Temple Mural Paintings of Tamil Nadu

M.V. Bhaskar and K.T. Gandhirajan have made an important and significant contribution towards helping to preserve the heritage of the Tamil people by setting about the task of systematically digitizing the temple mural paintings of the temples of Tamil Nadu and making them freely available at their website. Theirs is a labour of love and will be received with affection by Tamils living in many lands and across distant seas.
"Our aim in making these pages online is to represent and illustrate work that involves many people, organisations and locations, and the scope of the work, covered under what we call “Nayaka* Painting Archival Project” - through just one painting.

The actual size of the featured mural is 22’ x 9.5’. It was photographed in 39 parts and digitally stitched for museum quality reproduction at actual size at 300 dpi. You are seeing it at a pixel dimension of 630 x 250, medium quality jpeg. The black gap in the painting is a wooden pillar against the wall. The pillar is left out of the digital stitch.

This mural is in the first tier of a temple tower of five tiers with 30 such walls in all, in a tiny village in the far south called Tiruppudaimaruduur in Tirunelveeli District, Tamilnadu. A digitally reconstructed line drawing is annotated section by section. Murals like these are found on the walls and ceilings of many temples all over India, though our work is confined to the state borders of Tamilnadu.

In Phase 1 of this project, we completed the digital capture of close to 25000 square feet of murals from 11 temples, from out of a total of 135 temples that were surveyed, over a period of 2 years.