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One Hundred
Tamils of the 20th Century
Ganapati Sthapati
[Nominated
by S.Suriyanarayanan]
Article - Courtesy:
Hinduism Today, May-June 2000
 "Following
his profitable conquest of Karnataka, Kerala and northern Sri Lanka, the Tamil
King Rajaraja Chola found himself with a considerable budget surplus. With vast
tracts of fertile farmland already under year-round irrigation, he decided to
build the
largest Siva temple in the world, Brihadisvara, at Thanjavur (Tanjore in
modern Tamil Nadu state), a stunning masterpiece of stonecraft engineering.
The temple, now on the United Nations World Heritage List, was crowned
in the king's vision. He capped the 216-foot main sanctum with a single stone
weighing 86 tons and set in place by elephants' nudging it up a gentle sand ramp
starting five miles away. The great sthapati (architect and sculptor) Kunjara
Mallan Raja Raja Perunthachan was commissioned for the work.
That's a story that Dr. Vaidyanathan Ganapati Sthapati, 72, loves to
hear, for he is a lineal descendent of that same Perunthachan of a thousand
years ago. The great man's story reminds Ganapati Sthapati today of the
tradition he is commissioned by birth to uphold. and of the indomitable spirit
of his caste, the silpis, lords and and masters of South India's hard and heavy
granite.
Though trained in stonecraft as a boy by his father and uncle, Ganapati
Sthapati initially embarked on a career teaching mathematics. But, as the great
poet Valluvar
said, "What destiny calls yours will not depart." In 1957 Ganapati Sthapati
joined the Tamil Nadu government temple board and began overseeing temple
designs and construction.
In 1961 he took over as principal of the government College of Architecture
and Sculpture, Mamallapuram, which his father and other sthapatis founded just
four years earlier to issue degrees in affiliation with the University of
Madras. For 27 years, until retiring in 1988, Ganapati Sthapati meticulously
trained three generations of temple architects, sculptors and carvers. He taught
them, too, the profound mystical side of the silpi tradition, how to create not
just sculptures, but the very body of God. During his tenure, he oversaw the
construction of dozens of temples, the carving of thousands of sculptures and
even the construction of a few secular buildings, such as the library and
administrative offices of the Tamil University in Tanjore.
Retirement for Sthapati hardly meant extra leisure. Rather than rest, he
launched a private practice and was commissioned to build temples not oddly in
India, but everywhere Hindus had settled in the past few decades. He has
completed temples in America, England, Singapore, Malaysia, Fiji, Sri Lanka and
Canada. Accomplished artist, sculptor, designer and project manager that he is,
Ganapati Sthapati also succeeded at a broader and more meaningful goal: to
establish India's ancient construction arts as an important and useful field of
knowledge in the 21st century. In the process, he has evaluated each aspect of
the ancient art in terms of modern methods.
The silpis, for example, use simple iron chisels made and
maintained by onsite blacksmiths. Sthapati experimented with various metals to
replace these iron tools, but ultimately found none an improvement over the
traditional, cheap and easily created iron ones. As an alternate to breaking out
stones with hand-methods, he tried blasting them lose with dynamite. But stones
so quarried, he discovered, "lost their tone," and were useless for sculpting.
Noticing the trend toward simpler and simpler sculptures, Sthapati brought
back clever and delicate demonstrations of the stone carver's art, such as the
remarkable stone bell on a stone chain, with a stone clapper—all carved from a
single rock.
Perhaps closest to Sthapati's heart has been exploring the philosophical,
theoretical and historical traditions of stone carving. It is a field of
knowledge that encompasses all dimensions of architecture, from sculpture design
to town planning. In the process, he has generated renewed interest in the Vastu
Shastras, the scriptures of this art, which he is having translated into English
from the their original Sanskrit or ancient Tamil. Intrigued by the possible
relationship between Maya, the Godly architect in Hindu tradition, and the Mayan
people of South and Central America, he traveled throughout that region visiting
ancient monuments and meeting with modern Mayan representatives. Repeatedly he
was astounded by similarities between Hindu construction design and that of the
Mayans, right down to the use of the same measurements and proportions. No
explanation has been offered as to how this occurred, as the two peoples were
never known to have been in Contact.
Throughout his life, Sthapati has worked to revitalise an ancient art
imperiled by technology's usurpation of the hand-crafted way of life and its
deeply spiritual and aesthetic principles."
V.Ganapati Sthapati, Vastu Vedic Research Foundation, Plot No.546, First Avenue,
Vettuvankeni, Enjambakkam Village, Chennai 600 048, Tmail Nadu, India email:
vastuved@MD3.vsni.net.in
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