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South
Indian Inscriptions |
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GENERAL
The Kāṅgayars of the Poruḷandai-gotra in the Salem district.
88. A copper-plate record (C.P.No. 10) received from the Deputy Tahsildar
of Rāśīpuram in the Salem district is engraved on a single plate shaped like a
tray with raised rims all round. It is incised in modern and faulty Tamil and
dated in the cyclic year Rudhirōdgārin. To give the record an air of historicity
the names of several Vijayanagara kings
are jumbled together in the preamble
and the document itself is said to have
been issued in the reign of Muttu-Vīra-
Chokkaliṅga-Nāyaka, whose ancestry is traced from Vīrappa-Mudaliyār and
Vīrappa-Muttu Kṛishṇappa-Mudaliyār. Though these names are reminiscent of
those of the Nāyakas of Madura, and the cyclic year Rudhirōdgārin corresponds
to A.D. 1683, which immediately followed the last year of the reign of
Chokkanātha of Madura, it is doubtful whether this record could be assigned to
that period. It stated that several Kongu-Veḷḷāḷas and Koṅgu Maṇṇāḍiyār living
in Darumāpuram and the several nadus such as Pūndurai-nāḍu, Ēlūr-nāḍu,
Parittipaḷḷi-nāḍu and places like Kāḍaiyūr, Muttūr etc., met together and
presented some land and the right to collect certain specified cesses from among
themselves to Ponnāli-Pulāvan, son of Mudali-Gavaṇḍan Tittāppēru and
grandson of Nalla-Gavuṇḍan of Darumāpuram, on whom they also conferred
the title ‘ Poruḷandai-kulam-echchan ’ probably as the spiritual guru of the
Poruḷandai community.
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Labelled sculptures at Chidambaram.
89. The east and west gōpuras of the Naṭarāja temple at Chidambaram are
rich in sculptures whose value as pieces of art is increased by the explanatory
labels attached to most of them. The inner walls of the gōpuras contain the
well-known figures representing the sculptural exposition of the art of dancing
(See Ep. Rep. for 1914, pp. 74 ff), while all round the outer walls are found images
of likpālas such as Indra, Agni, etc. enshrined in niches. The niches especially
in the west gōpura bear labels in the
Grantha script which may be assigned
to the 13th century A.D. One such label gives the name of Dhanvantari and
the image in this riche is represented as an aged man with a beard and a potbelly in a standing pose wearing a yajñōpavita and a lower cloth reaching down
to the ankle. Both the hands are unfortunately broken, so that we are not in a
position to know what the objects were which they should have held. According
to the Vishṇudharmōttara, Dhanvantari should be sculptured as a handsome
person carrying in both the hands vessels containing amrita. He is considered
to be one of the minor manifestations of Vishṇu. On the inner wall in the
north gōpura of the same temple which was built by the Vijayanagara king
Kṛishṇadēvorāya (No. 371 of 1913), the names of the four architects who
apparently constructed this gōpura are given above small sculptures representing them. Their names are, Śēvakapperumāl of Vriddhagiri (Vṛiddhāchalam),
his son Viśuvamuttu, Tirumaruṅgan of Tiruppiraikkoḍai and his brother
Kāraṇāchchāri (Nos. 17-20). The practice of incising labels below the images
for their identification was not so common in the Tamil country as in Mysore
in the Hoysala period, where the names not only of the deities but also of their
sculptors were sometimes given.
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