Natarajaनटराज

Nataraja — naṭa, dancer, rāja, king — is Shiva dancing the Ananda Tandava, the dance of bliss, in a ring of flame, with one foot planted on a crouching dwarf and the other lifted.

It is probably the most reproduced image in Indian art, and one of the very few religious icons anywhere that is admired at least as often for its formal qualities as for its content. It is also, and this is easy to miss behind the familiarity, a doctrinal diagram. Every limb in it is assigned a meaning by texts written within the tradition and within a few centuries of the image's crystallisation. It is not a dancer to whom meanings were attached later; it is a meaning that was given a dancer.

The five acts it encodes are the pañcakṛtya: creation (sṛṣṭi), preservation (sthiti), dissolution (saṃhāra), concealment (tirobhāva) and grace (anugraha). The last two are the ones outsiders usually miss, and they are the two that make the image Shaiva Siddhanta rather than generic.

His home is Chidambaram in Tamil Nadu, where he is simply Koyil — "the temple", as though there were no other — and where the sanctum contains, alongside the bronze, a curtained empty space.

Dancing Shiva is older than Nataraja. Shiva as a dancer is attested well before the Chola form. The eighteen-armed dancing Shiva of Badami Cave 1 (Chalukya, sixth century) is the great early example; there are dancing Shivas at Ellora and in Pallava sculpture, and the Tevaram hymns of the Tamil Nayanmars — Appar, Sambandar and Sundarar, sixth to eighth centuries — sing of the dancer at Tillai long before any surviving Chidambaram bronze.

The Chola crystallisation. What happens under the Cholas, roughly the tenth to twelfth centuries, is that this becomes a fixed and highly resolved form in bronze, cast by the lost-wax method, made to be carried in procession, and standardised to the point that examples separated by two centuries are recognisably the same composition. Patronage is documented: the queen Sembiyan Mahadevi (later tenth century) and Rajaraja I are named in inscriptions endowing Nataraja worship, and Chidambaram is rebuilt as the dynastic temple. The Cholas made Nataraja the emblem of the state, and the image's authority is inseparable from that fact.

Why bronze matters. A stone image stays in the sanctum. A bronze utsava murti goes out into the street. The Chola bronze Nataraja was designed to be seen in motion by people who would never enter the sanctum, and its silhouette — legible from any angle, balanced on one foot, ringed by fire — is a solution to that problem before it is anything else.

The texts that read it. The interpretation of the limbs is set out in Tamil Shaiva Siddhanta works: the Unmai Vilakkam of Manavachakam Kadanthar (thirteenth century) gives the standard gloss verse by verse, and the Chidambara Mahatmya and Koyil Puranam supply the site's narrative. The image and its exegesis grew together; neither is a later imposition on the other.

The modern reception. In 1918 Ananda Coomaraswamy published The Dance of Shiva, which put the icon in front of a Western audience as philosophy rather than idolatry, and shaped how it has been discussed in English ever since — including, later, the frequent pairing of Nataraja with modern physics. A two-metre Nataraja was installed at CERN in Geneva in 2004, a gift from the Government of India. These are real facts about the image's afterlife. They are not part of its traditional exegesis, and this page keeps the two apart.

The standard gloss, element by element. The readings below are the tradition's own, from the Shaiva Siddhanta commentaries.

The upper right hand holds the damaru, the hourglass drum. Sound is the first thing to arise; the drum is sṛṣṭi, creation.

The upper left hand holds agni, fire, in a flame or a bowl. Fire is saṃhāra, dissolution. The two upper hands are held in balance across the composition — the world is made and unmade at once, not in sequence.

The lower right hand is in abhaya mudra, the gesture of no-fear. This is sthiti, preservation.

The lower left hand sweeps across the body in gajahasta, the elephant-trunk pose, and points to the raised left foot. This is anugraha, grace — and the pointing is the most important single gesture in the image, because it names where refuge is.

The right foot presses down on Apasmara (Tamil Muyalaka), a dwarf holding a snake. Apasmara means forgetfulness, heedlessness — the state of not registering what is in front of one. He is not killed, only held: the tradition is explicit that ignorance is suppressed rather than destroyed, because a world without it would have no one to instruct. This is tirobhāva, concealment.

The raised left foot is mukti, release. It is the only part of the image not touching anything.

The ring of fire — prabhāvalī or tiruvāsi — is the cosmos, and the flames are counted, in some readings, as the syllables of the five-syllable mantra.

The hair. The matted locks fly outward, and caught in them are Ganga as a small figure or a mermaid, the crescent moon, a datura flower, a skull, and a cobra. The dance is violent enough to lift them.

The earrings differ. The right ear carries a makara kundala, a man's; the left a patra kundala, a woman's. The asymmetry is deliberate and points at Ardhanarishvara: the dancer contains both.

The face is still. Nothing else about the figure is at rest, and the face does not move at all. Everything the image argues is in that contrast.

The five sabhas. Tamil Shaivism assigns Nataraja five halls, each with its own dance and its own material:

• Chidambaram — the Kanaka Sabha and Chit Sabha, gold; the Ananda Tandava, the dance of bliss. The definitive form.
• Madurai — the Rajata Sabha, silver; here he dances with the left foot down and the right raised, and the local account explains the reversal as a concession to a devotee.
• Tiruvalangadu — the Ratna Sabha, gem; the Urdhva Tandava, in which the leg is raised vertically. This is the dance-contest with Kali.
• Tirunelveli — the Tamra Sabha, copper.
• Kutralam — the Chitra Sabha, painted.

The seven or nine tandavas. Beyond the Ananda Tandava the tradition names others: the Rudra or Samhara Tandava of destruction; the Kali or Kalika Tandava; the Tripura Tandava after the burning of the three cities; the Sandhya Tandava at dusk; the Uma Tandava with Parvati; the Gauri Tandava. The Lalita, the gentle dance, belongs to the goddess and is set against the tandava as its counterpart.

Nataraja and Nartana Ganapati and Krishna Kaliyamardana are the three great dancing images of South Indian bronze, and they are cast by the same workshops in the same technique; the family resemblance is a fact about the craft as well as about the theology.

Adavallan and Kuttaperumal are the Tamil temple names by which the Chidambaram bronze is called in Chola inscriptions — useful when reading epigraphy, where "Nataraja" as a name is comparatively late.

Nataraja in Bharatanatyam. The image is the presiding icon of the classical dance form, invoked at the start of a recital, and the Natya Shastra's 108 karanas are carved around the gopura passages at Chidambaram — the fullest surviving sculptural record of the classical dance vocabulary anywhere.

The forest of Taruka. The best-known origin story, from the Chidambara Mahatmya and its relatives. A community of sages in the Taruka forest held that ritual action alone was sufficient and that no god was needed above it. Shiva came among them as a naked mendicant, with Vishnu as Mohini beside him, and the sages' households were thrown into disorder. Enraged, the sages performed a sacrifice and sent its products against him: a tiger, which he skinned and wore; a serpent, which he took as an ornament; and finally the dwarf Apasmara, on whose back he set his foot and began to dance. The sages saw the dance and understood. The story is a polemic against ritualism: what defeats the sacrifice is not a bigger sacrifice but a dance.

The contest at Tiruvalangadu. Kali held the ground there and would not yield it. The two danced against each other, matching step for step, until Shiva raised his foot vertically above his head — the Urdhva Tandava — and Kali, who would not adopt a posture that immodesty forbade her, conceded. The story has been read for a very long time as an account of a goddess cult being subordinated to a Shaiva one at a particular site, and that reading is not a modern imposition; the local tradition retains Kali's shrine and her precedence in the older layer of the site. It is worth stating both the story and what it is probably recording.

Patanjali and Vyaghrapada. Chidambaram's charter myth. The sage Patanjali — identified in the tradition with the grammarian and with the author of the Yoga Sutras, an identification historians do not accept — and Vyaghrapada, "tiger-foot", who was given tiger's claws so he could climb for unblemished flowers before dawn, both asked to see the Taruka dance. Shiva danced it again at Tillai for them, on the day of the Ardra star, and the temple stands where he did.

The Chidambara Rahasya. Beside the bronze in the Chit Sabha hangs a curtain. Behind it there is no image — only space, hung with golden bilva leaves. This is the Chidambara Rahasya, the secret of Chidambaram, and it is shown at each of the six daily worships. The temple's own explanation is that the fifth element, akasha, is what is enshrined there, Chidambaram being the akasha member of the five element temples of the Tamil country. The theological point is blunt: the most elaborate image in Indian art stands next to a demonstration that no image is required.

At Chidambaram. Worship is conducted by the Dikshitars, a hereditary community of some hundreds of families who administer the temple themselves and among whom the priesthood rotates — an arrangement without parallel among major South Indian temples, and one that has produced sustained litigation with the state over control. Six worships are offered daily, each closing with the drawing of the curtain before the Rahasya.

Ardra Darshanam is the principal festival: the Tiruvadirai star in the month of Margazhi (December–January), when the great abhishekam is performed over the bronze and the image is taken in procession. Chidambaram holds six such abhishekams a year, and they are among the most attended ritual events in Tamil Nadu.

Maha Shivratri, the Ani Tirumanjanam in June–July, and the two annual car festivals fill out the calendar.

Offerings. Bilva leaves, water, milk, sandal paste and the recitation of the Tirumurai — the Tamil Shaiva canon — which at Chidambaram is sung by hereditary Oduvars. The Panchakshara, namaḥ śivāya, is the mantra, recited freely and by anyone.

In dance. Every Bharatanatyam recital begins with an invocation before a Nataraja image, and this is the most widespread form of Nataraja observance outside temple worship — practised daily, in dance schools, by people who would not describe it as worship at all.

In the home. Nataraja bronzes and their reproductions are among the most common objects in Indian and diaspora households, and are as often placed as art as installed as icons. The tradition draws a distinction here that is worth respecting: an image that has undergone prana pratishtha is treated differently from one that has not, and no offence attaches to keeping an uninstalled bronze on a shelf.

Thillai Nataraja Temple, Chidambaram (Cuddalore district, Tamil Nadu) — the temple, called simply Koyil. The present structure is largely Chola with later Pandya, Vijayanagara and Nayaka additions; the golden-roofed Chit Sabha houses the bronze and the Rahasya. Its four gopuras carry the 108 karanas of the Natya Shastra. It is the akasha temple of the Pancha Bhuta Sthalams, the five element temples, and one of the Pancha Sabhas.

Meenakshi Amman Temple, Madurai — the Rajata Sabha, the silver hall, with the reversed-foot Nataraja.

Vadaranyeswarar Temple, Tiruvalangadu (Tiruvallur district) — the Ratna Sabha, site of the Urdhva Tandava and of the contest with Kali. The Tiruvalangadu Nataraja bronze, now in the Government Museum, Chennai, is among the finest surviving.

Nellaiappar Temple, Tirunelveli — the Tamra Sabha, copper.

Kutralanathar Temple, Kutralam (Tenkasi district) — the Chitra Sabha, whose Nataraja is a painting rather than a bronze.

Beyond the five. Nataraja bronzes are the pride of the Government Museum in Chennai, the Thanjavur Art Gallery, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum and the Asia Society; a number of the finest were removed from temples in the twentieth century, and repatriation cases involving Chola bronzes — including Nataraja images returned from Australia and the United Kingdom in the 2010s — are ongoing.

CERN, Geneva — the two-metre Nataraja presented by India in 2004, standing outside the Council Chamber.

The five acts, and why concealment is one of them. Most summaries of Nataraja give creation, preservation and destruction and stop, which turns the icon into a picture of a cosmic cycle. The tradition's own list has five, and the two that get dropped are the interesting ones. Tirobhāva, concealment, says that the same power which reveals also hides — that ignorance is not an absence of God's action but a mode of it. Anugraha, grace, is the release from that concealment, and the dancer's lower left hand is pointing at where it is found. Without those two the image is cosmology; with them it is soteriology.

Apasmara is not killed. The dwarf is held down, not destroyed, and the commentaries insist on the distinction. Heedlessness has a function: without it there would be no one to be taught, and the dance would have no audience. This is a considerably more sophisticated position than "good defeats evil", and it is the standing correction to the way the image is usually captioned.

Stillness at the centre of motion. The face does not move. In Shaiva Siddhanta terms, the dancer is nirguna — without attribute — while the dance is everything that has attributes. What the image asserts is not that God is active but that activity and immobility are the same fact seen from two sides, and the composition makes that assertion in a way no sentence does.

The empty space next door. Whatever else Chidambaram is, it is a temple that keeps the most elaborate figurative icon in Indian art beside a curtained void and shows both at every worship. The pairing is the tradition's own commentary on its own image-making, and it forestalls the obvious objection to icon worship from inside rather than from outside.

On the physics analogy. Since Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics (1975) it has been common to present Nataraja as an anticipation of particle physics, and the CERN installation has cemented the association. The analogy is a twentieth-century reading, made by people outside the tradition and by moderns within it, and it does not appear in any Shaiva Siddhanta source. It is worth knowing about as part of the image's history. It should not be reported as what the icon means, because the icon's own commentators say at length and in detail what it means, and they are talking about grace and bondage, not about matter.