Chola Empire

Chola religious policy is legible because the Cholas wrote it on the walls. The great temples at Thanjavur, Gangaikonda Cholapuram and Darasuram were endowed with villages whose revenue was assigned to specific purposes, and the inscriptions record the assignments in detail: so much paddy for the daily offerings, so much gold for lamps, named individuals with named duties and their rates of maintenance.

Richard Salomon's handbook on Indian epigraphy treats this South Indian material as among the most informative documentary evidence surviving from medieval Asia. What it reveals is that a large temple was a landholder, an employer, a bank that received deposits and made loans, and a redistributor of agricultural produce, at the same time as being a place of worship. Those functions are not separable, because the worship was what justified the endowment and the endowment was what made the worship continuous. A daily rite performed for centuries requires an income stream, and the Chola inscriptions are the record of how one was constructed. Historians disagree about what this implies for the nature of the Chola state, and the atlas records the temple economy as attested and its political meaning as an open argument among specialists.

Chola workshops produced the processional bronzes that are now among the most widely reproduced religious images in the world. They were cast by the lost wax method, made to be carried, dressed and taken out of the temple in procession on festival days, and they were never intended to be seen in a gallery on a plinth.

The Nataraja, Shiva dancing within a ring of flame on the figure of a dwarf, is the best known of them. Its iconography is read as a compressed statement of creation, preservation, destruction, concealment and grace, and Indira Viswanathan Peterson's work on the Tamil Shaiva hymns shows the devotional literature that the images accompanied and that pilgrims sang along the processional route.

The Cholas also carried religious forms outward. Naval expeditions reached Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, and Chola contact is part of the wider transmission of South Indian temple architecture, ritual and iconography across the Bay of Bengal. The atlas notes the expeditions as conquest as well as transmission, since the campaigns against Sri Lanka involved the sack of Anuradhapura and the removal of images, and a religious influence carried by a fleet is not the same thing as a religious influence carried by preachers.