A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c21.75

c21.75

The Cholas were the inheritors and continuers of the Pallava traditions in temple construction. They built numberless stone temples throughout their kingdom, but to the end of the tenth century the buildings were not very large. Unlike the great imperial designs of the early eleventh century, they imply limited resources and local developments. The district of Pudukkōṭṭai contains an unusually large number of early Chola monuments, in a good state of preservation, which give a very good idea of the stages by which later Pallava architecture grew into the Chola style proper. Among them, the Vijayālaya-Chōlēśvara at Nārttāmalai has the first claim on our attention. This temple was most likely built in the time of Vijayālaya, the first Chola ruler of the period. It faces west, and is one of the finest examples of the early Chola style. It has the unusual arrangement of a circular cella within a square *prākāra*. Above the cella and *prākāra* rises the *vimāna* in four diminishing storeys of which the three lower ones are square and the uppermost circular, the whole surmounted by a dome-shaped *śikhara* with a round *kalaśa* on top. There is an enclosed *maṇḍapa* in front. The external walls are adorned with ornamental pilasters with characteristic features of the Chola ‘order’. There are no niches in the walls and a frieze of *bhūtas* is carved below the curved cornice at the top, the cornice itself being decorated at intervals with *kūḍus* containing human heads or animal figures, while at the corner the decoration takes the form of very pleasing scroll work. Above the cornice is another frieze of lions (*vyālas*), changing at the corners into the form of a *makara* head. The parapet over the ceiling carries miniature shrines (*pañjarams*), which are square in plan at the corners and rectangular elsewhere. The *pañjarams* are also repeated in the lower storeys of the *vimāna*. The pillars in the *maṇḍapa* in front are still of the Pallava style, square at the base and top and octagonal in the middle. The corbels carrying the roll ornamentation have a slightly raised, plain, medium band. Over the main entrance is an elegantly carved floral design, and on either side of it are two *dvārapālas* inside niches 5 feet high facing forwards, but with their bodies half-turned towards the entrance, one leg crossed over the other. They have only two arms, as in Pallava monuments. Round the main temple in an open yard are seven small sub-shrines, all facing inwards, all built of stone and resembling the main temple in essential features. This arrangement of seven or eight sub-shrines round the main temple was typical of the early Chola period. The Bālasubrahmanya temple of Kaṇṇanūr (Pudukkoṭṭai), built in the reign of Āditya I, is another temple in the same style in which, however, elephants take the place of nandis at the four corners of the roof of the shrines and below the śikhara in the vimāna, the elephant being the vehicle of Subrahmanya.