“What sparked it off was a pilgrimage I made to the Vaishno Devi Temple in Jammu-Kashmir, India, in 1994,” Prof Dr Krishna Gopal Rampal says, when I ask him about Sacred Structures - Artistic Renditions of Hindu Temples in Malaysia, an exhibition now ongoing at the Badan Warisan Malaysia.

“I arrived at the temple at midnight, but so many were the pilgrims that by 8am, I was still nowhere at the end of the queue. It was winter, and children were sleeping on the ground,” says Dr Rampal, who is professor of Occupational Health at the Faculty of Medicine of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia in Bangi, Selangor.

“At that point, I asked myself why I had to come all the way to India to visit a temple when there were so many temples I had yet to visit in Malaysia.” That visit had inspired him to start a two-year-long project to have as many Hindu temples in Malaysia and Singapore captured on canvas, through the eyes and skills of Malaysian artists.

It’s certainly not a story you hear often in Malaysia, where arts patronage is sorely lacking. Yet the resulting exhibition, and how it came to be, stands as an example of what we can do with a simple idea, a measure of willpower, and belief in the abilities of home-grown visual artists.

Fresh Eyes

When he returned from India, Dr Rampal set out to identify all the Hindu temples in Kuala Lumpur. Soon, his list of temples broadened -- with the help of organisations like the Malaysian Hindu Sangam and temple management personnel -- to include locations outside KL, as well as in Singapore.

Being a board member of the National Art Gallery and an avid arts collector (for 15 years, now), Dr Rampal knew which Malaysian artists had the skills and interest to paint buildings. In putting the idea across to these artists, he stumbled upon a reality: “Except for less than a handful -- like Chong Hon Fatt and Long Thien Shih -- Malaysian artists have never painted or sketched a Hindu temple on canvas.”

Sacred Structures was to become the first of its kind, in terms of subject matter and social context. Hindu temples, and subject matters specific to the lives of minority ethnic Indians in Malaysia, have very rarely been the focus of the country’s visual artists -- less than a handful of whom are of Indian descent. This reality must have underscored the need for the project, and Dr Rampal was spurred on anew. “I felt that it would be a great way to show Malaysians and others our Hindu temples, and the role of the artisans as well as temple managers in constructing sacred abodes -- so beautiful that the gods would want to come reside in them.”

The project’s team of artists came to be made up of mostly Chinese and non-Hindu artists: Victor Chin, Chong Hon Fatt, Jeganathan Ramachandram, Lai Loong Sun, Lee Weng Fatt, Peter Liew, Long Thien Shih, Pheh It Hao, Soh Chee Hui and Tham Siew Inn. This selection has produced one of Sacred Structure’s main strengths: new meanings and reactions to the sight of Hindu temples that many of us -- including, by his own admission, Dr Rampal himself, a Hindu of ethnic Punjabi descent -- have come to take for granted in our multi-religious architectural landscape.

“Most of us are so used to the sight of Hindu temples that we simply drive pass them. We [Hindus] go in to pray and leave when we’re done. Seldom do we stop to look at the sculptures at the entrance or on the walls in these houses of God,” he observes. “Looking at these temples with fresh eyes, the artists I’ve commissioned have brought out more beautiful aspects of the temples, and have highlighted their unique aesthetic values.”

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The Energy of Worship

A good number of the exhibition’s works (187 paintings and drawings of a hundred different Hindu temples -- 82 in Malaysia and 18 in Singapore -- in various mediums and styles) are still in portfolio cases, because there is not enough wall space at the Badan Warisan to display everything.

Eight of Sacred Structures ten artists are painters, while two are sculptors who did works-on-paper that focused on the temples’ sculpture. Even among the painters, each artist handled their subject matter differently.

“For some, all I had to do was to furnish them with the temple’s addresses,” Dr Rampal tells me. “With others, I had to show them where the temples were.” He became privy to the various ways in which these artists worked: “Hon Fatt and Peter Liew painted on the spot and touched up later on. Victor Chin and some others visited the temples and talked to the priests before painting. Long Thien Shih brought out what he described as the Surrealism of the temples’ surroundings. Tham Siew Inn ‘went in’ with the aim to capture the energy of the temples.”

Sure enough, the artists’ works open up fascinating narrative about Hindu temples, their construction and the people who have dedicated their lives to them. “A few artists, like Weng Fatt, accompanied me on multi-itinerary trips across Malaysia and Singapore,” Dr Rampal continues. “His portraits of the Ganesha temple in the Puduraya area, complete with Tamil script, looks better than it does in real life!”

The soft-spoken Dr Rampal says this with a satisfied chuckle as he walks me through the exhibition. It is a weekday; Badan Warisan is devoid of visitors at this late afternoon hour. Yet, to me, the gallery seems filled with ongoing chatter: a sense I get whenever I’m in the company of diverse artworks inspired by a single, strong subject matter.

Documentation

It has been a good several months since I felt that particular sensation in an art exhibition. Talking to some of Sacred Structures’ artists, I soon realise that this is because ‘working’ on the temples became a journey of discovery for all involved, and everyone has a tale to share.

“The temples had so many statues, which I wasn’t used to drawing. I had to do nearly 100 sketches.” Lee Weng Fatt, who speaks expressively in halting English, has a portfolio that includes numerous drawings of old buildings and Malay kampung scenes. “The other challenge was in portraying every single colour used in the temples’ detailed carvings. I found the colours of the statues very strong, and I knew that if I tried to paint all of these details onto the canvas, they would end up blurred to the viewer’s eye! I had to come up with new techniques of working with these colours.”

I ask him about his accurate reproduction of Tamil on the Puduraya temple. “My 20 years as an artist helped in picking up details of the script, and controlling my hand movements to write correctly!” Weng Fatt explains. He adds that his Taoist-Buddhist background made him feel very comfortable working on the Hindu temples.

As an Indian -- “Not just Hindu,” he stresses -- artist and well-known Vasthu Shastra practitioner Jeganathan Ramachandram saw the project as a way to help document temple sculpture details, which were deteriorating due to time and poor maintenance. “If you take a look around, you will see that many historic Hindu temples here are in need of repair and restoration,” he says. “It’s a sad situation. Being an Indian, I felt that it was my duty to help document these sculptures, so that when these structures deteriorate further, in the future my paintings could function as a sort of reference for restoration work.”

Both Weng Fatt and Jeganathan felt that the opening night of the exhibition had been a good chance for the respective artists to exchange views, even if these were mostly self-congratulatory. They had been working separately throughout the duration of the project.

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Learning the Way

With Malaysia celebrating 50 years of nation-building this year, Sacred Structures couldn’t have come at a better time. While the exhibition glaringly lacks what would have been a very interesting artistic viewpoint -- Hindu temples through the eyes of an artist of the Muslim faith -- it wins credit for just the aesthetic experiments that it has brought about. Whether the project was entirely ecumenical is besides the point; it still shows us the beauty that can result from inter-religious -- as well as intra-religious -- artistic dialogue.

“We’ve tried to have a balance of representations of the Hindu deities which the different Indian communities build their temples in honour of,” Dr Rampal says. For this purpose, he referred to a wide range of academic texts: Dr K Ramanathan’s Historical Development of Hindu Temples in Malaysia, Manimaran’s Hindu Temple: Architecture and Sculptures, Vineeta Sinha’s Hindu Temples in Singapore.

According to these researches, plantation-based temples are generally Mariamman temples, Chettiars build Murugan temples, Ceylonese are generally Ganesha devotees, Northern Indians are Krishna devotees, and there have been recent Muneshwaran-based temples. Architectural identities are characterized by the shape of domes, the arrangement of pillars and the use of colours: “There are slight differences in, for instance, the pillars which are constructed in horizontal formations in southern Indian temples and vertical formations for northern Indian temples.

To guide Dr Rampal in curatorial aspects of the show were artist-educator Redza Piyadasa and artist-curator Anurendra Jegadeva. In keeping to the project’s budget, the doctor further shortlisted artists he had in mind to mainly those at a mid-career level, and chose medium to small-sized canvases to save costs in purchasing, framing and transportation. Quality-wise, he chose good 300gm cotton, acid-free paper -- and he didn’t rush the artists.

With Dr Rampal’s steady support of such a project over a course of two (if not 13) years, the exhibition is proof that individuals -- most of whom prefer to spend their money elsewhere, such as in education (schools, scholarships, etc) -- and not just multinational giants like HSBC Bank and DiGi, can make a difference in arts patronage.

Journeying On

To date, 15 framed drawings of the total 187 works that Dr Rampal allowed to go on sale have been snapped up. The rest will remain in his private collection, mainly for the purposes of a travelling exhibition; he hopes to take his pieces to Singapore and Chennai. To allow more people to partake of Sacred Structures, he plans to launch a 225-page coffee-table book, with prints of all the artworks, by mid-year.

In addition, Dr Rampal has donated two works -- one, of a southern Indian Mariamman temple in Kuala Lumpur; another, of a northern Indian Kunj Bihari temple in Penang -- to the National Art Gallery’s permanent collection. “I thought it was important that we donate these to NAG,” he says. “They are the suppository of our heritage. At least, the Gallery will be able to show Indian art and culture to the public.”

Sacred Structures project to be proud of. The man behind it, however, stresses that the exhibition has been more of a long and humbling pilgrimage for him. “At one point, while visiting one of the Hindu temples here, it dawned upon me that the past 15 years in art collecting was a training ground for me to appreciate art and temples, and to reach a stage where I would be able to do this project,” the doctor says. “By the end of the project, I had visited a large number of temples. It was like a journey, for me.”

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Veronica Shunmugam is a freelance arts and culture writer. She welcomes feedback on her blog.

Sacred Structures - Artistic Renditions of Hindu Temples in Malaysia is on at the Badan Warisan Malaysia unil April 21st, 2007. Photos courtesy of Badan Warisan Malaysia and Prof Dr Krishna Gopal Rampal.