While much in the gesture-language of India is still obscure, it seems to be clear enough that the so-called poses of Indian art include gestures as well as poses of the hands and that the conventionalised forms of both were based on a widely used, well understood and somewhat elaborate gesture-language.
Prentice Pillars. Architect and his Pupils.
(Folk-Lore, vol. xxix. p. 219.)
The following is a story current in the south of the Cochin State, Malabar. Near the Station of Alwaye on the Periar, there is a small village named Uliyannur. Long long ago there lived a master builder of the name Uliyannur Perumthachan. Many of his works are still extant to-day. One of them is the village temple at Uliyannur. The roof is so arranged over a flight of stairs that if you bend to avoid the low roof you are sure to hit your head on the rafters. But if you walk straight up you are unhurt.
Once they wanted him to build a tank, but each one wanted the bathing ghat to face a different direction. Finally, when he built it anyone used to lose his sense of direction the moment he got inside it. This tank was destroyed some years ago when the railway was built.
He is even reputed to have changed the course of a stream.
Once he built a bridge and set a doll at the head of it with the mechanism so arranged that it spat water at the face of anyone who set foot on the bridge. After a time his son himself—a gifted worker—came along and saw it. He built another doll and set it near the first. As soon as the father’s doll spat water, the son’s would give a slap on its face. When the father saw that the next day, he marvelled at it but thought, “If I let this boy of mine to grow up he will be greater than myself.” He was engaged in building the roof of a house. He sent the boy down to fetch a tool. When he was bending to take the tool he let fall a chisel on him and thus killed him.
