The most interesting calendar Madras Musings received this year was one from TNQ Books & Journals (www.tnq.co.in), a publisher of scientific books. The calendar is based on the work by M.V. Bhaskar and his team who are working on a project to restore the murals in a temple in Chengam, Tamil Nadu. The introduction to the calendar narrates the story of the project it is working on: Reconstructing the Ramayana.

l Each month of this 2014 calendar depicts a scene from the Indian epic Ramayana, as painted on the ceiling of the forecourt of the temple at Chengam, a small historic town that is midway between Chennai and Bengaluru.

The images presented are from the Yuddha Kandam – the Book of War – of the Ramayana. This part of the epic is painted on the central square of the ceiling and it constitutes the only part of the 17th Century murals that survives. The other sections of the Ramayana, painted on the ceiling of the aisles of the forecourt, are lost.

The surviving part of the painted narrative begins with the warrior prince Rama, his brother Lakshmana, and their army of monkeys crossing the ocean to Lanka where they receive assistance from Vibhishana in defeating his elder brother, the ten-headed demon Ravana, who has kidnapped and taken Rama’s wife Sita hostage. The story concludes with Rama’s ascent to the throne of Ayodhya, the kingdom from which he has been exiled.

In the three-part folio of each month, the main image is of the original but substantially damaged mural. The transluscent overlay is a line drawing that includes the missing parts. An inset on the facing page shows the same drawing in flat colour, as was characteristic of these murals.

The reconstruction effort is a collaboration between the illustrators at TNQ and a traditional painter who is well-versed in the Ramayana narrative. His medium is cloth and he uses a centuries-old resist-dye technique called kalamkari.

The digitisation process started with photographing every section of the mural using an
80-megapixel field camera. The images were then traced both on paper and on a computer using a touchpad and stylus. Both outputs were combined to create the master drawings.

These images represent a part of a three-year project to digitally restore these mural paintings in their entirety.

The progress of the project can be tracked at www.chengammurals.org

Lakshmana and Hanuman look at Rama with shock, as his reunion with Sita turns into a confrontation. Rama doubts Sita's fidelity and refuses to accept her.
In response, Sita proposes to 'bathe in fire' – if she is 'pure', the fire god will spare her.