Journey
Pallava and Chola — the Tamil temple
The southern temple is worked out over five centuries by two dynasties: the Pallavas cut it from rock and then learned to build it in stone, and the Cholas took that vocabulary and pushed it to imperial scale, adding the endowment and the administration that made a temple an institution rather than a building.
Stops (7)
- Badami · Badami — the Chalukya experiment next door
Rock-cut halls of the sixth century in a Deccan sandstone gorge, where the Western Chalukyas were cutting caves in the same decades the Pallavas were, and where Vaishnava, Śaiva and Jain excavations sit in one cliff. Pallava and Chalukya fought for two centuries and copied each other's masons throughout.
- Mahabalipuram · Mahābalipuram — from cut to built
The whole transition in one place: the rathas cut as monoliths from granite outcrops, the cave mandapas, the enormous Descent of the Ganges relief, and then the Shore Temple actually constructed from dressed blocks. Seventh-century Pallava masons solving the problem of how to assemble what they had been carving.
- Kānchī / Kānchīpuram / Kanchipuram · Kānchī — the built temple arrives
Rājasimha's Kailāsanātha of about 700 is the first large structural temple in the Tamil country, with a pyramidal vimāna, a surrounding cloister of small shrines and original Pallava paintings surviving inside some of them. Every Chola temple afterwards works from this plan.
- Thanjavur Brihadishvara · Thanjavur — Rājarāja's Brihadīshvara, 1010
A vimāna sixty-six metres high built without mortar, with an eighty-tonne capstone on top and granite brought from quarries kilometres away in a district that has none. Its walls carry the most detailed set of temple accounts anywhere: names of dancers, musicians, accountants and their allotted shares of land.
- Gangaikondacholapuram · Gangaikondacholapuram — the son answers the father
Rājendra's capital, built to mark his expedition to the Ganges, with a vimāna deliberately slightly lower than Thanjavur's and a more curved profile. The city was abandoned after the dynasty fell and the temple stands alone in fields, which is the difference between the two sites now.
- Darasuram Airavatesvara · Darasuram — the late Chola in miniature
Rājarāja II's Airāvateśvara, smaller and far more elaborate, with a front mandapa shaped as a chariot with stone wheels and miniature friezes running the base. The imperial scale has gone and the carving has taken over, which is what happens to the style in its last century.
- Uttaramerur · Uttaramerur — how the villages were run
Chola inscriptions on a temple wall setting out the qualifications for village committee membership, the disqualifications for defaulters and their relatives, the drawing of names from a pot by a boy, and fixed one-year terms. The empire's administration is on the walls because that is where a village kept its records.