Minor Majesties : The Paluvēttaraiyars and their South Indian Kingdom of Paluvūr, 9th-11th centuries A.D.

Abstract

This book is a study of the ancient small kingdom of Paluvūr, a town located about 30 km north of Tanjavur—today divided in two distinct villages and bearing the modern names of Kīlappaluvūr and Mēlappaluvūr. It was the capital of a minor dynasty, the dynasty of the Paluvēttaraiyars, active between the 9th and the 11th centuries, who swore allegiance to the Cōla dynasty. There are four still-standing Śiva temples in Paluvūr, built during the reign of the Paluvēttaraiyars little kings. For the first time, this book analyzes the four monuments in their entirety, scrutinizing their materiality, their location, and their epigraphy. For this, the author carried out much fieldwork and established a corpus of 136 Tamil inscriptions engraved on the walls of the shrines, gathered at the end of the volume. Combining all these data, the author attempts to better understand, on the one hand, the functioning of the minor dynasty of the Paluvēttaraiyars whose little kings often appear in the inscriptions of the temples, and, on the other hand, to map the interactions between the temples. The small size of Paluvūr with its hub of still-standing monuments provides exceptionally clear material to outline the possible relations between distinct temples, allowing us to fathom complexities related to temple sponsorship, organization, and functioning as well as the way those religious monuments, accruing wealth but enabling others gravitating around them to accrue merit and power, become the place for the fabrication of political discourses and powers, specific social configurations, and religious practices.