The artist who shaped visual culture in twentieth-century Tamil Nadu. Born as P.M. Sreenivasan on 19 January 1919, he took the name Silpi over a career spent producing line drawings and watercolours of South Indian temples, deities, and architecture. Most of that career happened at Ananda Vikatan, a Tamil weekly. He’d go into temples at night, after the crowds had cleared out from darshan, and sketch the sculpture directly, which meant his readers were seeing sanctum interiors most of them never would in person. The record on his life is patchy and scattered across a handful of sources.
Early Life
He was born in Namakkal, where his father, Mahadeva Iyer, ran a timber business which was successful enough, by most accounts, though nothing that suggested an artistic household. Still, the drawing talent showed up young, and it got noticed. Namakkal Ramalingam Pillai, a poet, freedom fighter, and evidently someone with an eye for this sort of thing, took an interest in the boy. His father wasn’t sold on it, though. Mahadeva Iyer wanted him to take over a government job. That changed only when the family’s finances took a hit, which is when Ramalingam Pillai stepped in to pay for the training his father wouldn’t. A fairly familiar story, but it’s the story that got him to the Madras School of Art, later the Government College of Fine Arts, Chennai, in the first place.
Artistic Journey
He started out at Ananda Vikatan drawing political and social events, the same as most staff artists there. Somewhere across his time at the magazine for over two decades, the temple work took over and became the thing he was known for. From 1947 through 1960, a weekly feature called Thennattu Selvangal, “Treasures of South India,” carried his temple drawings one after another. He didn’t stop after leaving the magazine, either. There was work for Bhavan’s Journal, Kalai Magal, Thinamani Kathir — smaller outlets, but steady ones. He occasionally exhibited his work too, including once at P.S. School in Chennai, and kept travelling to temples right up until he died in 1983.
Creative Process
The method is arguably more interesting than any single drawing he made. He worked on-site, at night, after the temple had emptied out, when it was just him and the sculpture of the deities in front of him. His figures followed rules laid out in the Shilpa Shastra, and for faces and features he stuck to Samudrika Lakshana — texts that don’t leave much room for personal style, by design. The big panoramic pieces required something closer to logistics than art: he’d climb the temple tower, sketch the view in pieces, then stitch the sections together afterward into one continuous drawing. For some subjects he just sat with for a prolonged period of time before he’d start drawing at all. By some accounts, he spent as much as forty days observing a single deity before he was satisfied enough to proceed with capturing details of the subject that even a photograph might overlook.
Signature Works
Most of what survives from that period was later gathered into two volumes, Thennattu Selvangal, published by Vikatan from drawings that had appeared between January 1948 and April 1961. Between the two books, you get temples at Madurai, Krishnapuram, Tirunelveli, Tenkasi, Sankarankovil — gopurams, pillars, individual deity figures, all rendered in the same exacting detail. One piece that comes up often is a panoramic view of the Meenakshi temple at Madurai, built from sketches he took from the tower. The work in watercolours doesn’t receive much recognition, but they are as significant as his other line art and oil paintings. Two versions of Kamakshi Amman at Kanchipuram, one from 1951 and another from 1963, plus Aghora Shiva at Thiruvengadu and a Bogar samadhi study at Palani.Whatever their original purpose, these drawings now function as something closer to a record, the kind of visual record that temple scholars, architects and artists still go back to.