Naṭarāja

Naṭarāja is Śiva as the Lord of Dance. The image most people know — four arms, one leg lifted, the whole body turning inside a ring of fire — took its classic shape in the bronzes cast in the Tamil country under the Cholas, about a thousand years ago. The dance it shows is called the ānanda-tāṇḍava, the dance of bliss, and its home is the temple of Chidambaram.

The best-known story behind it is set in the Dārukāvana, the pine forest. Proud sages who believed their rites ran the world were visited by Śiva as a beautiful wandering beggar; in their anger they sent a tiger, a serpent and a dwarf against him. He wore the tiger's skin, hung the serpent round his neck, and danced on the dwarf. (The Śiva Purāṇa tells the forest episode differently, as the beginning of Liṅga worship.) The Purāṇa does know Śiva as a dancer: in the story of Pārvatī's homecoming he comes to Menā's courtyard as a wandering dancer with a ḍamaru, and his thousand names call him nṛtyapriya, “fond of dance”, and nityanṛtya, “ever dancing”.

Tradition reads the whole figure as Śiva's five works in one moment. The drum creates, the raised palm protects, the fire dissolves, the foot on Apasmāra conceals — holding down ignorance without destroying it — and the lifted foot, to which the other hand points, offers grace and release. Nothing in the picture stands still, and yet the face at its centre is calm: the movement of the world and the stillness of its source are shown together.

At Chidambaram the dance is not only on the bronze. The temple is counted as the shrine of ākāśa, space, among the five elements, and behind a curtain in the sanctum is the “secret of Chidambaram” — an empty space, hung with golden leaves, where the dance is said to go on unseen. Tradition hears the name itself as cit-ambara, “the sky of consciousness”: the stage of the dance is finally the heart.

Devotees come to Naṭarāja for courage and for release. The lifted foot is sung of in Tamil hymns as a refuge for those who are tired of the round of birth and death. The great festival of Ārudrā Darśanam in the month of Mārgaḻi celebrates his dance at Chidambaram, and classical dancers in South India still begin by saluting him as the first teacher of their art.