Dynastic History | Airavatesvara Temple, Darasuram — Seven Courts, One Left Standing

Rajaraja II built at Ayirattali, a place his inscriptions also call Rajarajapuram, rather than at his predecessors' capital. The front hall was cut as a chariot: stone wheels, stone horses, a stair flanked by elephants. Its name in the record is the Rajagambhiran-tiru-mandapam, after the king. UNESCO's dossier dates the temple 1143–1173; George Michell puts the completion at 1166, which is the year used here.

The north verandah wall carries 108 sections naming and picturing the sixty-three Saiva teachers, with the principal events of each life set out beside the image. Another inscription near the gateway records an image brought from Kalyanapura by Rajadhiraja I after his war with the Western Chalukyas — a god taken as spoil and installed by the court that took it. The inscriptions also label, deity by deity, the sculptures that once filled the niches of the eastern gopura, which is how it is known that most of them are now broken or missing.

By those same inscriptions the complex had seven streets and seven courts. One court survives with the main shrine; the gateway tower is ruined and there are foundations at a distance from the visitor path. Why so much went is argued over rather than settled: the archaeologist S. Vasanthi has suggested Pandya reprisal against Chola sites late in the thirteenth century, a reading that does not account for why this temple stood while shrines around it did not.

It is Archaeological Survey of India monument N-TN-C189, and in 2004 it was added, together with the Gangaikonda Cholapuram temple, to the World Heritage property inscribed in 1987 for the Thanjavur temple alone.

📸 Cover: The chariot-shaped agra-mandapa with its stone wheel and elephant, Madhuranthakan Jagadeesan, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons