For three winters I sat under the Lepakshi mahamandapa with a notebook and a damp cloth, watching the conservation team argue. The ceiling above us — a single sheet of granite laid over with river clay, red ochre, lime and molasses — was flaking at its seams. Someone wanted to inpaint. Someone else wanted to leave it. The argument ran the length of every afternoon, and the ceiling kept flaking.
The case for sitting still
The mural's power is its flatness. Long-eyed deities move in procession across compartmentalised registers, outlined in fine black, filled with the same four colours the painters mixed in 1530. Retouch one panel and the whole procession lurches. I came to agree with the team that lost: you do not finish a sixteenth-century sentence with a twenty-first-century verb.