Growing up in a household at the corner of West Avani Moola Street in Madurai, artist R. Krishna Rao, who was born in 1915, took in the majestic beauty of the West Tower of the famed Meenakshi Sundareswarar Temple, hardly 100 metres away, as much as he could.
Rao, one of the renowned painters to emerge from Tamil Nadu, would later recount to his children that it was the sight of the West Tower that he woke up to after the several nights he and many others of his huge joint family slept on the terrace of their house.
His body of work includes beautiful paintings of temples and landscapes in watercolour. However, what entwined Rao inseparably to Tamil Nadu was the image that has ubiquitous presence in the State — its emblem.
Commissioned in 1948 by the government headed by Omandur P. Ramaswami Reddiar, Rao, who was then working at Government College of Fine Arts (GCFA), Chennai, designed the emblem, which included a temple gopuram, two national flags, and the Lion Capital of Ashoka. The motto, ’ Satyameva Jayate’ , in Devanagari script was added later and was subsequently translated in Tamil as ‘ Vaimaye Vellum’ during the first DMK government in 1967.
The government had decided the dominant feature of the emblem would be a temple gopuram and that was the brief given to Rao. However, which temple was actually represented in the emblem has often remained a point of debate.
While the popular view has been that it was based on the rajagopuram of the Andal and Vatapatrasayi temple in Srivilliputhur in Virudhunagar district, Rao, on many occasions, has registered that it was the Madurai temple’s West Tower, close to his heart, that he based it on.
That the emblem was based on the Srivilliputhur temple was hard to come by in any of the older official records. In a debate on July 15, 1948, in the Madras Assembly, few members raised concerns over choosing a temple gopuram as the emblem of a secular State.
Leader of the House B. Gopala Reddi reassured the House that the emblem “will not take away the secular character of the government”. He said the government could not think of anything other than the temple gopuram that typified south Indian culture and the emblem would feature a “south Indian temple gopuram” without mentioning any particular temple.
The emblem came into force in April 1949, days after Reddiar resigned and P.S. Kumaraswamy Raja became the Chief Minister. While the April 19, 1949 issue of The Fort St. George Gazette, the then official gazette, showed the emblem in use since before Independence, the issue of the subsequent week on April 26 showed the newly designed emblem.
Before deciding on the emblem, the government reportedly consulted Tamil scholar ‘Rasigamani’ T.K. Chidambaranatha Mudaliar, who previously served as the Commissioner of the Department of Hindu Religions and Charitable Endowments. He had close ties to Srivilliputhur. Kumaraswamy Raja was from Rajapalayam, just 20 kilometres away from Srivilliputhur. Some argue it is the involvement of these two personalities that gave rise to the dominant view that the gopuram depicted was that of the Srivilliputhur temple.
K. Srichandar, late Rao’s son, however, argues his father had expressed unambiguously that it was the West Tower of the Madurai temple. He says it was very natural for him to have chosen it as the spectacular image of the tower remained etched in his mind.
In the book, The Southern Accent, brought out by A.S. Raman, who served as the Editor of the The Illustrated Weekly of India, Rao was quoted as saying, “My birthplace being Madurai, I have a special interest in the various sculptural and architectural details of the temple.. Which explains the high priority the temple has in my artistic repertoire.”
In a short profile of Rao, published by Ananda Vikatan in May 1970 when he was serving as the Principal of GCFA, he was quoted as saying that it was the West Tower of the Madurai temple that he used for the emblem.
A Who’s Who of Artists and Craftsmen of Tamil Nadu, published in the 1980s by Tamil Nadu Oviyam Nunkalai Kuzhu, which was subsequently merged with the Department of Arts and Culture, records that “the credit of creating the Tamil Nadu government emblem of the Madurai Tower motif goes to him.” The monograph brought by Lalit Kala Akademi in July 2006, a few months before Rao’s demise, also records this through his quote.
Historian Chithra Madhavan, who wrote about this for Madras Musings in 2011, says she was also earlier of the view that it was the Srivilliputhur temple. “After one of my presentations about temple architecture, a person came forward and said he enjoyed the presentation, except for one detail that I got wrong. That was about the emblem,” she says. Though hesitant to believe him initially, she was, however, convinced after all the supporting documents he provided later.
She points out that although both gopurams had very similar structure, the one in Srivilliputhur did not have the rich iconography present in the one in Madurai. Acknowledging the possibility that Rao’s original design may have had such differentiating factors, she adds such details are, however, impossible to spot in the emblem because of the size in which it is used.
Pointing out that he had heard leaders mentioning in public speeches that the emblem had the Srivilliputhur temple, K. Thirunavukkarasu, the historian who has documented the Dravidian movement, says it need not be of great concern now which temple it was.
“Despite being a rationalist and a man of the self-respect movement, I do think that a temple gopuram is the appropriate choice for our emblem as it represented the uniqueness of Tamil culture and architecture. We should be proud of it,” he says.
