Chola Nadu · Eastern Coastal Plains
Rajaraja I's temple, consecrated around 1010, with a vimana of about 60 metres built of granite in a delta that has no stone of its own. Its walls carry the most detailed royal accounts in medieval India — endowments, lamp oil quantities, the names of four hundred temple women, the weight of every donated vessel. Inscribed by UNESCO in 1987.
Best time: December–February, early morning.
Rajendra I's temple, completed around 1035 at a capital he founded to mark a campaign that reached the Ganga. Its 53-metre vimana curves where Thanjavur's is straight-sided — the son answering the father in the same material. The city around it is gone; the temple and a stepped lion-well are what remain. Added to the UNESCO inscription in 2004.
Rajaraja II's temple of the mid-twelfth century, small beside the other two and far more finely carved — a front mandapa built as a stone chariot with wheels, and a set of miniature panels illustrating the lives of the Shaiva saints. Added to the inscription in 2004.
The temple of Shiva as dancer, and the only major South Indian temple administered by a hereditary priestly community, the Podu Dikshitars, rather than by the state endowments department. Its Chit Sabha is roofed in gold, its Kanaka Sabha hosts the Natyanjali dance festival, and the Chidambara Rahasyam behind the curtain beside the bronze is, by design, empty space.
Best time: February–March, at Maha Shivaratri.
The largest functioning temple complex in the world, on an island between the Cauvery and the Kollidam at the head of the delta, with twenty-one gopurams inside seven concentric walls — the outermost of which contains a living town. Its 72-metre Rajagopuram was completed only in 1987, on foundations laid centuries earlier.
Best time: December–January, for Vaikunta Ekadasi.
A 329-metre barrage of unhewn stone laid across the Cauvery, credited to Karikala Chola in roughly the second century, raised and reworked by British engineers in the 1830s, and still doing the job it was built for. It splits the river between the Kollidam flood channel and the delta's irrigation arm — the single decision on which everything downstream depends.
A town of some eighteen major temples within a few square kilometres, arranged around a twenty-acre tank with sixteen mandapas on its steps and wells sunk inside the water itself. The Adi Kumbeswarar and Sarangapani temples are the two poles of the town, and Sarangapani's front mandapa is built as a chariot.
A Nayak palace taken over by the Bhonsles in 1676, containing the Durbar Hall, a bell tower, an outstanding collection of Chola bronzes, and a library begun by the Nayaks and enormously expanded by Serfoji II — some 49,000 volumes, including around 39,000 palm-leaf and paper manuscripts in Tamil and Sanskrit, plus Marathi, Telugu, Persian and European printed books. Opened to the public in 1918.
One of the six Murugan war-houses, sixty steps up an artificial mound, and the working village of bronze casters below it. Both are worth the visit; the foundries are informal and generally happy to be watched.
A temple town on the Cauvery where Tyagaraja lived and where his samadhi stands. For most of the year it is a quiet agraharam street; for five days in January it holds the largest gathering in Carnatic music.
Best time: January.
A village of a few thousand people that has performed the Bhagavata Mela dance-dramas annually, in Telugu, in the street outside its temple, for roughly three and a half centuries.
Best time: May, at Narasimha Jayanti.
A Danish colony from a 1620 treaty between Ove Gjedde, acting for Christian IV, and Raghunatha Nayak of Thanjavur, and Danish until it was sold to Britain in 1845. The fort, the town gate, King's Street and the Ziegenbalg mission church survive; the Tranquebar mission set up the first printing press in India to print Tamil, and produced the first Tamil translation of the New Testament.
Best time: November–February.
A port with a two-thousand-year record — a Buddhist monastery endowed by a Srivijayan king, a Chinese-style brick tower demolished in 1867 for building material, three hundred and fifty Buddha bronzes dug out of the sand since the 1850s, and, three kilometres north, the Nagore dargah of Shahul Hamid with its five minarets, whose branch shrines stand in Penang and Singapore.
The Basilica of Our Lady of Good Health, drawing pilgrims of every religion in numbers that rival the largest Hindu festivals here. Its eleven-day feast ends on 8 September; the tonsure, the flag hoisting and the wax votive offerings follow local temple practice closely enough that the borrowing is unmistakable.
Best time: Late August to early September.
The Chola port of the Sangam poems, described in the Silappadikaram in enough detail to reconstruct its quarters, and largely taken by the sea. Offshore surveys have found submerged structures; onshore there is a modern art gallery and a beach.
Dry evergreen forest, saline swamp and mudflat at the cape where the coast turns west, holding blackbuck, feral horses and an enormous winter congregation of greater flamingo and shorebirds on the Great Vedaranyam Swamp. A Ramsar site.
Best time: December–February.
The delta's southern lip, where the Cauvery's last distributaries meet the sea in a lagoon of Avicennia mangrove. Boats run from the forest department jetty; the mangrove is also the delta's storm buffer, which 2018 demonstrated.
A Shiva temple associated with healing and with Angaraka, and the centre of the Naadi palm-leaf reading trade — an industry of hereditary readers claiming to locate an individual's pre-written leaf. Approach with whatever scepticism you brought.
The Saniswaran temple, and the busiest single day in the Puducherry enclave — the Sani Peyarchi transit, when the crowd waiting to bathe in the Nala theertham runs into lakhs.
A late Chola temple built by Kulottunga III with a rare Sarabha shrine, in a village better known now for the heavy zari silk woven a street away from it.
Places worth visiting in Chola Nadu — heritage sites, wildlife, pilgrimage and landscape, with the best time to go. (20)