The Pallava monuments of Mamallapuram

The Pallavas began to cut temples in the rock under Mahendravarman I, whose inscription at Mandagapattu boasts of a shrine made without brick, timber, metal or mortar. At Mamallapuram, the coastal town that took its name from Narasimhavarman I’s title Mamalla, ‘the great wrestler’, Pallava craftsmen created some forty monuments. Cave temples (mandapas) carry reliefs of Vishnu as the boar Varaha and as the giant Trivikrama, of the goddess Durga slaying the buffalo demon and other scenes of Shaiva, Vaishnava and Shakta mythology. The five monolithic ‘chariots’ — the Pancha Rathas, popularly named after the Pandava brothers and Draupadi — were each carved from a single outcrop of granite and left unfinished and unconsecrated; they show the variety of early Dravidian temple forms. The Descent of the Ganges, also called Arjuna’s Penance, about 29 by 13 metres, with over a hundred figures of gods, sages, people and animals around a natural cleft in two boulders, is one of the largest open-air rock reliefs in the world.

Who made what is debated. Most scholars attribute many of the monuments, including the rathas, to Narasimhavarman I (630–668); Marilyn Hirsh traced the earliest back to about 600, the reign of Mahendravarman I, while R. Nagaswamy argued in 1962 that King Rajasimha (Narasimhavarman II, c. 690–728), whose names appear in many inscriptions here, was the patron of much of the site. The Shore Temple, built of granite blocks under Rajasimha in the early 8th century, is one of the earliest important structural temples of South India. European sailors later knew the site as the ‘Seven Pagodas’; it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1984.