Brihadeeswarar

Brihadeeswarar

A granite statement from the years around 1000 CE

The Brihadisvara temple at Thanjavur - Brihadeeswarar, Brihadisvara - was built under Rajaraja I, and it is the largest and most consequential surviving monument of the early Chola state. Its construction is one of the few things in the Chola period that is unusually well documented: Rajaraja's own inscriptions at the site record the foundation, the assembly of the granite, the provision of gold and silver and of dancers and musicians, and the endowment of the cult. Those inscriptions, rather than a summary in a gazetteer, are the authority for everything below.

The temple is a granite rekha-prasada - a curvilinear tower over a rectangular plan - and what strikes a visitor is the scale relative to the material. It rises roughly 66 metres, and the sanctum alone is said to hold well over two hundred thousand cubic metres of cut stone; the temple is hollow, and the technology of that hollow vault was itself an achievement. The tower is in the Dravidian prakara form with a projecting subsidiary shrine housing the lingam, and the whole sits inside two concentric enclosure walls.

Two features make it a Chola statement rather than only a large temple. The bas-relief frieze of the tala panels around the plinth shows the Nataraja dance with the ashtamatrika and attendant figures, and it is generally described as the earliest such large-scale Nataraja frieze in the Dravidian south. The Chola frescoes in the circumambulatory passage, largely of Shiva and of the Nayars, are the best-known mural survivals of the period. It is worth saying that the dance carved on the base is evidence in a form that cannot be reduced to an illustration of a text - the texts are what let one recognise it as Nataraja.

Sources and what is still unverified

A guardian should check: the exact construction window and how it is computed from the inscriptions, which is why this entry says "around 1003-1010" rather than a single year; the number and identification of the Nataraja panels, which varies between accounts and which this entry has not fixed; the condition of the murals, since the sanctuary has needed conservation and the frescoes have been affected; and whether the corpus holds separate entries for the Amman shrine and for Subrahmanya, both of which stand within this complex and are distinct deities with their own traditions.