Somewhere between Chidambaram and the Violin
Trying to find order within chaos
For years, my sister and I had wanted to stand before the Thillai Nataraja. For her, the pull was even stronger. Being naturally inclined towards dance and having a quiet philosophical connection to Shiva through movement, she was longing to experience that space where dance is not merely performance but thought itself in motion…where the bronze form is never truly still, but alive with rhythm.
Long before we actually arrived there, my imagination had already wandered through those corridors. I had read The Vault of Vishnu by Ashwin Sanghi, and his brief but vivid passage through the Chidambaram temple felt almost like a virtual exploration. The temple had begun to exist in my mind as much as in geography, shaped by story, memory, and anticipation. It lived in our thoughts as an idea, built from fragments of history and some personal associations.
Ever since I first heard the composition Ananda Nadamadum Tillai Sankara by violin virtuoso Dr. L. Shankar, and subsequent renditions by other musicians (some renditions are in Ragam Poorvikalyani as well), I had been curious as to why this space holds such significance. Well, to understand why Dr. L Shankar’s rendition stands (for me) as the absolute gold standard, one has to look closely at the execution. In my view, he pushed past the structural limits of the instrument itself. But it makes me wonder — did he push the violin, or did the limitless potential of the instrument push him to think beyond boundaries?
From sound to space
Standing before Thillai Nataraja at the Chidambaram temple felt less like looking at an idol and more like stepping into an idea that had been waiting for us for years. We had never been drawn to temples through ritual or orthodoxy; what drew us instead was the philosophy held within their walls. The dancing form of Shiva did not feel separate from the space around it, or from the stillness hidden behind the Chidambara Rahasyam curtain. Here, the space seemed to suggest that consciousness is always in motion, and that somewhere between rhythm and silence lies the philosophy we had come to experience.
I had imagined my first visit very differently. I had imagined arriving slowly. I had imagined moving through the corridors, taking time to observe the sculptural grammar of the temple, time to understand a little, how consciousness had been imagined architecturally. I wanted to learn a bit of the language of Shiva as art, as space, and as silence.
Instead, the visit unfurled differently.
To accommodate my side of the family’s plan, with both a nonagenarian and a seven-year-old kid on board, we had to hurry through. We had to keep our visits short, packing as many places as possible into a tight timeframe. It was the height of the northeast monsoon, and the rain had left some of the streets completely waterlogged. Despite the downpour, waves of Deepavali crowds filled the roads, determined to celebrate with crackers. While most restaurants across Tamil Nadu had pulled down their shutters, the temple kept strictly to its ritual timetable, leaving every corner buzzing with sudden movements.
To be honest, I really hate crowds and the sensory mess of a waterlogged town. Don’t get me wrong, I actually like the rain when I am out doing fieldwork or exploring the Ghats and fully equipped with the right gear. Out there, the monsoon feels natural and rhythmic. But in a cramped, bustling temple setting, the claustrophobic combination of wet stone floors, narrow queues, and crushing crowds — where appropriate rain gear is practically useless — completely put me off. Still, I hate the thought of being a killjoy and letting my irritation spoil everyone else’s excitement. Well, my way of connecting with these spaces is entirely different. I prefer visiting temples when they are quiet.
Unfortunately, the exact opposite always seems to happen. The temples I want to explore most invariably welcome me with massive crowds. Well, blame it on bad timing, the wrong season, sometimes the wrong company, or even the underlying irritation of some priests’ moral policing of us on our appearances.
When that kind of peace isn’t possible, you sometimes have to create it yourself — whether by escaping the rules entirely on a past sister trip to Pashupatinath, or by quietly slipping away from the family the day before Chidambaram to catch the night ritual in Thanjavur, where the resonance of the Mangala Vadya Periya Melam ensemble finally caught us completely by surprise and gave us a great moment to just stand there and soak it all in.
Yet, despite those frustrations, there are many exceptions that stand out as deeply memorable, during which I have been fortunate enough to explore some magnificent sites, particularly those showcasing Vijayanagara and Hoysala architecture, with my husband’s family. Some of those spaces were incredibly quiet, giving me the time I needed to photograph and absorb the artistry.
But back to Chidambaram. The moment we stepped inside to catch a glimpse of Thillai Nataraja, we had to rush because the crowd was swelling by the second. People were barging into the sanctum just to escape the rain. The head priest performed a few brief rituals, and we were quickly ushered along. My seven-year-old, who also hates crowds, was getting restless, even though he was trying his best to understand the situation.
Even inside the sacred space, the spiritual atmosphere felt a bit lost. Although we managed to steal a few minutes there, a priest spent less time explaining the temple's symbolism and more time pitching an annual prasadam subscription scheme to help fund temple activities. Perhaps the rush forced him to resort to just a cursory rant?
Even after we exited the sanctum sanctorum, the pitch followed us; I ran into a few more priests who parroted the exact same lines with little to no change in the script. Well-trained, huh!
To be fair, I don’t mean to demean them. It is a private temple that runs entirely on donations, and they are just doing their job. “Ungalaale dhaan indha kovil nadakkum…1 year subscription pannikreLa? Prasadam every month unga addressukku annuppavom!” But still, one expects at least a brief mention of the significance of a temple that holds so much history and deep philosophical weight. Instead, I couldn’t help but feel that even before stepping inside, I already knew more about the space than what they were willing to share. I couldn’t help but wonder if they were taking cues from OTT giants: hit them with an annual subscription and they’ll mail some monthly goodies our way.
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Well, thanks, but no thanks!
At the time, it felt like I had missed something essential.
Only weeks later did I begin to wonder whether what I had encountered was not absence, but maybe another form of arrival.
Because the temple of Nataraja is not only a place of stillness. It is the space of the cosmic dance itself. And the dance is never linear. It is creation and dissolution unfolding together. Maybe it is concealment before revelation. Maybe it is rhythm before silence.
And slowly, that difference began to make sense.
Listening later to Dr. L. Shankar’s rendering of Ananda Nadamadum Thillai Sankara alongside Dr. Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman and Zakir Hussain, I began to recognize something familiar in the way the music itself unfolded.
The piece begins in Ragam Savitri, almost as though inviting the listener gently into a recognizable landscape. There is delight there, clarity, balance, and a sense of arrival. The violin sings with assurance, and the central melodic line invites dramatic improvisation alongside the percussion of the mridangam and tabla, creating an atmosphere as if the dance itself is beginning.
And then something shifts.
The violin begins to move far beyond its expected grammar, crossing thresholds that a violinist could not even dare to think of. Being a casual violin player myself, I couldn’t help but wonder: How did he even think like this? And how on earth did he translate such wild, complex thoughts onto his innovative ten-stringed double violin? Looking back at this piece forty-six years after its release, one cannot help but feel: his genius was undeniably ahead of its time!
On my very first listen years ago, the track’s progression left me completely disoriented, particularly as the improvisation drew to a close. What starts as a fast movement, even within the bounds of Savitri, suddenly jets off into a contrasting scale, Hamsanandi, before entering a labyrinthine ragamalika that settles momentarily in Kaapi. While this first half was structurally flawless, the choice of notes was so elusive that I completely failed to recognize even the most common ragas on first listen. But as the improvisation crossed into its second half, the true turbulence began, morphing into something far more bizarre. The execution there was so baffling it left me wondering how a virtuoso like Dr. L. Shankar could choose to play so seemingly out of intonation. Yet, curiosity overrode my confusion, leaving me eager to understand why he would construct such a deep puzzle right before launching into the brilliant sautillé section in Hamsadhwani before letting the percussionists do their talking!
Avant-garde!
To put it plainly, you almost have to grapple with hating that brief chaos at first encounter to truly appreciate the brilliance of how the piece was executed. It was only after zooming out — which meant slowing down the digital track to its slowest possible playback speed — that the inner architecture began to reveal itself. I just was—mouth wide open—as the realization of what was actually happening finally hit me. It was an exhibition of absolute mastery. Perhaps the finer details of art only reveal themselves when we change our perspective, or perhaps chaos is just order at a zoomed-out level.
Eventually, as other things took over my life, that curiosity had taken a backseat for a long time. The thought remained buried in the back of my mind, and it had been a long, long time since it last bounced back into my consciousness. Yet, my recent trip to Chidambaram unexpectedly unraveled the composition all over again, calling it forward in an entirely different sense.
The track enters a field of pure movement rather than a linear progression. As the ragamalika unfolds, the listener is no longer traveling through melody alone but navigating shifting centers of gravity. From a distance, it begins to sound almost chaotic. Or perhaps that is simply my own way of reading it, an attempt to find order in the movement because that is what I had been searching for all along.
But on closer listening, the apparent turbulence reveals itself as deliberate design. It reminded me entirely of Chidambaram. The concept of Chit-ambaram itself, the space of consciousness, is never a still center we are meant to reach immediately. It is a realization that only reveals itself after moving through layers. The famous Chidambara Rahasyam is not simply a hidden object behind a curtain; it is the radical suggestion that the divine center is space itself.
In that sense, our brisk journey through waterlogged corridors, festive crowds, monsoon rain, and some random interruptions was not outside the experience of Chidambaram. I felt it was its very grammar.
What first sounded like excess slowly seemed to resemble scale. Indian thought often imagines the universe not as structure alone but as vibration, Nada, the idea that reality itself is sound. The dance of Nataraja represents creation, preservation, dissolution, concealment, and grace unfolding simultaneously. The universe exists not despite this movement, but because of it. As art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy describes in his work The Dance of Shiva, this icon is understood as a supreme synthesis of art, religion, and science, depicting a cosmos in which perpetual cosmic movement and absolute stillness coexist in perfect equilibrium. It is striking that even modern physics arrives at a similar image. In The Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra describes Shiva’s dance as a powerful metaphor for the movement of subatomic matter itself, depicting a universe comprised not of still objects, but of patterns in continuous, dynamic motion.
Seen this way, what first feels like disorder in the middle of this musical performance begins to resemble choreography. The violin is no longer simply carrying a melody; it is stretching pitch into physical movement. The percussion is no longer just marking time; it is shaping space. What appears chaotic from afar reveals, on closer listening, an extraordinary craftsmanship.
Perhaps this is what the title itself has been suggesting all along. Ananda Nadamadum Thillai Sankara is not only the blissful dance of Shiva in Chidambaram. It is perhaps a reminder that bliss itself may first appear as chaos and movement, long before it finally reveals itself as stillness.
Looking back now, even my rushed visit began to feel different in memory. What I had wanted was silence. What I encountered instead was the dance.
Yet, the quiet space I first imagined still lingers, waiting. I know I will return to Chidambaram, not to rush through waterlogged corridors or evade a crowd, but to finally have that slow, soaking visit to try stepping past the movement to find the apparent silence hidden behind the curtains.
