Discovering the history of South India through its objects Premium

It is a large house with cream walls and lilac windows situated along a narrow road in Tamil Nadu’s Tirunelveli district, solid-looking but not particularly distinctive. “It is very boring on the outside,” agrees Chennai-based historian Dr. Pradeep Chakravarthy, nodding towards the photograph of this old house that he has shared with the audience of The Bangalore Room in Indiranagar, who are here to attend his talk titled A History of South India through Selected Antiques.

It is a large house with cream walls and lilac windows situated along a narrow road in Tamil Nadu’s Tirunelveli district, solid-looking but not particularly distinctive. “It is very boring on the outside,” agrees Chennai-based historian Dr. Pradeep Chakravarthy, nodding towards the photograph of this old house that he has shared with the audience of The Bangalore Room in Indiranagar, who are here to attend his talk titled A History of South India through Selected Antiques.

And yet, it is this house, one that six generations of his family have lived in, that triggered his lifelong passion for history, says Pradeep, recalling lazy summer afternoons spent in that house as a boy, rummaging through the many discarded objects that littered the upstairs floor of this house. “One rule of our family was that when something was broken, we threw it upstairs,” he says wryly.

On one such excavation, he found an object that triggered his lifelong fascination for history: a child’s notebook, so old that the brown paper covering it flaked off when he touched it. He remembers flipping open the book, clearly one dedicated to maths, and finding a rather relatable epithet written neatly in it.  It said, “I hate maths”, with flowers drawn around the words.  “Here was somebody who I didn’t know…everything in his life was so different…but I could connect with that emotion,” says Pradeep, with a laugh. “That was an important moment for me because I realised that, fundamentally, human nature doesn’t change.”

This one image, he says, taught him to see history very differently — not as a long string of dates and battles, but as stories of people whose lives were not very different from those of our own. “Whether it was the Mughal kings we know so much about or the South Indian kings we know nothing about…their lives were very similar to us in terms of feelings and emotions.” The other thing he learnt from this home, growing up surrounded by old objects, was having a visual image of history. Pointing to a range of antiques arranged behind him at the talk, loaned for the occasion by Bengaluru’s Natesan’s Antiqarts, he says, “My hope is that through these objects, not only will you see them and admire them for their art, but also see the stories and some of the meanings behind it,” says Pradeep.

The first object that Pradeep selects from the collection on display is a beautiful bronze lamp. “Lamps started off with a very practical point of view—giving light,” he says. He then goes on to decode the various elements of the lamp, starting from the very top. “The minute you see this shape, with four wick holders, you know it is from Tirunelveli in the southern part of Tamil Nadu.”

According to him, the tradition of worshipping gods we are familiar with came fairly recently, only about 2000-odd years ago. “In the Rig Veda, the oldest Hindu texts, the two main gods it concerned itself with was Agni, which was for fire, and Indra, which was for water,” he says. The oldest tradition, he adds, was simply to worship just the lamp. “That is true enlightenment. When you can focus your eyes on the lamp…on a steady flame…it calms and focuses the mind,” he says before expanding on some of the finer details of this object.

For instance, he points out this lamp was created using the lost wax process, an ancient metal casting tradition dating back to at least 4000 BCE, where a mould made with wax is used to cast metal. Also, the upper part of the lamp, narrow at the top and enlarged at its waist, appears to represent a Mother Goddess, a symbol of fertility found in prehistoric excavation sites, “something we must have worshipped around 10,000 years ago,” he says. Even though we have forgotten this tradition of worshipping this Mother Goddess figure, “the motif has continued,” he says. Additionally, in the region of the Thamirabarani river, where this lamp is probably from, pottery shards with images of a female figure like this, carrying two sheaves of rice with a river with fish and crocodiles in the background, have been discovered. “All of these are fertility symbols,” he explains.