The Colas c33.38

c33.38

In the long period of Cōḷa rule the Hindu temple attained the zenith of its influence on the social life of the country. It ceased to be a small structure of brick and mortar providing a centre of simple worship attended by the villagers. The new idea of the stone temple found room for the employment of much skill and taste in its planning and decoration. With its rise, there came up also a varied and complex routine in each temple sustained by the rich accumulations in land and gold, the result of pious gifts, offered with a generosity and administered with a care to which we have long become strangers. Each generation husbanded with caution what was handed down to it, and by means of fresh additions, managed to leave a richer heritage to its successor. The vast and growing wealth of the temples brought them into more and more intimate business relations with the neighbourhood. And in Tanjore, there rose under Rājarāja's eye, as under a magician's wand, the marvellous Great Temple which surpassed everything effected elsewhere by generations of effort. Not only did its stately plan ensure for it an abiding place as the masterpiece of South Indian Temple architecture, but the elaborate arrangements made for the management of the affairs of the temple and carefully recorded in the inscriptions on its walls, summed up the best practices of the time in this regard and set a model for the future. A deliberate desire to bring the temple into intimate touch with several aspects of the life of the people marks almost every one of these arrangements. As the Great Temple adorned the capital city of the whole empire, and as it was the foundation of the greatest monarch of Southern India, the range of its contacts was naturally much wider than that of an average temple; but almost every temple, however small in size and restricted in influence, was a miniature of the Great Temple and had its counterpart of every feature of the larger institution.