The bride stood solemnly in prayer, bedecked in wedding jewellery, a yellow sari, a gold belt and hair ornaments. By her side was her husband, looking elegant in a white veshti with a garland of yellow flowers around his neck. The couple was flanked by dapper police officers, students carrying books, and doctors in lab coats. They were all ready for a final coat of paint, waiting to join the finished figurines some steps away.

Lined up along the inner shrine of the Aiyanar temple in Thenampakkam village and its courtyard are thousands of statuettes – some bright and freshly painted, others washed out, and some missing limbs.

Each figurine represents a token of gratitude from a devotee whose prayers at the temple had come true.

Figurines lined up by the temple.

Temple tales

Situated near the western border of Puducherry, the temple in Cuddalore district is dedicated to the village’s guardian deity, Aiyanar, and the Shaivite saint Azhagar Siddhar. More than 1,000 devotees visit it every week, walking through paddy fields and casuarina groves, before finding it nestled amidst a clump of trees at the end of a narrow road.

According to popular lore, the tradition of the figurines began centuries ago with the visit of a Shaivite sage to a small shrine for Aiyanar, the son of Shiva and Vishnu’s female avatar Mohini.

As legend goes, Aiyanar would ride horseback around the village, keeping vigil, once darkness set in and the villagers were asleep. This is why most Aiyanar temples have clay sculptures of horses, sometimes accompanied by fierce-looking Aiyanars on their backs.

Every evening, at the Aiyanar temple, a priest would light a lamp and perform prayers. One day, however, an old sage sat under a banyan tree by the temple and began to meditate. After observing him for a few days, the priest and the other villagers grew curious. They went up to him to find out who he was. The sage, awakened from his trance, blessed the villagers and told them that all their wishes would be fulfilled if they prayed at this shrine.

After this, the sage jumped down a well and disappeared without a trace. Since this incident is believed to have occurred in the Tamil month of Chitirai, between mid-April and mid-May, this is when the temple festival is still celebrated.

Statues of horses outside the Aiyanar temple.

As in many village temples around the country, animal sacrifice was a routine offering made to Aiyanar. But devotees changed their ways after the sage’s visit to the village, according to S Kumar, the priest at the Thenampakkam temple.

“The sage told his devotees to make statues representing that which they most desired,” said S Kumar, a fifth-generation priest at the temple. “This was so that people don’t forget their blessings – parents can point out a family idol to the child, and remind them that the deity once granted their wish. This can go on for generations.”

All kinds of offerings

On a sunny afternoon in September, K Manibalan, a welder from Singapore, and his wife waited patiently at the Thenampakkam temple. For three years, they had been trying unsuccessfully to conceive a child. Their wish came true within two months of visiting the Aiyanar temple, they said. They were back now to fulfil the promise of offering a small sculpture of a child to the deity.

Also at the temple was M Ramajayam, an employee of a company nearby, with the statue of a rosy-cheeked boy: thanks to Aiyanar, he said, his son had recovered from a respiratory illness.

Stories like these fill all crannies of the Aiyanar temple in the form of figurines, each representing a different aspiration fulfilled. Among the sculptures are likenesses of army officers, two-storey houses and even a laptop complete with a mouse, printer and a Central Processing Unit.

Small statues of gadgets offered by a grateful devotee.

Carving traditions

J Jaykumar, a sculptor who has worked in several temples across the state for 20 years, said the Aiyanar temple near Cuddalore is the only temple in Tamil Nadu where devotees deposit desires modelled in cement, all year round.

Sculpting the eyes of a bridal figurine, on which he had worked for 10 hours, Jaykumar said it took him an average of three days to finish one statuette.

“If people want their real features on the idol, it takes longer, up to five days,” he said. “But most people just tell me to work on a regular type of figurine.”

The sculptor Jaykumar working on a cement figurine.

Jaykumar’s town of Thiruvadi is famous for its sculptors, who also make temple gopurams (the towers at the entrance). He has been employed on contract by the temple authorities, but earns just Rs 500 a day. Jaykumar is proud of the dozens of sculptures he has made over the last one month.

“No factory can do what I do,” he said. “Each one of my handcrafted figurines is unique.”