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The Great Chola Temples: Thanjavur, Gangaikondacholapuram and Darasuram
On 22nd April 1010, the 25th regnal year of the Chola king Arunmolivarman—better known by his title Rajaraja, ‘the King of Kings’—installed a gold-plated pot-finial on the summit of a monumental new temple in the city of Thanjavur, consecrating one of the grandest temples ever built in India. By Rajaraja’s reign (985–1014), the Chola kings had come to be the rulers of one of the foremost of India’s temple-building polities from their power-base in the Kaveri delta region of central Tamilnadu. The period from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries in southern India is regarded as one of the most creative and formative periods of Tamil culture, inspiring some of the finest literary and artistic achievements. Over the height of the Chola dynasty’s power in southern India, at least 300 stone temples were built, among which the great temples at Thanjavur, Gangaikondacholapuram and Darasuram are often considered their finest artistic achievements for the monumentality of conception, architectural grandeur, powerful sculpture and fine painting.
Thanjavur lies at the head of the Kaveri delta from where various tributaries provide the low-lying lands of central Tamilnadu with a near constant supply of water that has enabled intensive rice agriculture and supported a dense population for over a thousand years. The city became a Chola settlement from c. 850, but was a major political centre only from Rajaraja’s reign with the foundation of this monumental new temple and surrounding royal centre. This coincided with the height of the Chola Empire, with expansionist conquests under Rajaraja and his son and successor Rajendra (1014–44) to the whole of south India and overseas to northern Sri Lanka, the Maldives and even Sumatra.
Temples have been built in stone in the Tamil region since the sixth-seventh centuries, both rock-cut monuments excavated from the living rock and structural ones. The earliest monuments are to be found both to the north and the south of the Kaveri region: the temples at the Pallava capital of Kanchipuram and their coastal port of Mamallapuram, and the monuments in the southern Pandyan region around Madurai and Pudukkottai. Temples in both brick and stone had been built in the central Kaveri region dominated by the Cholas since at least the ninth century. Though beautifully sculpted and elegantly proportioned, most were on quite a modest scale. A number were located on the numerous sacred sites celebrated by the Shaiva nayanmar and the Vaishnava alvars, the wandering poet-saints who sang their praises of Shiva and Vishnu in localised forms in passionate, poetic devotion song in the Tamil vernacular. In terms of its scale and grandeur, the temple founded by Rajaraja in Thanjavur marked a major change in the conception of the Hindu temple in south India. Its explicitly royal character also established a model followed by the great Chola temples at Gangaikondacholapuram and Darasuram.
The Rajarajeshvara temple is set within a large rectangular enclosure, measuring 241 by 121m, nearly a perfectly proportioned double square. Entered through two monumental pyramidal gateways (gopuras) this huge enclosure is aligned on an east-west axis. The 18-degree deviation south from exact east may be explained by the careful alignment of the temple with the rising sun on the day of the temple’s foundation. At the exact centre of the rear square of the enclosure is placed the monumental tower or vimana that rises above the main shrine containing the massive linga of Shiva in his form as Rajarajeshvara, ‘the Lord of Rajaraja’. The vimana is slightly under 60 metres in height, almost exactly half the courtyard’s width, further demonstrating the precision with which this temple was built.
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