Sixty Metres of Granite Without Mortar

The vimana over the sanctum at Thanjavur rises about sixty metres in thirteen diminishing storeys and is built dry, with the blocks held by their own weight and their fit. It was completed around 1010 under Rajaraja the First, and for its period nothing in South Asia approached it. Stella Kramrisch's study of the Hindu temple explains why the height is a religious statement rather than a display of engineering: the tower stands over the garbhagriha, the small dark womb chamber that holds the linga, so the largest and most visible element of the building marks the smallest and least accessible one. The plan works inward and downward while the elevation works upward, and a worshipper moving through it goes from open light into an enclosed dark. The scale of the sanctum matches the tower.

The linga is very large, the Nandi facing it is cut from a single block, and the ambulatory around the sanctum carries painted walls, some of them Chola work later covered by Nayaka painting and recovered in the twentieth century. The temple has never gone out of use. It is a working place of worship with a daily routine of offerings as well as a monument under conservation, and the two functions have to be managed together on the same ground, which is the ordinary condition of the great living temples of the south and a constant source of practical difficulty at all of them.