The Colas c25.8

c25.8

About Tañjāvūr, the original capital of Vijayālaya and his successors, we learn more from the inscriptions of the period than about any other city. The Big Temple, the most remarkable monument of Rājarāja’s reign, was nearing completion about A.D. 1010; it is not possible to decide how long before that date its construction was begun. Though the king’s order for engraving on the walls of the temple his gifts to it and those from others was issued early in his twenty-sixth year, A.D. 1011, it seems hardly likely that the work of actual engraving started till nearly three years later.⁸ Besides a number of royal palaces inside the city and in its vicinity, and the residence of palace-servants divided into a number of *vēḷams*,⁹ we find the names of a large number of streets and quarters of the city mentioned in the records. The big street of Vīraśōḷa, the big bazaar of Tribhuvana-mahādēviyār, are mentioned in inscriptions of an earlier date than the reign of Rājarāja.¹⁰ In that reign a distinction comes up between the inner (*uḷḷālai*) and the outer (*puṟambaḍi*) city, and it seems possible that the *Puṟambaḍi* was of the nature of an extension, a new city, planned and for the most part built in the reign of Rājarāja himself, though the big bazaar named above had been in existence for some time already.¹¹ It is perhaps noteworthy that among the new streets constituted in Rājarāja's reign were two running east to west, perhaps in front of the big temple, and known as the Northern and Southern Taḷiccēris, both of them given over entirely to the occupation of four hundred hetaerae who were impressed into the service of the big temple from the various other temples of the kingdom, and whose names are preserved to us with the door numbers of the houses occupied by them.¹² We also learn incidentally of other temples in the city called the Jayabhīma temple and the temple of Tañjai-māmaṇi. And there was a hospital attached to a Viṣṇu temple called after Rājarāja's father Sun-dara-cōḻaviṇṇagarātula-śālai and endowed by his sister Kun-davai.¹³ Altogether the impression we get is that of a rich, well-provided and progressive city whose life was doubtless dominated by the temple and the court.