where we found our ramp.
16:44So the evidence points clearly to this being the remains of the ramp used to get the 40-ton
16:49blocks to the top of the temple. But how did Raja Raja move 40 tons of solid granite up
16:56a mile-long ramp 1,000 years ago? Elephants. After all, he had tens of thousands of them in his
17:05army. But no one has used elephants to move blocks of this size in living memory. So we decided
17:12to try an experiment. We ordered a block of granite to be delivered to a slope identical
17:17to the ramp we had discovered at Tanjore.
17:27The block only weighed 25 tons, not 40, because that is the maximum weight you're allowed to
17:32transport on Indian roads. Even this weight took three days and three nights to travel the
17:37200 miles from the quarry. We prepared several wooden rollers, then brought in the powerhouse
17:44of ancient India, the elephant. The elephants moved into position to both push and pull the block.
18:00a block.
18:24But despite all their efforts, it didn't budge.
18:30It looked as if we had failed.
18:37But one of the men who was handling the elephants noticed that one of the logs wasn't completely round.
18:48That log was removed, and the elephants tried again.
18:51Let's try it again.
19:12Success.
19:13Not only did the elephants move the block, they picked up the rollers and put them in place for the next push.
19:25Let's try it again.
19:26Let's try it again.
19:27Let's try it again.
19:28Let's try it again.
19:29Let's try it again.
19:30Let's try it again.
19:31Let's try it again.
19:32Let's try it again.
19:33Alright.
19:35All right.
19:38Our experiment showed how it was possible for Raja Raja and his architects to move giant stones to the summit of his temple.
19:48to the summit of his temple.
19:50But how did they cut the stones in the first place?
19:53Remember, this temple is built almost entirely of granite,
19:57one of the world's hardest stones.
19:59How did Raja Raja's workers 1,000 years ago
20:02shape and carve this immensely hard stone
20:05using only primitive tools?
20:18The main business of this resort town just south of Madras
20:25is sculpting granite.
20:27This statue of Hanuman, the monkey god,
20:31will take a sculptor and his team of ten men
20:34more than six months to complete.
20:36These sculptors have the benefit of steel tools.
20:39In the ninth century, the only tools available
20:48were made of soft iron.
20:50It would have taken many years
20:52for a statue like this to be carved.
20:54So this carved rock face must have taken decades.
21:03Known locally as Arjunas Penance,
21:06this granite carving tells a universal story.
21:21See this holy man standing in the burning sun on one leg
21:24with his hands in the air performing a penance?
21:31The artists clearly had a sense of humor though.
21:34At the bottom of the wall is a little cat
21:37holding the same difficult pose.
21:40Some mice, impressed by his piety,
21:42have come to worship him as a saint.
21:45One even has his paws clasped in prayer.
21:48Every Indian knows what happens next.
21:51The cat eats the mice.
21:53The sculptor is warning of the dangers of false prophets.
21:57Iron tools might have been fine for sculpting,
22:07but how did these ancient craftsmen quarry
22:10the hardest stone in the world?
22:14Today, even a diamond-tipped circular saw
22:17and countless gallons of water
22:19will take hours to cut through this block of granite.
22:22Looking around, you can see clues to how this would have been done a thousand years ago.
22:31Once he had decided which segment of stone he wanted to quarry,
22:34the stonemason used a small iron chisel
22:37to hollow out rows of little pockets in the granite.
22:40Then he hammered wooden blocks firmly into the holes
22:43and poured water over them.
22:45The wood would then slowly swell until the granite split.
22:50That's how Raja Raja quarried stone for his temples.
23:01During Raja Raja's lifetime,
23:03millions and millions of tons of granite were cut and transported
23:07because Tanjur was only one of the many temples he and his family built.
23:15Raja Raja moved enough granite to build the Great Pyramid of Giza.
23:24What was the driving force behind this building frenzy?
23:30Religion.
23:31You see, as a king, Raja Raja was in a terrible bind.
23:36On the one hand, his religion told him not to kill.
23:39But on the other, as a successful king,
23:42he was supposed to make war on his neighbors.
23:44And so he was responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of his enemies.
23:54He firmly believed in reincarnation
23:56and that his actions in this life would determine his luck in the next life.
24:00So given the blood on his hands,
24:02he might come back as a worm.
24:05Or even worse.
24:10That's why in the painting of Raja Raja
24:12in the secret passage of the great temple at Tanjur,
24:15the greatest warrior that India ever produced
24:18is shown paying respect to his elderly guru.
24:23The holy man held the key to Raja Raja's salvation.
24:26He knew that Raja Raja had to build more temples
24:30in order to ensure a good reincarnation.
24:33So the man responsible for the spiritual health of the king
24:36was painted in front of the great Raja Raja.
24:39Even for a king as rich as Raja Raja the Great,
24:52building a new temple was an expensive operation.
24:55It wasn't just the building.
24:57It was the upkeep.
24:58An Indian temple employs thousands of people.
25:13For centuries, here at Sri Rangam Temple,
25:16men have been selected from special families
25:18to pick and prepare the garlands of flowers for the gods of the temple.
25:2158-year-old Ramanuja can never marry,
25:37and must maintain a vow of silence as he prepares garlands for the gods.
25:42Every day he rises before dawn to start picking the many sacred flowers.
25:46String is strictly forbidden,
25:50so he uses fiber from dried banana trees to tie the garlands together.
25:57Up to 40 garlands a day for 20 gods and saints
26:02are produced in this little room,
26:04which no one except Ramanuja and the other garland makers can enter.
26:075 times a day Ramanuja walks from the flower gardens belonging to the temple,
26:24past shops selling everything from butter to bronze.
26:26It's a huge bustling city of 50,000 people,
26:45and all of them depend on the temple for their livelihood.
26:47Ramanuja is part of a team of several hundred people who maintain the temple and its rituals.
26:57And in Raja Raja's day, the king paid for the whole thing.
27:03At the end of his journey in the heart of the temple,
27:16Ramanuja hands over his garlands to the priests.
27:19So that the many gods of India can be properly cared for.
27:38In his lifetime, Raja Raja's great temple at Tanjore was a hive of activity.
27:43A temple this big needs hundreds of people to run it.
27:49Inscriptions tell us that over 4,000 cows, 7,000 sheep and 30 buffalo were needed
27:56to supply the butter for the hundreds of lamps that lit the temple.
28:00It must have been a blazingly bright place.
28:05And all this was to light only one temple.
28:08Raja Raja provided for hundreds of temples that he created,
28:11spending fabulous sums of money to ensure that he kept his karma in good standing.
28:18Because of his generosity, Raja Raja hoped the gods would overlook his many transgressions
28:24and be persuaded to reincarnate him in his next life as something a little better than a worm.
28:30This religious devotion led to an event that radically changed the entire course of all human history.
28:41One of the best kept secrets of the lost temples of India is that Indian kings like Raja Raja were as important to world civilization as the ancient Greeks.
28:54Indian traders rode the monsoon winds to Southeast Asia and beyond, bringing their gods, art and architecture.
29:01and architecture.
29:09That's why thousands of miles from Mother India, amidst steaming tropical jungles,
29:15the temples of Angkor depict not Cambodian gods, but the gods of India dancing on every wall.
29:21Not only did the traders bring new religions to distant parts of Asia,
29:38they also carried with them some of the greatest art ever created,
29:42the incomparable religious art of India.
29:44This bronze was made for Raja Raja, when Europe was still languishing in the dark ages,
30:02incapable of producing anything that approached the beauty and technical accomplishment of this piece.
30:17It is the lord of the dance, Shiva as Nataraja, simultaneously crushing the dwarf of ignorance underfoot,
30:30beating the drum of creation, unleashing the fires of destruction,
30:35and finally raising one hand in assurance, telling us to fear not.
30:40Near Tanjore, artists still create bronzes in exactly the same way as they did in the time of Raja Raja the Great.
30:58Ramalim, a seventh generation master bronze caster, prepares the wax figure for the first stage of this age-old process.
31:06After the figure has been shaped in wax by the master, mud from the banks of the sacred cavalry river is packed around it.
31:22The mud cast is left to dry, then slowly heated until the wax melts completely.
31:45The hollow mold is now tough enough for the mixture of precious metals that will make up the image of the god.
31:58Copper, brass, tin, gold and silver are melted together at temperatures reaching over a thousand degrees centigrade,
32:05and then poured into the mold and left to cool.
32:14Once cooled, the mold is broken, revealing the icon that is then given finishing touches by Ramalingam's assistants.
32:21Every single bronze statue is a unique piece intended to bring the people closer to God.
32:32Ramalingam says the beauty of the classic bronzes of Raja Raja's time is because of their liberal use of gold.
32:39Nowadays, the temples that commission bronzes have much smaller budgets.
32:50Shiva as Raja Raja, caught in a snapshot pose, dances the world into existence.
32:56The abandoned whirling of Shiva as he conquers the three demons was one of Raja Raja's favorite images.
33:12A temple without dancers would have been like a football team without cheerleaders.
33:16The whirling of the finest temple dancers, or devadasis, accompanied worship.
33:23Without dancers, the god could not be expected to perform its role as the giver of blessings and the protector of the temple.
33:30A devadasi, or servant of god in the days of Raja Raja, was a member of a cultural elite.
33:51These beautiful women could dance, sing, act, compose poetry, and paint.
34:01In his many temples, Raja Raja supported tens of thousands of these brilliant women.
34:08But no golden age lasts forever.
34:11A new threat from the north, invading Muslim armies, brought an end to his dynasty.
34:21All over the south, in the tens of thousands of Hindu temples, desperate measures were being carried out.
34:31These Muslim invaders didn't just rob the rich and depart.
34:35They destroyed every Hindu image they could find.
34:38And if they couldn't destroy it, they defaced it.
34:41This Muslim army wanted to wipe Hinduism off the map of India.
34:45So Hindu priests hid precious idols.
34:47Bronzes covered with gold and diamonds were buried or locked in secret rooms.
34:52The bronzes were a prime target for the invaders, searching for jewels and precious metals.
34:58These bronzes were all taken from their temple shrines and buried in fine white sand.
35:06To remain hidden for over 700 years, until their discovery in 1965.
35:11One of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the century.
35:25This room, hidden in the recesses of one of Tanjur's smaller and more obscure temples,
35:31was full of stone idols collected from other temples and stored here.
35:35The room was then sealed and forgotten.
35:39When it was rediscovered hundreds of years later, no one knew which idol belonged where.
35:45So they have stayed here ever since.
35:48The Muslim invaders never managed to suppress the Hindu religion, only loot its treasures.
35:54Southern India shrugged off the Muslim invasion and rose again to yet more splendid heights.
36:00The heartland of Southern India, with its sun-baked red earth and huge piles of granite boulders,
36:16that looked like they had been arranged by playful giants, could be mistaken for the surface of Mars.
36:21But amazingly, a great Indian city once flourished here.
36:26And its inhabitants looked back to the golden age of Raja Raja,
36:30and built a celestial city beyond anything even Raja Raja had imagined.
36:35Centuries after Raja Raja's temples had been swallowed by the jungle,
36:43a new mysterious holy city rose on a barren plain in Southern India,
36:48called Vijnagra, the City of Victory.
36:52It was founded in 1350, and within 30 years the city was larger than any other on Earth,
36:58with a population 50 times greater than medieval London or Paris.
37:02It arose from the chaos following Raja Raja's dynasty,
37:26and its founders were determined to carry on his tradition of art and architecture.
37:41The carved granite murals created for their court show us the lifestyle of the rich and famous.
37:47The kings liked to hunt, and had their acts of bravery carved for all to see.
37:59And they also liked their dancing girls.
38:02And here, Portuguese traders with their sharp, pointy beards appeared before the clean-shaven king.
38:12These Portuguese wrote about the life of the city, and the lifestyle of its king.
38:16The king allowed the Portuguese traders to witness his morning routine.
38:28Every day he would drink a pint of oil and rub some more oil into his skin.
38:33Wearing only a loin cloth, he would exercise with his sword and wrestle for a time with his favourite opponent.
38:38The people of Vijayanagara still carry on the tradition of wrestling.
38:52Though in the modern version, the idea is to hold your opponent up in the air for more than three seconds to secure a victory.
39:06Ancient wrestling was far more brutal.
39:12Ancient wrestling was far more brutal.
39:15The Portuguese wrote of blows so severe as to break teeth and put out eyes and disfigure faces,
39:22so much so that here and there men are carried off speechless by their friends.
39:27After he had finished this morning practice, the king would mount his horse and ride from one end of his great city,
39:35to the other.
39:41It was during his reign that the empire counted all of southern India under its control,
39:46and traded with both the Arabs and Portuguese.
39:49This road, leading up to a great temple, was said by the Portuguese to have been
39:53a broad and beautiful street full of fine houses.
39:57The houses belong to merchants, and there you will find all sorts of rubies and diamonds and emeralds and pearls.
40:04Every evening, there is a fair where they sell horses, citrons, limes, oranges and grapes.
40:10You have all this in a street which leads to the palace.
40:23In the heat of a southern summer, life at Vijayanagara was only made bearable by water tanks,
40:28the swimming pools of ancient India.
40:40From the queens of the great courts to the peasant women in the fields,
40:44the women of southern India practice ritual bathing every day.
40:47This is where Europe learned that it might be a good idea to take a bath more than once a year.
41:02Noblemen and women, queens and their serving girls bathed within the palace walls in water brought from the river
41:17by an ingenious aqueduct system.
41:32The city of victory is literally covered in game boards.
41:39Carved everywhere on boulders, the floors of temples and palaces are dozens of games.
41:45So it's not surprising that chess was invented in India.
41:48It's called Chaturanga.
42:09This is the game that the kings of Vijayanagara played to sharpen up their battlefield skills.
42:14The elephant piece was the castle of today's game and the most powerful piece.
42:25It can move in all directions and even leap over weaker pieces.
42:34This power reflected the unstoppable nature of the elephant,
42:38whose fearsome presence decided the outcome of the battles of Imperial India.
42:42A game of Chaturanga could last for days or even weeks,
42:47as long as a real battle, with the loss of the godlike king spelling defeat.
42:57After 200 years, the impregnable city of victory fell to the Muslim invaders from the north.
43:02This was not just a battle for territory and plunder.
43:06It was a battle for supremacy between the Muslims' one god, Allah, and the Hindus' hundreds of gods.
43:12The Hindu general was beheaded on the battlefield, and the battle was over.
43:23His army stopped fighting, downed their weapons, and retreated when they saw their leader's head waved aloft on the end of a spear.
43:35The city was literally torn apart.
43:44To this day, it has never been resettled.
43:49The city that was, in its day, described by a Portuguese trader as large as Rome and the best provided city in the world,
44:02is now, like Pompeii, a ghost town frozen in time, lying empty and strange amidst the barren plateau.
44:10The last seat of imperial southern India, a city of ghosts.
44:25But the south rose yet again, and conscious of the traditions of Raja Raja the Great,
44:31built ever larger and more beautiful temples, the jewel of which is Madurai,
44:36the grandest and most graceful of all India's temples.
44:45Yet for every hundred people who visit India, less than ten journey south to gaze upon these incredible temples.
44:52The central shrine was the home of the gods, and it was considered incorrect to build anything other than a modest, but often gold-plated roof over the shrine.
45:07So since the central shrine couldn't be enlarged, the rest of the temple began to get bigger and bigger.
45:13This expansion created the ornamental gateways called Goparis.
45:26Now they took wing and soared to unprecedented height and glory.
45:31The ones at Madurai are particularly graceful and crowded with sculpture.
45:34One gateway has more than a thousand individual statues on it.
45:47Today the temple authorities repaint them regularly, and in their original vivid colors.
45:53The result is truly out of this world.
45:57Grand as Madurai is, it is far from the biggest.
46:00That title goes to Sri Rangam, which is so vast that it could comfortably hold the Kremlin, the U.S. Senate buildings and the Houses of Parliament,
46:18and still have room for the Palace of Versailles and St. Peter's in Rome.
46:22And in the temples, the ancient bronzes are still worshipped, the thousand-year-old hymns still sung, an unbroken line of cultural continuity back to Raja Raja.
46:40But to the majority of people in the world, even to many in India, this is a lost and forgotten world.
46:46Why have these temples, the legacy of Raja Raja, been ignored by the Western world?
46:53Part of the answer lies in what happened here in February 1838.
46:58The lost temples of India were discovered in February 1838 by a British army officer called Captain Burke.
47:14He was told of the wonders to be seen in a place called Kajuraho, deserted for hundreds of years and covered by a thick canopy of trees.
47:23The trouble started when he came close enough to see what was on the walls.
47:31I found the ruins most beautifully and exquisitely carved.
47:35But some of the sculptures were extremely indecent.
47:39The religion of the ancient Hindu could not have been very chaste.
47:45The temple walls are covered with scenes of group sex, aroused males and eager females.
47:50It is not exactly what the average Christian expects to find on the walls of a house of worship.
47:59In the Hindu religion, however, things were very different.
48:03One of the many goals in Hinduism was the pursuit of love.
48:07And they saw nothing wrong with portraying the pursuit of sexual love on their temple walls.
48:11But these temples shocked the European visitor, convincing him of his moral superiority.
48:23Our religion is sublime and pure and beneficent, said William Wilberforce, the man who ended the slave trade within the British Empire.
48:31Hindu religion is mean and licentious and cruel.
48:35The sensuous nature of Hinduism was too extreme for the Victorians.
48:47The erotic temple sculptures and the lascivious activities could not be mentioned in mixed company.
48:53It was the Victorian sense of propriety that caused the temples and art of southern India to be ignored by tourists and scholars.
49:00A world that matched the Greeks in culture and the ancient Egyptians in building, slipped back into the jungle.
49:11A lost world.
49:12A lost world.
49:24The Europeans in India may have found Hindu gods and temples strange and uncivilized.
49:30But they admired and felt comfortable with the architecture of India's Muslim overlords and their one god, Allah.
49:37No many are monstrous idols here.
49:43No highly erotic sculpture.
49:46No dark sanctuaries with half-naked priests worshipping phallic stones.
49:53Here was an architecture that appealed to the European mind.
49:57Full of graceful Gothic arches and white marble.
50:00Here they found buildings that matched their idea of what the mysterious East should be like.
50:05So it is the northern Indian monuments that most tourists visit.
50:11The Hindu south is still firmly off the travel plans of most visitors to India.
50:19Despite its contribution to Indian and world civilization, the legacy of Raja Raja the Great has been ignored.
50:26But in southern India, in the temples that Raja Raja and his successors built, the priests still carry out ancient rituals that have remained unchanged for thousands of years.
50:46While the rituals of King Solomon's court in Jerusalem have faded and the rites of the Ming emperors in Beijing's Forbidden City have all but vanished.
50:57To enter a temple here is to enter a time war.
51:01At dawn, in a ceremony carried out every day for thousands of years without interruption, the priests chant the ancient magical words to wake the gods.
51:14Gods carved in stone by Raja Raja, the greatest Hindu king that ever ruled.
51:20that ever ruled
Recommended
10:00
|
Up next
46:53
42:04
47:15
44:08
Be the first to comment