Gangaikondacholapuram Brihadeeshwarar

Gangaikondacholapuram — the second great Chola temple

Bṛhadīśvara at the mouth of the Kaveri

The temple at Gangaikonda Cholapuram, in Ariyalur district of Tamil Nadu, is the second of the three great Chola temples and the one whose name records an empire. Gangaikonda Cholapuram means "the city of the Ganges", taken from Rajendra Chola I's northern campaign, whose epigraphs date to the first quarter of the eleventh century CE. The temple's foundation inscription gives 1035 CE; construction almost certainly ran over a longer span, and the precise chronology of the earlier phases should be read from the inscriptions rather than compressed into a single date.

Its central deity is Shiva as Bṛhadīśvara, in the lingodbhava form — a lingam with a face on the right side. Beside him, in the northern enclosure, is Chandeśvarī (also called Munneśvarī), whose shrine makes the temple a Paadal Petra Sthālam: one of the Tamil Saiva temples whose praises were sung by the Nāyanārs and preserved in the Tēvāram hymn cycle. The number of Paadal Petra Sthālams is usually given as 275, though lists differ. When you read that the hymns were composed between roughly the seventh and ninth centuries and that the building dates from the eleventh, you are reading about singers who were dead long before the stone was cut — which is the whole point of the institution.

What the temple is like

The complex follows the axial plan established at Thanjavur in the earlier eleventh century, and the resemblance is deliberate dynastic self-representation: a roughly rectangular peristyle, two enclosing courts (prakāram and antaram), a taller central shrine, and galleries on the longer sides. The scale is a little under Thanjavur's, which makes comparison easy and misleading at the same time — the Cholas knew exactly what they were quoting.

The sculptural programme is unusually coherent. Nude figures (nudeśvarīs) appear on the sub-shafts, unusual for a temple of this class and date. The narrative panels are drawn from the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa, and the Chola claim on the Kaveri's waters is worked into the site rather than left to text: the temple stands on the north bank of the river, and its scale made visible, from the causeway, the Cholas' command of the water.

The temple is under the care of the Arulmigu Kailasanathar Devasthanam at Thanjavur, and it is one of the three temples inscribed by UNESCO as the Great Living Chola Temples, together with Brihadeeswarar at Thanjavur and Airavatesvara at Darasuram.

Sources and what is still unverified

The inscriptional record, the Tēvāram corpus, the UNESCO nomination dossier, Sadasiva Pandarathar's catalogue of temple relics, and Nilakanta Sastri's history were consulted in outline for this entry.

A named guardian should check: the exact division of work between the eleventh-century inscriptions; which Tēvāram hymns are assigned to this temple and to which poet (the allocation differs between published lists); the dating of the northern enclosure; and the current ritual calendar, including the Mahāśivaratri and month-long Kōṭṭai festival, which is a living Chola-era institution rather than a historical relic.