Swamimalai Bronzes: Lost-Wax Legacy of the Cholas
A thousand years after Rajaraja Chola's workshops at Thanjavur, a small town by the Kaveri is still casting bronze gods the same way, one wax model and one pit of sand at a time.
In 1010 CE, the Chola king Rajaraja I consecrated the Brihadeeswarar temple at Thanjavur and filled it with portable bronze festival deities, or utsava murtis, cast by sthapatis using a technique older than the dynasty. The technique is madhuchchishta vidhana, the lost wax method. A wax model is covered in clay. The clay is heated until the wax runs out. A molten five-metal alloy, panchaloha, is poured into the empty space. The clay is broken away. The bronze is the god. A thousand years later, the technique is still practised in the small temple town of Swamimalai on the south bank of the Kaveri river, about forty kilometres west of Thanjavur. Swamimalai sthapatis still belong to the Vishwakarma community and still trace their guru-shishya lineage back to the Chola workshops. The Devasenapathy Sthapathy family, led in the twentieth century by Padma Shri S. Devasenapathy Sthapathy, kept the craft alive through the lean decades of the last century. The Swamimalai Panchaloha Bronze Icons received a Geographical Indication tag in 2008, giving the name legal protection. In June 2004, a two-metre Swamimalai Nataraja was installed outside the particle physics laboratory at CERN in Geneva. This lesson walks into one foundry at Swamimalai on the morning of a pour.
A Foundry at Swamimalai
In a ground-floor foundry on the south bank of the Kaveri river at Swamimalai, in Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu, on a hot morning in 2022, a senior sthapati of the Devasenapathy lineage stands with a long iron ladle in his hand. Beside him, a clay-wrapped mould the size of a small child is buried up to its shoulders in a pit of dry sand. The mould has been heated for a full day. Inside, a wax model of Shiva Nataraja has melted and drained out through narrow channels, leaving a hollow in the exact shape of the god.
The crucible is ready. Inside it is a glowing orange mix of five metals: copper, silver, gold, brass, and a little lead. This is panchaloha, the five-metal of the Chola bronze tradition. The furnace has roared all night. The men around the pit are silent. A single bubble in the wrong place, a single cold spot in the metal, and the image will come out of the sand with a blind eye, a broken arm, or a fingerless hand. The only fix for a bad pour is to melt the bronze back down and begin again.
He tips the ladle.
For about nine seconds, a ribbon of molten panchaloha flows into the clay mould and fills the Nataraja-shaped space inside. Then it is done. Nobody will know if the god came through until tomorrow afternoon, when the clay is broken away.
A thousand years ago, almost the same scene was playing out at the other end of the same Kaveri river, in the workshops of the Chola court at Thanjavur. What follows is the story of how the hands at the pit then became the hands at the pit now.
The Chola Bronze Century
Bronze casting in India is three thousand years older than the Cholas. The small Dancing Girl of Mohenjo Daro, cast around 2500 BCE, is the earliest known lost-wax bronze on the subcontinent. But the Chola dynasty of Tamil Nadu, who ruled from about 850 to 1280 CE, pushed the technique to a height that has not been matched anywhere else.