The Polonnaruwa Bronzes

In a ring of flame the god Shiva dances the world into being and out of it again, one foot planted on the dwarf of ignorance, the other lifted, the four arms holding the drum of creation and the fire of destruction and raised in the gesture that says fear not, the matted locks flung out to touch the burning circle that frames him. The dancing Shiva, the Nataraja, is the summit of the Polonnaruwa bronzes, and those bronzes are the finest metal sculpture the island has made.

They are the work of the Chola centuries. When the south Indian Cholas took Polonnaruwa in the eleventh century and ruled it for two generations, they brought with them the Hindu image and the Chola way of casting it, and the tradition did not leave when they did; the bronzes go on being made under the Sinhalese kings who followed. Cast by the lost-wax method, poured and then chased by hand, the Nataraja figures, the largest of them nearly a metre and a half high, resolve a violent motion into perfect balance: the weight held on one leg, the limbs and the flying hair thrown out to the very rim of the flame-ring and answered across the centre, so the whole spinning form hangs still. It was of this image that Ananda Coomaraswamy wrote his essay The Dance of Siva, finding in it the clearest form any art or religion had yet given to the activity of God.

Beside the dancing god stand the goddesses, Parvati and Uma in the slow triple bend of the body, counted among the most gracefully proportioned figures the island cast, and the saints of the Shaiva devotion. The bronzes were dug from the Shiva shrines at Polonnaruwa by the archaeologist H.C.P. Bell early in the twentieth century, and they are kept now in the museums at Colombo and Polonnaruwa.

Whether they are Sinhalese art or south Indian is genuinely argued. The early scholars took them for imports, cast in the Chola country and carried over; later finds turned the weight of opinion the other way, towards workshops on the island casting in the Chola idiom, and the truth is likely both, some brought and many made here. A Hindu, Chola-descended body of work, they are too often left out of the account of the island’s art, and they should not be, for they are its greatest bronzes, and they were, in good part, made on its soil.

Sources

1. Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. The Dance of Siva. 1918; History of Indian and Indonesian Art. 1927.
2. von Schroeder, Ulrich. Buddhist Sculptures of Sri Lanka. Hong Kong: Visual Dharma, 1990.
3. Arunachalam, Ponnambalam. Polonnaruwa Bronzes and Siva Worship and Symbolism. 1906.