Gangaikonda Cholapuram: The Temple of a Capital That Vanished

The name of the place records a specific military undertaking, and it is one of the more remarkable in Indian history.

What Rajendra Chola I did:

• Around 1019 to 1024 CE he sent an army north from the Tamil country
• It marched up the eastern side of the subcontinent, through the Kalinga country and into Bengal
• It defeated the Pala ruler Mahipala
• It reached the Ganga
• Water from the Ganga was carried back to the Chola country

What he did with the water:

• He founded a new capital and named it Gangaikonda Cholapuram, the city of the Chola who took the Ganga
• He took the title Gangaikonda Chola
• He had an enormous tank excavated, the Chola Gangam, and the Ganga water was poured into it
• Inscriptions describe the tank as a liquid pillar of victory

Why the water and not territory. This is the interesting part. Rajendra did not annex Bengal and did not attempt to.

• The campaign was a demonstration, not a conquest for occupation
• What was brought back was symbolic, and deliberately so
• Bringing the Ganga to the south makes a claim that no amount of territory would. It says the sacred geography of India can be relocated by a Chola
• A tank of Ganga water at a southern capital lets everyone who bathes in it do so without going north

The naval campaigns. Rajendra also sent naval expeditions across the Bay of Bengal against Srivijaya, the maritime power based in Sumatra and the Malay peninsula, in the 1020s.

That is genuinely unusual. Indian states very rarely projected military power overseas, and a south Indian fleet attacking ports in Southeast Asia is one of the few clear instances.

The Chola connection with Southeast Asia went well beyond raiding, and included trade, temple endowments and the movement of merchant guilds, and the influence is visible in the architecture and iconography of the region.

Comparing this temple with Thanjavur is the standard approach and it is genuinely illuminating.

The vimana:

• Thanjavur's rises to around sixty six metres. This one to around fifty five
• Thanjavur's profile is straight sided and severe. This one curves, with a concave sweep
• The two are frequently described as the masculine and the feminine of Chola architecture, which is a conventional formulation but does capture the difference in feel
• Rajendra building lower than his father was almost certainly deliberate

The sculpture:

• Widely held to be finer than Thanjavur's, with the wall niches carrying panels of considerable quality
• The Chandesa Anugraha panel is the famous one. Shiva garlands Chandesa, the devotee who cut off his own father's leg when the father kicked over his offering, and a figure understood as Rajendra appears in the composition
• The Sarasvati, Ganga and Durga panels are among the best of the period
• The great Nandi, formed in stucco over a core

The lion well:

• The simha kinaru is a well with a lion carved at the top, through which one descends
• Tradition connects it with the Ganga water brought from the north

What the differences mean. Read together, Thanjavur and Gangaikonda are the work of a father and a son with different problems.

Rajaraja at Thanjavur had to announce that the Cholas had arrived, and he built the largest thing anyone had seen.

Rajendra did not need to. He had already marched to the Ganga and sent a fleet to Sumatra. He built something slightly smaller and considerably better made, which is what a person does when they no longer have to prove the point.

The disappearance of the capital is the most striking thing about the site and it deserves a proper answer.

What we know:

• The city was the Chola capital for roughly two centuries
• The Pandyas, the Cholas' southern rivals, rose in the thirteenth century and the Chola state collapsed
• The capital was taken and, on the general understanding, destroyed
• The site was then progressively quarried for building stone, which is the usual fate of an abandoned city near settled land
• Over centuries the fields came back over it

What survives:

• The temple, which survived because it remained in worship
• Traces of the fort walls and the palace area, some of it under archaeological investigation
• The bed of the Chola Gangam tank, silted and largely dry
• The village that sits beside the temple

Why the temple survived and the city did not. This is the general rule and it is worth stating.

• A temple in worship has a community with a stake in it, and that community will repair and defend it
• A palace belongs to a dynasty. When the dynasty ends, nobody has an interest in maintaining it
• Stone is valuable, and an abandoned building near a village is a quarry
• Temples were the only buildings whose demolition carried a cost that people were unwilling to pay

That is why the archaeology of Indian cities is so heavily weighted toward temples. It is not that Indians only built temples. It is that temples are what nobody was willing to take apart.

What excavation has shown. Work at the palace site has recovered structural remains, and the outline of the capital's layout is becoming clearer. Compared with the temple, the excavated area is modest, and a great deal of the city is still under fields.

A visitor should understand that they are looking at perhaps two percent of what was here, and that the other ninety eight percent is the ground they are standing on.

The Chola temples are among the most important documentary sources for medieval Indian history, and it is worth knowing why.

What is on the walls:

• Chola temples carry very large numbers of inscriptions, cut into the plinth and walls
• They are in Tamil, sometimes with Sanskrit portions
• They record endowments, gifts of land, money, livestock, lamps and grain, with the donor named
• They record what each gift was for, down to the specific lamp to be lit or the specific offering to be made
• They record the staff, including priests, musicians, dancers, garland makers, accountants, watchmen and cooks, with their entitlements

Why this matters. Almost everything we know about how a medieval south Indian society actually worked comes from this material.

• It tells us about land tenure, since gifts of land specify boundaries, rights and existing holders
• It tells us about local government, since Chola inscriptions record the working of village assemblies, including the kudavolai system of selection by lot at Uttaramerur, one of the most remarkable documents of early self government anywhere
• It tells us about wages and prices, since entitlements are specified in measures of grain
• It tells us about temple economies, and about the very large number of people a major temple employed

The Thanjavur inscriptions are the most famous, listing hundreds of dancers assigned to the temple, along with their names and the streets they were housed in.

What that means for a visitor. When you look at the base of a Chola temple wall and see lines of Tamil script, you are not looking at decoration. You are looking at an archive, cut in stone because that was the most durable medium available, by an administration that expected its records to be consulted.

They were right. They are still being consulted, a thousand years later, by people they could not have imagined.

Getting there

• Gangaikonda Cholapuram, Ariyalur district, Tamil Nadu
• About 35 km north of Kumbakonam, which is the practical base
• Roughly 70 km from Thanjavur and 100 km from Tiruchirappalli, which has the nearest airport
• Kumbakonam and Ariyalur have railway stations, with road transfer
• A car is easiest. Buses run but the site is a little off the main route

Timings

• Open through the day, with the sanctum following worship timings including a midday closure
• It is a protected monument and a working temple at once

When to go

• November to February for the most comfortable weather
• Early morning or late afternoon, since the compound is open and the stone gets very hot
• Mahashivratri and the temple's festival days
• It is far less visited than Thanjavur, so you can usually have it quiet

How to see it

• Walk the exterior completely, looking at the wall niches
• Find the Chandesa Anugraha panel, which is the one to look for
• Look at the curve of the vimana from a distance, and compare it in your mind with Thanjavur's straight profile
• The great Nandi
• The simha kinaru, the lion well
• Walk out to where the Chola Gangam tank was, to get a sense of the scale of the vanished city
• Allow two hours

Practical notes

• Carry water and sun protection. There is very little shade
• Remove footwear at the appropriate point. The stone is extremely hot at midday, and this is a real problem here
• Facilities at the site are limited. Eat at Kumbakonam
• Do not touch the carvings

Doing the Chola circuit

• Thanjavur for Brihadeeswarar, and the Thanjavur palace and its bronze gallery, which is one of the great collections of Indian sculpture
• Darasuram, near Kumbakonam
• Kumbakonam and its temples
• In chronological order: Thanjavur, then Gangaikonda, then Darasuram

A closing thought. Thanjavur tells you what the Cholas wanted to be. Gangaikonda Cholapuram tells you what happened to them. A temple of imperial scale standing alone in a paddy field, with a silted tank nearby that once held water carried fifteen hundred kilometres, is about as clear a statement about empires as any building in India makes.