The thirty-eight: Belur’s bracket figures and the queen they are said to be

Under the eaves of the Chennakeshava temple at Belur, on the capitals of the pillars that carry the roof overhang, stand the figures the building is famous for. The technical word is madanakai; the older word is salabhanjika, the woman-and-tree figure that runs back through Indian sculpture for a thousand years before the Hoysalas. Forty were carved for this temple. Thirty-eight survive, some perfect, some knocked about.

What they are actually doing

They are not all the same thing, which is the first surprise. Two of the thirty-eight are Durga. Three are huntresses carrying bows. The rest divide roughly into dancers holding recognisable positions out of the Natya Shastra — abhinaya mudras, the gestures of classical performance — musicians, women dressing their hair or making up, a woman with a pet parrot sitting on her hand, and men making music.

The famous one is the Darpana Sundari, the lady with the mirror. Others have their own names in local usage: Shuka Bhashini, the woman speaking to a parrot, and the figure everyone photographs for a different reason, in which a monkey is pulling at the end of a sari while its owner does nothing about it.

The detail that stops people

Wikipedia records the one that visitors remember longest. One madanakai stands under a canopy of fruit tree. On a fruit sits a small fly. On the branch above the fly, a lizard is gathering itself to pounce. All of it is cut in soapstone at a scale you could cover with a coin, eight hundred years ago, forty feet up, where hardly anybody would ever see it.

Inside the hall there are four more, on the capitals of the four pillars beneath the central dome. On those four the necklaces and bracelets have been cut free of the stone and can be moved with a finger. One is Saraswati dancing; one is dressing her hair; one holds a Natya position; one has the parrot.

The queen

Karnataka Tourism prints the tradition plainly: that Shantala Devi, queen of Vishnuvardhana, is the model for the Darpana Sundari, and that the four figures under the dome were inspired by her beauty. Shantala Devi was real — she paid for the Kappe Chennigaraya temple that stands a few metres south of the main shrine, in the same years, and the inscriptions record it.

What no inscription says is that any of these figures is her. It is a tradition, not a record, and it is one of the oldest and most persistent things the town says about its own temple. That is worth knowing before a guide tells it to you as fact, and it is not a reason to think less of the story. A queen who commissioned a temple of her own, in a dynasty whose sculptors signed their work, is exactly the sort of person a town remembers in stone.

Where the sculptors put their names

The Hoysalas let their artists sign, which is rare, and which is why we can say anything at all about who made this. Dasoja of Balligavi and his son Chavana both worked here: Chavana is credited with five of the madanikas and Dasoja with four. Ruvari Mallitamma, the most celebrated sculptor of the whole dynasty and the man with more than forty attributed works to his name, is another. Malliyanna and Nagoja did birds and animals; Chikkahampa and Malloja carved in the hall.

Mallitamma is the link to the quiet end of the story. His earliest known work is not here but at Amruthapura, on the domed ceilings of a small temple in a village of a few hundred people, a hundred kilometres north. Belur is where the dynasty showed off. Amruthapura is where one of its greatest hands started.