Dynastic History | Brihadisvara Temple, Thanjavur — The Payroll Cut Into the Plinth

Rajaraja I called it Rajarajesvaram, the temple of Rajaraja's god, and that name is cut into the building rather than merely reported by a chronicle. UNESCO's dossier puts the start of work at 1003–1004 and the consecration at 1009–1010. The vimana over the sanctum rises 59.82 m above a walled compound on the south bank of the Kaveri, in what was then the Chola capital.

What is unusual here is that the accounts survive. On the twentieth day of his twenty-sixth regnal year the king ordered the temple's records engraved on stone, and they were: revenue in paddy, in gold and in kāśu, drawn from named villages, some of them in territory his armies had lately taken. E. Hultzsch, epigraphist to the Government of Madras, edited and translated the Tanjavur texts as the second volume of South Indian Inscriptions. One order there, dated to the twenty-ninth year, assigns produce both to men performing services in the temple and to four hundred women moved to Rajarajesvaram from other temples across the Chola country — listed one by one with the temple each came from, each holding one or more shares, a share being the yield of one veli of land reckoned at a hundred kalam of paddy, and each placed in a specified house on the temple streets north and south of the shrine. Hultzsch, writing in the 1890s, called them dancing-girls.

That is the arithmetic the tower stands on: the paddy of named villages and the labour of an establishment the court moved into place. The temple is protected by the Archaeological Survey of India, was inscribed by UNESCO in 1987, and is still in worship. The plinth still carries the ledger.

📸 Cover: The vimana seen across the inner courtyard, L Ram Vidya Sagar, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons