The Lord of the Dance

Nataraja is Shiva as the Lord of the Dance, the standing bronze form developed in the Tamil south under the Chola dynasty from around the tenth century and now perhaps the single most widely reproduced image of any Hindu deity. Shiva dances the ananda tandava, the dance of bliss, within a ring of flame, poised on one leg with the other lifted across his body, his matted locks flying out on either side. Every element carries meaning: the upper right hand holds the damaru, the small drum whose beat is the pulse of creation and of time itself; the upper left holds agni, the fire of destruction that will consume the world; the lower right hand is raised in the gesture of abhaya, fearlessness and protection; and the lower left points across to the raised foot, the refuge of release.

Nataraja's home shrine is the Thillai Nataraja temple at Chidambaram in Tamil Nadu, where the bronze form is worshipped as performing the ananda tandava in what temple theology calls the exact centre of the universe; the medieval Tamil text Unmai Vilakkam sets out the dance's five cosmic activities of creation, preservation, destruction, concealment and release. The image reached a wide audience outside India largely through the art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy's 1918 essay The Dance of Shiva, which did much to establish Nataraja in Western eyes as a central symbol of Hindu philosophy and art.