The temple and the state in medieval South India

The temple seems to have been practically unknown during the early historical period in South India. It is not evidenced in the archaeological record associated with the megaliths in the early Iron Age nor in the early Tamil literature known as ‘Sangam’ literature. What we presume to do is to look at the two institutions of temple and state, and the ways in which they drew sustenance from each other, when the temple appeared on the scene.

We start getting indications about the existence of the temple in the later layers of early Tamil literature. The Paripāṭal, for instance, speaks about a temple of Māl or Tirumāl, identified with Viṣṇu. ¹ So also, the Tirumurugāṟṟuppaḍai, a still later text, speaks about temples such as Tirupparaṅkuṉṟam, Tiruccentūr, Tiruvāviṉaṅkuṭi, etc., dedicated to Murugan, the quintessential Tamil deity. ² But the temple as an important institution arrives only after the fifth or sixth century ad. It drew largely on three things: (a) the deities celebrated in the Sanskrit Purāṇas and the myths around them, (b) the iconography developed in the Āgama literature and (c) rituals such as pūjā (worship) and pilgrimage.

We can see that the temple was part of a complex phenomenon which developed in this region with several inter-related aspects. Among the more important ones of these was the unprecedented expansion of wet rice cultivation following the opening up of the fertile river valleys and tank irrigation. This corresponded with the covering of the landscape by a network of big and small brāhmaṇa settlements, which may also have been causally linked with it. The rise of a large number of brāhmaṇical temples, commanding vast areas of land as their property and considerable entailing privileges, was a concomitant of this.

The state, too, was a new experience in South India, related to developments in the field of economy and society. Sources beginning from the edicts of Aśoka and early Tamil literature do refer to the houses of the Cēra, Cōḻa and Pāṇḍya, but it has been shown that the political organisation represented by these sources can be described as that of a chiefdom level at best, not a full-fledged state as yet. ³ Several factors were at work before the earlier primitive organisation disintegrated and gave way to a state society. ⁴ Thus, it is clear that the Pallava and Pāṇḍya kingdoms which came into existence in the seventh and eighth centuries and their Cēra and Cōḻa counterparts which arose in the ninth century represented a new political experience in South India characterised by the state with all its attendant features such as considerable social disparity, and unequal access to resources and unequal power relations.

In a paper presented at the symposium on the ‘Socio-economic Role of Religious Institutions in India’ in the Indian History Congress in 1981, M.G.S. Narayanan and I had shown that the following are the major features of the temple in early medieval South India: ⁵

The temple served as an agency for easier and more efficient extraction of surplus from the peasants in the agrarian economy, and this contributed to the extension of agriculture in the tribal areas and the consolidation of landlord domination.

In the course of such extension, the temple accelerated the process of the disintegration of tribal society and its reorganisation as a caste society.

In the newly formed caste society, the temple served as an integrating factor linking the high and low in its service and drawing towards itself as clients the different castes and sub-castes.

Such integrated role paved the way for the Brāhmaṇa-inspired and Brāhmaṇa-supported state power in the regional monarchies of South India. The temple put its imprimatur of legitimacy on the new polity and this in turn guaranteed state patronage for the temple.

In this process, the Brāhmaṇical varṇāśrama or caste ideology strengthened its grip on society, its latest weapon being the Bhakti movement for which the temple served as an institutional base.

In course of time, the prosperous temple, which was a landed magnate from the beginning, also developed into a storehouse of gold and silver and precious jewels as well as the regular place of assembly for the rural elite.

This produced the need for exclusiveness and protection leading eventually to the development of the temple to fortress-like proportions with several circles of streets within streets, bazaars and armed retainers.

Finally, the temple acted as the agent for developing, consolidating, transmitting and conserving the legacy of culture.

Naturally, the temple initially represented a forward-looking force and all those who were related to it in many complex ways accepted the religion it represented. The temple in South India, with its strong ideological weapon in the Bhakti movement, was able to register victory of what can be called the Purāṇic Hindu religion. It succeeded in gaining the victory also over the agrarian order, bringing about differentiation of society with infinite gradations in a caste hierarchy that it entailed. This social order found its normative definition in the textual prescriptions or varṇāśrama-dharma. The upper classes consisting largely of the land-owning groups in society accepted this ideology. But what was more important was that this ideology extended to other sections of society. We have argued elsewhere that the Bhakti movement in South India was in reality a temple movement coeval with the rise and fulfilment of the temple. ⁶ It reflected the newly emerging social order and legitimised it comprehensively. Thus, the temple was an institution whose potential was realised by the monarchs of South India as early as the period of the origin of the monarchical state represented by the Pallava and Pāṇḍyan kingdoms.

Against this background, the way in which symbols of this religion were made use of for achieving ideological domination in society by the ruling classes in general and for seeking legitimacy for the ruler himself in particular becomes important. ⁷ Among the more important features of this period, the expansion of agriculture shows a trajectory starting from the northern regions of the Tamil country and expanding to the south. This process extended to the southern regions and then to the west and south-west. By the ninth century, the Kāvēri valley itself becomes the core region of a new kind of monarchical state. In other words, social change resulting from agrarian expansion reflected itself in the newly emerging political institutions, in the Pallava and Pāṇḍyan states to begin with and eventually the Cōḻa empire. It is significant that an identical trajectory is followed in the spread of the Bhakti movement. ⁸ The early Āḻvārs and Nāyaṉārs are connected with Toṇṭaimaṇḍalam; they sing about temples there, even though in a general way. By the time we come to the later poets, they start singing about particular temples in the Pāṇḍyan and Cēra territories, and the maximum number of temples sung about by them is in the Cōḻa region on either side of the Kāvēri. Thus, the Bhakti movement accompanied the expansion of agriculture and the rise of the temples along with the formation of the state. The three show identical trajectories.

Among the patrons of the Bhakti movement in the early days were rulers belonging to the newly established dynasties. The great Tirunāvukkaraśu Nāyaṉār or Appar had, as his patron, the famous Mahendravarman Pallava: the story goes that he was instrumental in the latter’s conversion to Śaivism from Jainism whereupon a Jaina monastery was pulled down to construct a Śiva temple. ⁹ Neṭumāṟan, a Pāṇḍya king, is likewise believed to have been converted to Śaivism from Jainism under the influence of his minister Kulaiciṟai Nāyaṉār. ¹⁰ A Cōḻa, Kōcceṅgān, identified by scholars as the grandfather of Vijayālaya ¹¹ , was a Śaiva Nāyaṉār; and so was Cāramān Perumāḷ, identified as Rāma Rājaśekhara, the founder of the Cēra kingdom of Mahodayapuram. ¹² Kulaśekhara Āḻvār, one of the leaders of the Vaiṣṇava Bhakti movement, too, was a Cēra king. ¹³ In the early days of these monarchies, it is probable, the rulers found the support of these movements to be quite useful for themselves. The movement, in its turn, derived much benefit from royal patronage, especially in getting land and other forms of support for the temples and making use of state power for winning their conflicts with rival creeds, even by physical means.

At the wider levels of society, too, the Bhakti movement had a major role to play. As the temple gained in popularity with the Bhakti movement, the services in the temple and the jargon of Bhakti came to reflect a particular kind of power relation. For instance, the deity in the temple was accorded royal status. Thus uṭaiyār or perumāḷ meant both the king and the deity, kōil meant both the temple and the palace and the day-to-day routine of service in the temple followed, to the last detail, the routine in the palace, both being known as rājopacāra. If the deity was thus equated with the lord, the devotee was equated with the vassal. While the devotee addressed the deity habitually as uṭaiyār or tampirān (lord), he described his own position as that of aṭiyār (serf). ¹⁴ This recreation of a parallel world of authority in the realm of religion went a long way towards legitimising the polity.

This is not to say that the only way in which monarchy in these kingdoms sought legitimacy was through the temple and the Bhakti movement. An elaborate self-image of royalty was created, with this in view. ¹⁵ Among the various aspects of this self-image was the attribute of divinity for the king. ¹⁶ In the particular context of the socio-religious history of South India, this element of divinity, which added another dimension to the image of royalty, had a special significance. The divine figures chosen for this purpose were, significantly, deities and heroes of the Āgamaic/Purāṇic Hinduism. In the context of the growing popularity of this religion with the temple as its institutional base and Bhakti as its ideological weapon, its deities, naturally, had greater appeal than the ones worshipped in South India in an earlier period.

At very concrete levels also, there were attempts at ‘divinising’ the king. The Cōḻas started the practice of consecrating images of the kings in temples and thus making them objects of worship. A large number of such ‘portrait’ images of the Cōḻa kings have come down to us. ¹⁷ Rulers of later dynasties in South India emulated this practice. Another way was naming temples after the ruler who had endowed them. In most cases, the deity himself was known by a name or a title of the ruler, the most striking example being that of the Great Temple of Tanjavur, where ‘Uṭaiyār Śrī Rājarājadēvar’ boasted of the temple he built for ‘Śrī Rājarājēśvaram Uṭaiyār’. ¹⁸ Closely related to this was the building of sepulchral temples or paḷḷippaḍais. This has been compared with the cult of Deva-rāja in South-east Asia. ¹⁹ Temples were constructed over the mortal remains of kings, princes and princesses. This practice became prevalent among the Cōḻas. Thus, the Ādityēśvara temple at Toṇḍamānāḍ was a paḷḷippaḍai erected by Parāntaka I over the remains of his father; the Ariñjigai-īśvara at Mēlāḍi commemorated Ariñjaya who died at Āṟṟūr; the Pañcavanmahādēvīśvara at Rāmanāthankōil, is another example of such sepulchral temples. ²⁰ Human bones were discovered from below the sanctum sanctora of several such temples during renovation. ²¹ However, this practice came to be looked upon with disapproval in later times as is shown by the attempt to erase the word paḷḷippaḍai in the inscription at Rāmanāthankōil.

There is another way in which the historian can look at the use of religious institutions such as the temple in the service of politics. We can consider two kinds of temples, namely, what have been described as the ‘royal’ temples and what grew up as centres of agrarian corporations and Brāhmaṇa settlements, the latter with claims to a richer religious tradition behind them. ²² They too had, to be sure, considerable patronage from royalty in most cases but their raison d’être lay outside state patronage. The former, on the other hand, were not only patronised by royalty but also meant by their builders to be a statement of state power.

A good case in point is the Bṛhadīśvara temple at Tanjavur. Tanjavur is not one of the centres celebrated by the Bhakti hymnists of the Śaivites. It was the nucleus of a collection of agrarian villages at a high ground on the Kāvēri, where the river begins to fan out into its system of distributaries, a vast resource base. It was under the control of the Muttaraiyar chiefs, from whom Vijayālaya Cōḻa captured it in the middle of the ninth century. We are told that he built a temple for goddess Niṣumbhasūdinī there. By making this rich centre the base of his operations and the ceremonial centre of the state, Rājarāja made a loud and clear statement of his power. The project of building the Great Temple was undertaken relatively late in his life, probably after all his military expeditions were over. ²³ He was by then heading a powerful and somewhat centralised state that demanded convincing legitmation. The temple, thus, was far from a ‘system-maintaining mechanism of a weakly organized polity’, as George W. Spencer understands it. ²⁴

This project has two aspects about it: what is directly conveyed and what is symbolic or metaphorical. The royal inscriptions engraved on the walls of the temple represent the ‘literal’ aspect of the statement. The range of activities in the temple, the amount of wealth and other resources that were mobilised in favour of the construction and maintenance of the temple, and such other details bring out the importance of the institution. The stupendous nature of the structure has been adequately written about. The vimāna itself was a metaphor for the structure of the state presided over by Rājarāja—a pyramidal structure with a heavy top. Its conception as Dakṣiṇameru (the southern Meru, Meru being the mythological axis of the earth), surrounded by shrines of the guardian deities of the four cardinal directions and the four corners, is the first step in identifying the temple with the cosmos itself. ²⁵ The chief deity is Dakṣiṇameru-viṭaṅkar, also called Śrī Rājarājēśvaram Uṭaiyār. We have seen above how, by a sleight of words, as it were, ‘Uṭaiyār Śrī Rājarājadēvar’ boasted of the temple he built for ‘Śrī Rājarājēśvaram Uṭaiyār.’ Thus, the temple-cosmos identification went to the level of the identification of the temple as the territory and the deity as king, where what he presides over is the entire cosmos. The sacred and the secular blend perfectly. This is also seen in the architectural plan and the sculptural and other artistic details. For instance, I have shown elsewhere how the theme of Tripuradahana is taken up in the sculptural scheme of Cōḻa temples in the period of Rājarāja Cōḻa. ²⁶

There are many other aspects in relation to the institution of the temple, which lent itself to a political use, if in a different way. Some of the temples arose as centres of Brāhmaṇa settlements, as the pivot around which agrarian corporations revolved. These temples came to be managed by corporations of those who formed these settlements or their more notable representatives. These corporations were synonymous with the managerial bodies of the agrarian settlements around them, controlling vast areas of landed wealth. This meant controlling major chunks of population in different capacities. In a period when large sections of tribal population were getting transformed as peasants and drawn into caste society, this position of the temple was crucial, and enabled it to wield enormous political power in the locality in which it functioned. This is visible in the clearest fashion in the Cēra kingdom in Kerala, where the monarchical state was at its weakest in South India. The local groups practically enjoyed a measure of dominance in the political structure. The most important local group was the Brāhmaṇical corporation of non-cultivating intermediaries organised around the temple. These bodies came to enjoy considerable powers in the matter of fiscal, judicial and political administration, that is, in functions that are thought to belong to the state. A lengthy copper plate record, or more correctly a collection of records in copper plates, known as the Tiruvalla Copper Plates or the Huzur Office Plates, documents the process of this development elaborately. ²⁷ I have made a somewhat detailed study of the development of the Tiruvalla settlement with the help of this document, bringing out the growth of a temple-centred Brāhmaṇa settlement in space and range of activities. ²⁸

A few more details may be relevant here. There are many instances recorded in the Tiruvalla Copper Plates showing that the temple was assigned, or else arrogated to itself, many functions of the state. There are many references to the temple collecting revenue, which would have been normally due to the various nodes of state power. A particularly interesting case is that of the grant of a village by Iravi Cirikaṇṭan, the chief of Veṇpolināṭu. Kuṭavūr, where the granted village, is described as of the donor (tannuṭaiya), and when it was granted to the temple of Tiruvalla, ‘[all the] eighteen taxes and the market [duties]’ were also given away. The representative or the manager of the temple committee was authorised to collect 360 paṟais of paddy, this being the equivalent of 18 kaḻañju (unit of weight, used in place of a coin) of gold, the rakṣābhoga (‘land tax’) of that village, from the chief. In the event of a failure to make timely payment of such dues, the chief was required to pay the original due in gold even if the fault was not his. At the end of the details of the provisions is a very interesting prescription: the temple committee shall take the rakṣābhoga, a tax for protecting [the settlement] from the wrath of the king and the sāmanta (feudatory). Members of the sabhā opposed to this arrangement would forfeit their rights including membership of the sabhā. ²⁹ That the same statement, apparently in relation to the same endowment, is repeated elsewhere in the same document ³⁰ may be due to a scribal error. If it is not, it is an extremely important repetition, bringing out the importance of this endowment and the conditions attached to it.

What does this assignment signify? It is now well known that fiscal assignments were typical of the land grants in what is called ‘Indian feudalism.’ The temple committee is assigned all taxes from the village and placed in a position where it can redress the grievances caused by acts of even the king and the sāmantas. For those who were concerned, the temple committee was here presenting itself as the state. This is not a solitary case where the temple and its managerial body appropriated the functions of the state, so far as revenue and judicial administration were concerned. Speaking about a particular expense, the record says elsewhere that it was to be met from the ‘tax’ (vari) due to Ōṭanāṭu. ³¹ There are several other cases in the record where such assignments of ‘taxes’ from the nāṭu units and the lesser ones such as ūr and vāḻkkai occur. ³²

As in revenue administration, so in judicial administration, we see the temple exercising state power. There is a very interesting case where it is stated that, in the event of any member of the managerial committee standing in the way of a particular service for which an endowment is made, he would be deemed to have killed his father and married his mother. ³³ Even those who took his side would be treated in the same way. They would lose their caste and the committee was allowed to confiscate their land and the sites of their houses to the properties of the deity of Tiruvalla. Elsewhere, Māḷuvakkōn, the chief of Kīḻmalaināṭu, assigns some land to the temple. The trustees of the temple were authorised to attach the property of the village (in which the grant was made) in the event of default in the prompt payment of dues. It is significant that this agreement, where the chief has to look on helplessly as the temple attaches his property, is attested by the 600, the chief’s ‘companions of honour,’ together with his other representatives. ³⁴ The temple not only looks after judicial administration, but it does it above the head of the actual political authority, that is, the local chief. In another case, it is stated that those who were required to supply the stipulated amount of oil to the temple should pay, in the event of their failure to do so, a fine of 50 kaḻañju of gold to the Perumāḷ or the king, 25 kaḻañju to the sabhā of the temple and 10 kaḻañju to the local chief. ³⁵ The temple is shown unequivocally as above the local chiefs in the hierarchy; just below the Cēra king, it represented the state in a visible form. From this status attained by the temple developed what came to be called the saṅkētam in the post-Cēra centuries in Kerala, where certain major temples were totally independent of the authority of the rājā who held authority in the area. ³⁶