The poem is narrated by ghosts who’re companions of a fearsome goddess known as Anangu
The poem is narrated by ghosts who’re companions of a fearsome goddess known as Anangu
When the Delhi Sultanate was being established in the north of India some 800 years in the past, down south, a Pallava common was main a Chola king’s military alongside the jap coast.
He crossed the deltas of Krishna and Godavari, slaughtered a whole lot of war elephants despatched to dam his progress, and at last overpowered the king of Kalinga, who had not paid his tribute for 2 years, and in addition occurred to be the son of a Chola princess. So nice was this victory that it impressed a parani — a war poem for when a thousand elephants are slaughtered — often known as Kalingathu Parani.
The Kalinga king was a Chodaganga, i.e., Chola-Ganga: Chola from his mom’s aspect and Ganga from his father’s aspect. He managed the Mahanadi delta in the east, the Cholas managed the Kaveri delta in the south, and the Gangas managed the Krishna-Godavari delta in between. This is why the jap coast was identified to sailors as the Chola-mandala (Coromandel). The three kings competed with one another, every making an attempt to make the different a tributary.
In the spirit of competitors, the Chodaganga constructed the present construction of Puri’s Jagannath Temple in the twelfth century, to rival the top of the Brihadeeswara Temple in Thanjavur constructed by Rajaraja Chola in the eleventh century. When it was found that the masonry was just a few toes quick, the king ordered a protracted iron flag pole formed like a discus to be positioned on high, in order that Jagannath’s flag would flutter increased.
Like the Tamil folks, the folks of Kalinga had been fiercely impartial, and declared their autonomy via their deity, Jagannath, who was an amalgam of Shaiva, Vaishnava, Sakta and tribal practices. Later, the Chodagangas would insist they had been mere viceroys of Jagannath, distancing themselves from the apply began by some Chola kings who recognized themselves with Shiva.
Kalinga kings had been often known as Gajapati, as they had been masters of elephants. Hundreds of elephants could be used to clear the path of the Kalinga military, and block the progress of enemy troopers. To outmanoeuvre such a transferring wall of pachyderms was no imply feat. Hence, it deserved a parani.
A sculpture of Chola emperor Kulottunga I, throughout whose reign the ‘Kalingathu Parani’ was commissioned. The sculpture is at the Chidambaram Nataraja Temple.
| Photo Credit: Matthew T. Rader/ Wiki Commons
What is attention-grabbing about Kalingathu Parani, translated to English by Kausalya Hart, made accessible by Project Madurai, is that the narration is by ghosts. These ghosts are companions of a fearsome goddess, Anangu. She appears just like the goddess identified in Shakta literature as Chamunda, and is traceable to the Vedic goddess Niritti and the Tamil goddess Kotravai. She is linked to dry, sizzling, barren landscapes and to battlefields moist with blood.
In artwork, this goddess is proven holding weapons in her hand, surrounded by ghosts, seated on rotting corpses, entertained by carrion crows and wild canines. The battleground is her sacred area, the place she receives blood supplied by males aspiring to be heroes.
The poem begins with prayers to many Puranic and Tantrik deities in addition to to the Vedas. There is hope that the tiger banner of the Cholas will flutter over different royal banners displaying the boar, the plough, the deer, the lion, the fish and the bow, and inscriptions of Chola conquests carved on Himalayan slopes.
Then come passages describing the craving and erotic longing of the stunning wives of warriors — a foreshadowing of the distress of war widows. Then comes description of the goddess, Anangu, her forest, her ghosts, and the temple they constructed to her with the cranium of fallen kings, and bones of animals killed in battle. The goddess, a beloved of Shiva, wears elephant cover, with girdles manufactured from its intestines. Her hand is purple with the blood of warriors felled by valiant kings in her honour.
Dark humour
Her ghosts are hungry and emaciated, and yearn for human flesh and blood. Their stomachs are like pots, their eyes like caves, their limbs like unburned wooden. A ghost who had run away to the Himalayas returns south and speaks of the Kalinga battle that’s below method.
Blood, blood, in all places there was the blood of the Kalinga warriors. Let us go, allow us to go to the battlefield there. Your empty stomachs shall be full. Your skinny our bodies will change into fats.
The ghosts cheer and proceed to the battlefield. They learn the way the Kalinga troopers who survived saved themselves by pretending to be Brahmins (they used bowstrings as sacred thread), or Buddhists (they soaked their garments orange by washing it in blood), or Jains (discarding their garments, tearing out their hair). In the climax, we hear how the ghosts put together and eat the porridge of flesh and fats and pulverised enamel in pots produced from the large legs of elephants, below canopies manufactured from elephant pores and skin, dripping with blood. All ghosts are fed — even the Brahmin ghosts, the Buddhist ghosts and the Jain ghosts. A moderately weird solution to present a plural beneficiant society.
In the centuries that adopted, songs similar to these had been progressively overshadowed by songs of devotion to Krishna. Unlike earlier Alvar and Nayanar poetry, later bhakti works had been stripped of eroticism and violence. Their Tantric nature waned. The flesh grew to become invisible. Greater consideration was given to feelings. Indian royalty was sanitised as violence was outsourced to the beef-eating invaders. But the hungry ghosts of Kalingathu Parani remind us of a special India, the place blood and gore nourished formidable kings, the place heroes massacred elephant armies, made garlands of human heads for goddesses, and enabled her ghosts to relish a porridge manufactured from flesh and fats.
The author is the writer of fifty books on mythology, artwork and tradition.
