Brihadishvara Temple

The vimana over the sanctum at Thanjavur rises about sixty metres in thirteen diminishing storeys and is built dry, with the blocks held by their own weight and their fit. It was completed around 1010 under Rajaraja the First, and for its period nothing in South Asia approached it. Stella Kramrisch's study of the Hindu temple explains why the height is a religious statement rather than a display of engineering: the tower stands over the garbhagriha, the small dark womb chamber that holds the linga, so the largest and most visible element of the building marks the smallest and least accessible one. The plan works inward and downward while the elevation works upward, and a worshipper moving through it goes from open light into an enclosed dark. The scale of the sanctum matches the tower.

The linga is very large, the Nandi facing it is cut from a single block, and the ambulatory around the sanctum carries painted walls, some of them Chola work later covered by Nayaka painting and recovered in the twentieth century. The temple has never gone out of use. It is a working place of worship with a daily routine of offerings as well as a monument under conservation, and the two functions have to be managed together on the same ground, which is the ordinary condition of the great living temples of the south and a constant source of practical difficulty at all of them.

The most valuable thing at Thanjavur may not be the architecture. The base of the temple carries an extraordinary quantity of inscription, and it is administrative rather than devotional. The texts record who endowed what, which villages were assigned to pay for which service, how much grain and gold went where, and the names and duties of the people attached to the temple: dancers, singers, drummers, accountants, watchmen, garland makers, lamp lighters, potters and washermen.

Richard Salomon's handbook on Indian epigraphy treats South Indian temple inscriptions of this kind as one of the richest documentary sources for the medieval subcontinent, because they were cut into a building that was never demolished and they describe ordinary economic arrangements that no literary text bothers to mention. What they show at Thanjavur is a temple functioning as a landholder, an employer and a redistributor of agricultural surplus on a large scale. That has consequences for how the Chola state should be understood, and historians have argued at length about whether such temples were instruments of royal power, autonomous corporations, or something between the two. The atlas records the inscriptions as attested and the interpretation of the temple economy as an open scholarly question, since the same texts support more than one reading.