Long before the internet and books emerged, people told their biggest stories on walls and ceilings. A traveller who could not read might still “read” an entire epic simply by looking up and following the painted figures from one scene to the next.The pictures narrated the entire story, it was like cinema centuries before cinema, frozen on walls for anyone patient enough to trace it.The ceilings of the Lepakshi temple in southern India still have several well-preserved painted panels that have survived nearly five hundred years, and they do not merely decorate the space, but actually narrate stories. According to art historian Anna L. Dallapiccola, these ceilings hold the most extensive surviving paintings of the Vijayanagara period in southern India, and most of the art from the period has nearly vanished.Here are some of the paintings of the Lepakshi temple that still amaze us
Photo: @IshaSacredWalks/ x
The justice of Manunidi Cholan
One of the paintings depicts the legend of Manu Needhi Cholan, a Chola king famous for impartial justice. When a calf was crushed under his own son’s chariot, the grieving cow came to the king for redress. Rather than spare his heir, the king ordered the prince placed under the same wheel, so that he too would feel the animal’s loss. Moved by such fairness, Shiva and Parvati are said to have restored both calf and prince to life.
Arjuna wins Draupadi’s hand
Another panel depicts Draupadi’s swayamvara, which is one of the Mahabharata’s most crucial scenes. To win the hand of the Panchala princess, suitors had to shoot the eye of a wooden fish spinning high on a wheel, aiming only by its reflection in the water below. Arjuna, hidden among the crowd during disguise, is the one who makes the near-impossible shot which decides Draupadi’s marriage to him.
Arjuna in deep meditation
Arjuna is depicted several times across paintings, and in this one, he is depicted in fierce penance. Seeking the powerful Pashupata weapon from Shiva, he meditates alone in the forest, his body is rigid with concentration.But it is the surrounding tale that catches the attention, where a demon arrives as a wild boar, Shiva and Parvati appear disguised as a hunter and huntress, and a quarrel erupts over who struck the beast. When Arjuna realises his rival is Shiva himself, he bows, and the god grants the weapon.
Shiva and Parvati playing dice
It is perhaps the most charming scene among the paintings, and it is also the most human. Here, Shiva and Parvati appear not as remote deities but as a couple at play, bent over a board game of dice, which shows an intimate and domestic image of the divine pair. Like several Lepakshi panels, parts of it have deteriorated with age, yet enough survives to convey the easy warmth between them that the artists clearly wanted us to feel.
