The Temple as an Economic Institution

Chola religious policy is legible because the Cholas wrote it on the walls. The great temples at Thanjavur, Gangaikonda Cholapuram and Darasuram were endowed with villages whose revenue was assigned to specific purposes, and the inscriptions record the assignments in detail: so much paddy for the daily offerings, so much gold for lamps, named individuals with named duties and their rates of maintenance.

Richard Salomon's handbook on Indian epigraphy treats this South Indian material as among the most informative documentary evidence surviving from medieval Asia. What it reveals is that a large temple was a landholder, an employer, a bank that received deposits and made loans, and a redistributor of agricultural produce, at the same time as being a place of worship. Those functions are not separable, because the worship was what justified the endowment and the endowment was what made the worship continuous. A daily rite performed for centuries requires an income stream, and the Chola inscriptions are the record of how one was constructed. Historians disagree about what this implies for the nature of the Chola state, and the atlas records the temple economy as attested and its political meaning as an open argument among specialists.