Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu is where a full religious literature developed in a South Indian language alongside Sanskrit rather than in translation from it, and that is what makes the region distinctive rather than the scale of its temples, remarkable as they are.

From roughly the sixth century, two groups of poets travelled between shrines composing hymns in Tamil: the Nayanars, devoted to Shiva, and the Alvars, devoted to Vishnu. Their verses are personal, sometimes furious, often addressed to the god in the second person, and they name specific temples, which turned a scattering of shrines into a mapped pilgrimage network. The Shaiva hymns were collected as the Tevaram and the Vaishnava ones as the Divya Prabandham, and both are recited in temple worship to this day, in Tamil, beside Sanskrit ritual formulas.

A theology was built on that poetry rather than the other way round. Shaiva Siddhanta, systematised in Tamil from the thirteenth century, holds God, souls and the material principle to be eternally distinct, with grace rather than knowledge as the means of release. Ramanuja, working at Srirangam in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, produced a qualified non-dualism in Sanskrit that gave the Alvars' devotion a philosophical footing and became one of the principal schools of Vedanta.

The great temple cities, Madurai, Chidambaram, Thanjavur, Srirangam, are the institutional form of the same tradition.

The Tamil temple is not a building but a walled town, and understanding that changes what the region's religious history looks like.

At Srirangam the complex encloses seven concentric walled enclosures with the shrine at the centre, and people live and trade inside the outer ones. At Madurai the Minakshi temple stands at the middle of the city with streets laid out concentrically around it, and the deity's marriage is re-enacted annually as a civic festival with processions through those streets. The towers over the gateways, covered in painted figures, are later additions that grew taller than the shrines they guard.

Historically these institutions were landlords, employers, banks and courts. Inscriptions cut into their walls, in Tamil and running to many thousands of texts, record land grants, endowments for lamps and offerings, the wages of temple servants, and the settlement of disputes, which makes South Indian temple walls one of the richest archives of medieval economic life anywhere in the world.

They also carried the argument about entry. Access to inner enclosures was regulated by caste, and the campaign to change that ran through the twentieth century; the Temple Entry Proclamation issued in Travancore in 1936 opened state-controlled temples to all Hindus and was a landmark for the wider movement. The temples remain working institutions with tens of millions of visitors, administered largely by state endowment departments rather than by hereditary trustees.