Sixty-five kilometres north of Thanjavur, in a village that the road signs still spell out as Gangaikonda Cholapuram, stands the second of the three UNESCO Great Living Chola Temples. It is the temple Rajendra Chola I built in 1035 to mark the founding of a new capital — a capital that never became one, in a town that did not survive its patron by much more than a century.

The temple has consequently become, for the traveller, an unexpected thing. It is the equal of Brihadeeswara in seriousness, smaller in scale, more refined in detail, and almost always empty. On a clear morning in February one can have the prakara to oneself for an hour.

The town that was a capital.

Rajendra Chola I, son and successor of Raja Raja, concluded a great northern campaign in 1023 with a march to the Ganges — a campaign whose chief political function was to bring Ganges water back to the Tamil heartland and pour it ceremonially into a new tank at a new capital. The town was founded around 1025 and given the name Gangaikonda Cholapuram — “the town of the Chola who took the Ganges”. The temple was completed in 1035, the year before Rajendra's death.

The capital functioned as the seat of administration for some decades after Rajendra. By the late twelfth century, however, the locus of Chola power had returned to Thanjavur and the wider Kaveri delta. Gangaikonda Cholapuram declined. By the fall of the dynasty in 1279, it was a village around a great temple.

Rajendra Chola I, patron.

Rajendra (r. 1014–1044) extended the Chola empire to its territorial maximum — from the Ganges plains in the north, across the Bay of Bengal to Sumatra, and west to the Western Ghats. His naval expedition against Srivijaya in 1025 is the only documented Indian transoceanic conquest of the medieval period. The new capital and the new temple were the political expression of a reign that, on the evidence, regarded itself as the climax of the dynasty.

The temple, in plan.

The Gangaikonda temple follows the same Dravidian plan as Brihadeeswara — a central shrine on a square base, a vimana rising above the sanctum, a mandapa hall in front, and a prakara wall enclosing the precinct. The differences are in proportion and ornament. The precinct is smaller — about a hundred metres on a side rather than two hundred. There is no second outer prakara. The mandapa is shorter relative to the shrine.

Inside the sanctum is a Saiva lingam — large, but not the 3.7-metre giant of Thanjavur. Outside the sanctum, a bronze Nandi sits where the Thanjavur Nandi is a monolithic stone. The compound holds a number of subsidiary shrines — to Surya, Chandikesvara, the Saptamatas — that are sculpturally rewarding in their own right.

Vimana — the curve.

The single most visible difference between the two temples is the silhouette of the vimana. Brihadeeswara's tower is stepped — thirteen receding storeys, each a clean horizontal stage, the profile a straight pyramidal taper. Gangaikonda's tower is curved — nine storeys, but the storeys themselves bow inward, so that the silhouette becomes a soft convex arc rather than a hard taper.

The curve is a deliberate aesthetic departure. Where Brihadeeswara reads as imperial assertion in stone, Gangaikonda reads as the same form softened to something more sculptural. The architectural literature calls this the transition from the early imperial Chola style to the middle Chola style. The transition is visible from the prakara gate.

Sculpture and detail.

The exterior sculpture at Gangaikonda is denser and figurally more elaborate than at Brihadeeswara. Where Thanjavur reserves the wall for niches with single figures, Gangaikonda fills the wall surface with subsidiary figures — attendants, devotees, ornamental creatures. The figural canon is the same — the Dakshinamurti on the south face, the Lingodbhava on the west, the Brahma on the north — but the surrounding density is greater.

The Chandikesvara shrine on the north-east of the precinct contains a fine standing Saptamatas panel that is one of the most accomplished sculptural sequences of the middle Chola period. Photographs do not do it justice.

After 1279.

With the fall of the Chola dynasty to the Pandyas in 1279, the town declined. The temple was preserved under Pandyan and then Vijayanagara administration, but the urban context around it dissolved. The British took the district in 1801; the temple passed to the Archaeological Survey for monument protection in the early twentieth century and to the Tamil Nadu HR&CE department for worship administration after independence.

How to visit.

Open 06:00 to 12:30 and 16:00 to 19:30 daily. Entry is free. Photography is allowed outside the sanctum and not inside. The site is staffed by a small team of HR&CE priests and a handful of ASI conservators. There is a small visitor centre near the entrance with a working English-language map.

Drive from Thanjavur takes ninety minutes via the Ariyalur highway. The site is best visited in the morning — eight to half-past nine — for both the light and the temperature. Take an hour and a half at the temple, half an hour for the subsidiary shrines, and another half hour for the tank to the north. Lunch in Kumbakonam on the way back. See our 3-day itinerary.

A small thing worth knowing

The bronze Nataraja that originally stood in the front mandapa of Gangaikonda is now in the Government Museum at Chennai, which holds a number of the temple's portable bronzes. The temple itself retains the inscriptions and the stone sculpture; the moveable metalwork was relocated under the British administration and never restored.