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| Saturday, 2 November 2002 |
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The 'golden girls' of Sigiriya : We spoke but they didn't respond by Derrick Schokman
In the original Sigiriya complex a gallery four to five feet wide, paved with slabs of limestone, and protected by a brick parapet on the outside ran alongside the western face of the rock. The inner face of the parapet was given a high polished surface - a durable glaze believed to have been contrived of lime, egg white and wild honey that gave it a mirror-like finish. The rockface above the gallery was decorated with fresco paintings of pretty women, given the appearance of looking down on visitors who passed along the gallery. When the archaeological Survey was conducted a little over a century ago, only 22 frescoes were found protected in a pocket of rock 40 feet above the gallery, and only a small portion of the mirror wall remained. On this fragment of mirror wall were found a wealth of graffiti inscribed with metal styluses by visitors, giving their impressions of the "golden girls" above them - a great many of them in verse.
"Sweet girl, standing on the mountain, Swans drunk with nectar". "We spoke but they did not responds, There were many more verses in this vein, but none of them gave any indication of who the golden girls were supposed to represent. Yes indeed, who were the golden girls of Sigiriya? There have been several educated guesses. Bell, an early Archaeological Commissioner, thought they could represent the wives or ladies of king Kassapa's court. But the very fact that their figures were cut off at the waist by clouds, suggested to others that they were celestial images or apsaras. Professor Paranavitana, who advocated the theory that Sigiriya was built by Kassa pa as a symbolic representation of the paradise of Kuvera, god of riches, above the Himalayas, maintained that they were lightning princesses and cloud maidens.
This debate on the identity of the golden girls will I dare say continue with new meanings being attributed to them. It is however generally agreed that stylistically the Sigiriya frescoes are an off-shoot of the Gupta school of mural paintings found in the Ajanta Caves of India. But in a far simpler and more spontaneous composition - the only one of its kind in this country depicting sensuous women portrayed as a decoration, quite unlike the religious paintings which are narrative of the Buddha's life. In regard to the graffiti, although scribbling on walls is universally considered a disgusting habit, in this instance we must be grateful because they provided evidence of the high standard of Sinhala writing among the different social classes from the 6th to 10th centuries. In the words of Professor Paranavitana they showed that "education was not confined to a small circle among the Sinhalese of those times". |
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A recent newspaper report that a Rs. 35 million project has been
launched by the Central Cultural Fund, Geological Survey and Mines Bureau
to conserve the historical Sigiriya mirror wall and frescoes, prompted me
to write this piece on the inter-relationship between these two artistic
achievements of the fifth century.
Professor Senarath Paranavitana, one-time Commissioner of Archaeology,
deciphered and published nearly 700 of these graffiti. Here are some
translations of the impressions of enraptured visitors who walked that
gallery between the 6th and 10th centuries. One of them wrote:
And more recently another commissioner of archaeology Raja de Silva,
has put forward a proposition that Sigiriya was never meant to be a palace
in the sky, but rather a monastery of Mahayana Buddhism supported by King
Kassapa, and that the golden girls were none other than Tara, consort of
Avalokitesvara, a popular Bodhisatva of that faith.
