The Kathiresan Koyil temple in Galle, Sri Lanka, is set to feature a significant exhibition of its historic mural paintings at the Arts Faculty in Jaffna this October. These murals, dating back to the late 18th century, represent some of the oldest surviving examples of Hindu mural art on the island, yet they have received little attention in written histories.
The murals are stylistically notable for their clear connections to Kandyan and colonial Buddhist murals in Sri Lanka, as well as contemporaneous mural traditions in South India. This artistic interplay illustrates the region’s complex cultural exchanges, where religious, regional, and colonial influences intersect in ways that challenge traditional national art historical narratives.
Dedicated to Lord Murugan, locally known as Kathiragamadiyo, the temple murals portray stories from the Thiruvilayadal Puranam, a Tamil Shaivite text recounting 64 miraculous episodes linked to Lord Shiva. These tales, believed to have been composed before the 12th century and associated with the Pandya kingdom of Madurai in South India, describe Shiva’s earthly interventions, often disguised, to aid his devotees. The murals, arranged as sequential pictorial panels along the inner and outer walls of the temple’s circumambulatory path, invite devotees on a visual pilgrimage that parallels ritual circulation around the sanctum.
The mural scenes are bordered by vertical decorative dividers, creating a rhythmic progression through the narratives. This spatial organization mirrors the continuous textual flow of the Thiruvilayadal Puranam, aligning the temple’s visual storytelling with broader South Asian traditions where image, text, and ritual converge.
Artistically, the figures are rendered in a stylized manner featuring profiled faces, elongated eyes, and sharply defined features. The compositions adopt a flat two-dimensional approach with bold use of deep crimson backgrounds, and intricate depictions of drapery and jewelry. Above each pictorial frame, Tamil inscriptions provide descriptions of the narratives below.
Scholars note that the murals reflect the visual style of 17th and 18th century Nayaka period painting from Tamil Nadu, which spanned Shaiva, Vaishnava, and Jain religious traditions. The Nayaka dynasty’s artistic legacy continued the traditions of the Vijayanagara empire while incorporating regional adaptations in Madurai and Thanjavur. In Sri Lanka, parallel Buddhist mural traditions developed during Nayaka influence in Kandy, highlighting shared visual vocabularies across religious and geographic boundaries.
The surviving murals, though partially damaged with significant sections lost due to lack of maintenance, remain a valuable record of Shaivite devotional art. Their partial deterioration emphasizes the need for conservation efforts to preserve what is left of this rare cycle of temple murals. The forthcoming exhibition aims to bring attention to this overlooked cultural heritage and deepen understanding of the interconnected artistic histories across South Asia.
Research for the exhibition has been supported by Ismeth Raheem. The article’s author is a visual artist and professor of Art History at the University of Jaffna.