Women like you: The Sigiriya rock paintings

"Ladies like you / Make men pour out their hearts. / You also have thrilled the body / Making its hair / Stiffen with desire.”

Sigiriya. Lion Rock. – There it sits in a corner of my memory, surprising, monumental, monstrous, enigmatic, its curvy garlanded women, those excited voices inscribed on stone, its lion’s claws and gaping lion’s mouth – all calling for my attention.

So here I return, now several months and a half a world away, to that rock and those women ….

Imagine a 150-metre high rock – a 50-storey building – rising suddenly and solitary from a vast green plain. The rock’s westerly face is covered in 500 frescoes of bare-breasted women, each festooned in flowers and jewels. On a nearby polished “mirror wall,” visitors are writing couplets and quatrains, graffiti-style, describing their responses on seeing the women. The remains of a palace rest on the summit, once accessible by walking from a terrace halfway up the rock through mammoth, stone-cut lion’s paws, then through the lion’s gaping mouth. Formal gardens, pools and fountains stretch from the rock’s base. In the far distance, earthen ramparts and a moat surround the whole complex.

Sigiriya – in north-central Sri Lanka, the buildings and gardens from the 5^th century, the paintings from the same era or at least a century later, the graffiti added later still – is easily enough described in broad outline. But step beyond its most obvious characteristics and you enter a fog thicker than that swirling around Adam’s Peak in the mountains to the south.

Are these the ruins of a palace or a fortress – or both? Was the complex once a monastery or a king’s fortress refuge – or both? Was the king a patricidal megalomaniac or a pleasure-loving aesthete – or both?

And the women in the paintings (about 20 remain)?  They rise from painted clouds, full-breasted, shoulders soft and sloping, bodies splendidly adorned in flowery and bejewelled tiaras, coronets, bracelets and necklaces, their long delicate fingers holding lotus flowers and other blossoms, the line from coronet to hips suggesting that sensual S-curve of the female body found in sculpture, paintings and dance across south and east Asia.

Are these women a king’s courtesans? The work of court painters ordered to decorate the rock with beautiful maidens? Buddhist goddesses? Representations of the goddess Tara, or of Cloud and Lightning goddesses, or more lowly apsaras?

There are hardly two people who agree on any of this. Nor has the thin historical record helped, based as it is on chronicles, legends, hearsay and limited archaeological research, all of which has fed an array of speculative and conflicting claims.

On our visit, we arrived by foot amongst rows of parked vans and buses and hundreds of other visitors. The site attracts tens of thousands of visitors each year, mainly for the spectacular summit vistas and to see the women.

Our route takes us across the moat and ramparts, through the “pleasure gardens” with their formal patterns, fountains, and water hydraulic system (ingenious for the 5^thC we read); along winding pathways at the foot of the rock, among boulder-strewn gardens, terraces, cisterns and pools, stone archways and a five-metre-long granite throne, all constructed from fallen boulders; then further up a modern iron staircase to the painting gallery and graffiti mirror wall; then higher still to the mid-level terrace, past the enormous sharp claws on the lion’s paws, past the ruins of the lion’s mouth, up and further up another iron staircase (the original steps were small carved hollows in the sheer wall) until we are at the ellipsis-shaped summit among the foundation ruins of tiered palaces and deep pools. Far beneath us spreads a dark green plain and glistening, meandering rivers, serpentine, serpents.

(A photograph of Sigiriya taken from the far west and at an elevation somewhat higher than the summit gives the rock and its westerly-flowing gardens the uncanny appearance of a colossal throne. Although the view seems one that would have been difficult for the builders of the 5thC palace-fortress to have experienced, other pre-modern peoples have imagined geographical shapes and relationships with surprising accuracy from an aerial perspective.)

It is here on the summit where we have our picnic lunch – or attempt to, if it weren’t for the monkeys that inch ever closer, lunges in their eyes, chattering every-monkey-for-itself chatter. It is only some barking hound from who knows where, 50 storeys up, who keeps them at a slight distance. A smart hound, this, for it is she who gets to gobble up our thank-you scraps and, inexplicably, is already waiting for us a thousand steps below at the lion’s claws.

But what about the star attractions of Sigiriya: the women in the frescoes?

Some people think that around the 10thC Sigiriya’s western face was covered in 500 similar images. Today only some 20 remain. The close-up view of the paintings used here would have been that of the painters, but it might not have been that of 10thC viewers. Some scholars argue that most people would have viewed the women from some distance, seeing them as representational figures in standard poses. This too is disputed.

The women’s upper bodies – they appear to emerge from cloud images at their hips and waists – are  naked except for their elaborate and colourful necklaces, bracelets, head ornaments and the flowers they hold. Each women is represented by certain common features (the S-curve of the body, the head’s downward tilt, the overall facial expression, the decorative/symbolic elements), and yet several also have subtly unique facial and bodily characteristics.

Most attractive for me are the women’s soft-sloping shoulders, the forward thrust of their pelvis and hips, the naturalistic folds of skin along the belly, the forward tilt of their necks and heads, their long arms and fingers, and the exquisitely gentle, loving, even sensual way those hands – long palms, curved fingers – hold lotus blossoms and other flowers. Looking at those fingers touching – caressing? – the blossoms, I feel such pleasurable tenderness. Surely we’re seeing here a centre of the painter’s personal felt-interest and energy.

The line of the women’s arms, wrists, palms and fingers suggest the sensual S-curves formed by the line through each woman’s tiara, head, neck, chest, waist and hips. This same bodily S-curve or tribhanga pose, emphasizing hips and breasts, is found in ancient representations of women across Hindu and often Buddhist -influenced Asia.

Curiously, most of the women’s breasts seem attached to (not a natural element of) their bodies. It is as the painters had sculptural models in mind, not live models, or in depicting life-giving goddesses, they were treating breasts as a symbol of fertility and sustenance. The breasts are also exaggerated relative to the overall body size, and they exaggerate in turn the slightness of the women’s waists with their natural rolls of flesh. A partial exception is a woman painted in profile whose breasts have natural weight and downward pull. We won’t know if there were other women like this, more naturalistic, among the five-hundred.

The women’s eyes are sometimes bright and outward-looking, but more often slightly downward cast, languid, and always noticeably long. Their lips are often curved into indecipherable – content, waiting, patient, whimsical, comforting? – smiles. One modern-day viewer describes the ‘look’ as both open and introvert at the same time, and I can see why. There’s something of I-am-ready-to-be-whatever-you-expect in that look.

I was told by a guide at the gallery that each figure represented a woman from Sri Lanka and other parts of the world: Africa, the far east, Persia. Although it is not a claim I have found anywhere else, it is true that at least one woman has distinctly African facial features.

(Having said all this, I read that centuries of wear on the paint and elements of the painters’ techniques can result in distortions in visual detail and thus in modern-day responses, especially regarding the women’s faces.)

Why were these paintings done in the first place? And what really existed at Sigiriya in ancient times? Contending theories, most of them strongly speculative, abound.

One approach sees the 5^thC palace-fortress complex as the brainchild of King Kassapa and his court. According to the Mahavamsa chronicle, written years after the events it describes and sketchy at best, Kassapa entombed his father-king alive then, fearing retribution by his brother, fled to Sigiriya where he build a fortress-palace. (Kassapa’s brother eventually killed him, or he killed himself, depending on how you read the page leaves.)

Kassapa himself has been given many identities. In one version he is not a patricide at all, but rather a misunderstood or misremembered aesthete, the pleasure palace, gardens and paintings his secular “homage to beauty.” In another he is a devout leader, a patron of the local monastery, who had the paintings done for religious purposes (or: to glorify his own image). Or he built the complex to honour his father. Or he is a king-murdering, narcissistic, paranoid megalomaniac (remember the lion’s claws and mouth?) who led repeated wars against his neighbours and indulged in profligate ‘beautification’ projects.

Quite another approach is to see Sigiriya as a Buddhist monastery. Indeed its rock shelters and caves functioned like this before Kassapa’s time and the site became a monastery again a century (or five centuries) later. In this view, the paintings are done after Kassapa’s tenancy, the women represent various religious figures and the rock becomes a place of pilgrimage.

So who are these women? Courtesans of the royal court and bed chambers? Queens and princesses on their way to worship Buddhist gods? Beautiful, decorative objects, like the gardens and fountains? Heavenly beings (those clouds) of various kinds: your standard apsaras waiting on the gods; Lighting and Cloud goddesses, created to glorify Kassapa; the Mahayana Buddhist goddess Tara, a favoured goddess found across south and east Asia, a splendidly-adorned female Buddha associated with compassion, enlightenment, power and prosperity? 

Welcome to the fog of understanding hanging over Sigiriya.

For most of us, though, maybe it needn’t matter what the women are supposed to represent; maybe what matters is how we experience them in themselves. This is the approach taken by the graffiti writers – some 1,500 of them: kings and queens, monks, a guard, a smithy and other travellers – who began visiting the paintings a century and more after they were completed. Their comments are of great interest to those studying the Sinhalese language and script, but they also give us a good sense of what people of the time understood these paintings to be about in terms of their own experience.

On one essential point – and in stark contrast to a major line of modern-day theorizing on the paintings – many of the graffitists agree. Whereas the visitors appear to have arrived with an understanding that the goddess-women are supposed to elevate them into a ‘heavenly’ state of physical disinterestedness, detachment, contemplation and piety, unencumbered by physical desire, their own experience of the women has the exact opposite effect.

As one person writes: “Ladies like you / Make men pour out their hearts / And you also have thrilled the body / Making its hair / Stiffen with desire.”

And a second: “By means of the splendour of the mountain side, I saw their manner in which nymphs stood in heaven. My hand jumped up with the desire of grasping their girdle in dalliance.”

Or: “The girl with golden skin entices the mind and eyes. / Her lovely breasts cause me to recall swans drunk with nectar.”

 And: “Who is not happy when he sees / Those rosy palms, rounded shoulders / Gold necklaces, copper-hued lips / And long long eyes.”

A woman, too, sees attractive rivals in the paintings: “A deer-eyed young woman of the mountainside arouses anger in my mind. In her hand she holds a string of pearls and in her looks she assumes rivalry with me.”

The heavens don’t stand a chance, as at least one visitor makes clear,: “The ladies who wear golden chains on their breasts beckon me. As I have seen the resplendent ladies, heaven appears to me as not so good.”

The women as objects of contemplation, detachment, piety – as some scholars argue? Hardly. These are embodied, sexual responses, the responses of longing, attraction and expectant fantasy. Whatever the painters’ patrons thought they were asking to be depicted on Sigiriya’s walls, what they got “thrilled the body” and made heaven “not so good.”

Today, writing on Sigiriya’s walls is forbidden, which is too bad because surely visitors still have things they’d like to say, and some arrangement could be made for the old wall’s protection.

But there it is: keep your experiences to yourself.

No everyone is so compliant though. Here is Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje’s Sigiriya poem “Women Like You.” 

Women Like You
(the communal poem – Sigiri graffiti, 5^th century)

They do not stir

these ladies of the mountain

do not give us

the twitch of eyelids.

            The king is dead.

They answer no one

take the hard

rock as lover

Women like you

make men pour out their hearts

            ‘Seeing you I want

            no other life’

            ‘The golden skins have

            caught my mind’

who came here

out of the bleached land

climbed this fortress

to adore this rock

and with the solitude of the air

behind them

            carved an alphabet

whose motive was perfect desire

wanting these portraits of women

to speak

to caress.

Hundreds of small verses

by different hands

became one

habit of the unrequited.

Seeing you
I want no other life
and turn around
to the sky
and everywhere below
jungle, waves of heat
secular love

Holding the new flowers
a circle of
first finger and thumb
which is a window
to your breast

pleasure of the skin
earring     earring

curl
of the belly
         and then
stone mermaid
stone heart
dry as a flower
on rock
you long eyed women

the golden
drunk swan of breasts
lips
the long long eyes

we stand against the sky
I bring you
a flute
from the throat
of a loon
so talk to me
of a used heart