History · India · Long read · 16 min read

Mahabalipuram: The Pallava Workshop by the Sea and the Legend of the Seven Pagodas

Temples carved from single rocks, a cliff face turned into one great story in stone, a temple at the edge of the waves and a legend of drowned pagodas. The story of Mamallapuram from its Sangam-age port to the 2004 tsunami, through the first European accounts and photographs, with our own assessments.

By GK Global, Adimali, Munnar · Trails & Tales by GK

On a flat stretch of the Coromandel coast in Tamil Nadu, about 55 km south of Chennai, a low ridge of pink-grey granite rises out of the sand. For about a hundred years in the seventh and eighth centuries, sculptors working for the Pallava kings of Kanchipuram turned this ridge, its boulders and the beach beside it into a vast open-air workshop. They cut temples out of the living rock, carved caves with some of the finest reliefs in India, sculpted a whole cliff face into a single story in stone, and finally built one of the earliest free-standing stone temples in the south, right at the edge of the sea. The place is Mamallapuram, better known to travellers as Mahabalipuram, and to generations of sailors simply as the Seven Pagodas.

This article sets out what is firmly known about the site, from the Pallava kings and their inscriptions to the first European accounts of the 1770s and 1780s, the lighthouse on the temple roof and the discoveries made after the 2004 tsunami. Where the evidence runs out and opinion begins, we say so, and our own reading of the evidence is kept in clearly marked boxes.

Three names for one town

The official name, Mamallapuram, means "the town of Mamalla", "the great wrestler". This was a title of the Pallava king Narasimhavarman I (reigned about 630–668), the ruler most closely linked with the site. The older and more popular Mahabalipuram connects the town with Mahabali, the generous demon-king of Hindu legend who was humbled by Vishnu in his dwarf incarnation, Vamana. When William Chambers wrote the first English account of the place in 1788, the local Tamil name he recorded was Mavalipuram, which he explained as the city of the great Bali.

The third name, the Seven Pagodas, came from the sea. For European sailors working the Coromandel coast, the cluster of temple towers on the shore and on the hill was a landmark visible from far out, and "pagoda" was the usual European word for an Indian temple. Nobody has ever been able to count seven of them on land. That gap between the name and what can actually be seen is where the town's most famous legend begins, and we return to it below.

Before the Pallavas: a Sangam-age port

Mamallapuram was not a new town when the Pallava sculptors arrived. Megalithic burial urns dating to around the beginning of the Common Era have been found in the area, and some scholars identify the town with a port named Nirppeyarru in the Sangam-age Tamil poem Perumpanarruppadai, which describes a busy harbour with ships and warehouses. The identification is not certain, but the coast here had clearly been settled and used for trade long before the seventh century.

The strongest physical evidence came after the Indian Ocean tsunami of 26 December 2004. At Saluvankuppam, a fishing hamlet about 4 km north of the main monuments, the waves and the later clearing of sand exposed a rock bearing inscriptions of the Chola and Rashtrakuta periods that referred to a temple of Subrahmanya (Murugan). ASI archaeologists dug into a nearby mound in 2005 and found a granite shrine of the Pallava period, built on top of a much older brick temple. The brick shrine faces north, unlike later temples built to the rules of the agamas, and from its bricks, pottery and layout the excavators dated it to the late Sangam period, perhaps around two thousand years ago. Layers of sea sand and shell inside the excavation suggested that the shrine had been damaged by waves, possibly more than once.

The Pallavas and the stone revolution

The Pallavas ruled much of northern Tamil country from their capital at Kanchipuram, about 65 km inland, from roughly the fourth to the ninth century. Before the late sixth century, temples in the Tamil region were built of brick, timber and plaster, and almost none survive. The change came with Mahendravarman I (about 600–630), a king who was also a playwright. At Mandagapattu, in today's Villupuram district, an inscription of his proudly describes a shrine made without brick, timber, metal or mortar: a cave cut straight into the granite. It is one of the first rock-cut temples in the Tamil country.

His son Narasimhavarman I Mamalla carried the idea much further. He is remembered in history for defeating the Chalukya king Pulakeshin II and capturing the Chalukya capital, Vatapi (Badami), in about 642. Mamallapuram, the port of the Pallava kingdom, bears his title. Later kings, especially Narasimhavarman II, better known by his title Rajasimha (about 700–728), moved on from carving rock to building with cut stone: the Shore Temple here and the great Kailasanatha temple at Kanchipuram are his. Rajasimha's reign is also linked with an embassy from the Pallava court to Tang China recorded in Chinese sources, a reminder that this was a seafaring kingdom.

Arjuna's Penance, or the Descent of the Ganges

The most famous single work at Mamallapuram is a granite cliff face, nearly 30 metres long and some 13 metres high, carved from end to end into one crowded scene. Gods, celestial beings, sages, hunters, monkeys, deer, lions and a herd of life-size elephants all turn towards a natural cleft in the middle of the rock. In the cleft swim nagas, serpent deities with human upper bodies. Traces of a cistern on top of the rock suggest that water could be released to run down the cleft on festival days, turning the carving into a living picture.

What the scene shows has been debated since the nineteenth century. One reading follows the old local name, Arjuna's Penance: the hero of the Mahabharata standing on one leg in severe austerity to win a divine weapon from Shiva. The other reading sees the sage Bhagiratha, whose penance brought the heavenly river Ganga down to earth, and the cleft as the river itself. A beloved detail beside the elephants shows a cat standing on its hind legs in mock penance while mice play around it, a sculptor's joke about false piety that appears in Indian fable literature.

The cave temples

Around the hill are about a dozen mandapas, pillared halls cut into the granite. Their columns often rest on seated lions, a Pallava signature. Inside are some of the finest reliefs in Indian art. In the Varaha cave, Vishnu as a boar lifts the earth goddess Bhudevi from the ocean, and nearby panels show Gajalakshmi bathed by elephants and Durga standing above a severed head. In the Mahishasuramardini cave, one long panel shows the goddess Durga, riding her lion and drawing her bow, driving back the buffalo-headed demon Mahisha and his army; the opposite wall shows Vishnu asleep on the cosmic serpent. The Krishna mandapa holds a broad relief of Krishna lifting Mount Govardhana to shelter herders and their cattle, full of everyday detail such as a man milking a cow.

About 4 km north, at Saluvankuppam, is the Tiger Cave, a small shrine framed by a ring of carved yali heads, lion-like monsters that early visitors took for tigers. It carries an inscription with the title Atiranachanda, usually linked with Rajasimha.

The Pancha Rathas: temples carved from a single rock

At the southern end of the town, five temples stand in a row on the sand. They were not built: each was carved, top to bottom, out of one long granite outcrop that sloped from north to south. The local names, Dharmaraja, Bhima, Arjuna, Nakula–Sahadeva and Draupadi rathas, after the five Pandava brothers and their wife in the Mahabharata, are later popular names with no basis in the Pallava inscriptions. The word ratha means chariot, but these were never meant to move; they are full-size models of different temple forms. Draupadi's ratha copies a thatched hut-shrine, Bhima's a long barrel-roofed hall, and the Dharmaraja ratha, the tallest, a pyramidal tower of the kind that would become the standard southern vimana. A life-size elephant, a lion and a Nandi bull were carved from boulders alongside them.

None of the rathas was completed or consecrated. The inscriptions on the Dharmaraja ratha, written in the elegant Pallava-Grantha script, list royal titles that link it with Narasimhavarman I, though some scholars attribute the inscriptions to a later king.

The Shore Temple

The Shore Temple, built in the reign of Rajasimha in the early eighth century, is one of the oldest structural stone temples in South India. Instead of carving into the rock, the builders cut granite blocks and assembled them. The plan is unusual: two shrines to Shiva, one facing east towards the sea and one facing west towards the town, with a third, smaller shrine between them containing a reclining Vishnu carved from the bedrock. Many scholars think the Vishnu shrine is the oldest part, and that the Shiva shrines were built around it. Rows of seated Nandi bulls line the enclosure wall.

For centuries the temple stood exposed to salt wind and sand, and its carvings are softened and worn. When Chambers and his contemporaries saw it in the late eighteenth century, the surf broke against its foundations. Its survival through the 2004 tsunami, when the waves rolled over the beach and into the enclosure but did not bring the towers down, impressed engineers and pilgrims alike.

The Seven Pagodas legend

The story told to every early visitor was that the town had once been far larger and richer, with seven great temples, and that the sea had swallowed all but one. William Chambers, who first visited in 1772 and published his account in the first volume of Asiatick Researches in 1788, recorded that older people among the local population remembered seeing the tops of several pagodas far out in the sea. John Goldingham, writing in the same journal in 1798, heard a similar story: a man's father had seen gilded temple tops above the waves. In the Hindu version, the gods themselves were jealous of the city's splendour and sent a flood to destroy it. The English poet Robert Southey took up the tale in The Curse of Kehama (1810), and through him the Seven Pagodas entered European Romantic literature.

For two centuries the submerged temples remained a matter of hearsay. Then evidence began to appear. Underwater surveys in 2002 by India's National Institute of Oceanography, together with the Scientific Exploration Society of Britain, recorded structures of cut stone on the sea floor off the Shore Temple, including what appeared to be walls and scattered blocks, published in Current Science in 2004. When the tsunami of December 2004 pulled the sea back for some minutes, people on the beach reported seeing rows of rocks and structures far out; afterwards the shifted sand exposed a number of sculptures near the shore, including a large stone lion and an elephant head.

Krishna's Butter Ball

On the slope of the hill near the Ganesha ratha sits a granite boulder about 6 metres high, resting on a tiny base on a steep incline. Its popular name, Krishna's Butter Ball, compares it to the butter that the child Krishna loved to steal. It is entirely natural, the product of the slow weathering of granite along its joints. A widely repeated story says that a Governor of Madras in the early twentieth century tried to have it moved with a team of elephants and failed.

A temple, a beacon and a lighthouse

On the summit of the hill, above the Mahishasuramardini cave, stands the small Pallava temple called Olakkannesvara, often explained as "the lord of the flame-eye". In May 1887 the British authorities placed a wick lamp inside a fourth-order optic and lantern on its roof, and for some years the temple served as the Seven Pagodas light for ships on the coast. A new lighthouse, a circular tower of natural stone, was built beside it and became fully functional in 1904. It is still operated by the Directorate General of Lighthouses and Lightships and has been open to visitors since 2011.

Rediscovery: from Chambers to the World Heritage List

Mamallapuram was never abandoned. Later dynasties, including the Cholas and the Vijayanagara rulers, endowed its temples, and the Sthalasayana Perumal temple in the town, rebuilt in the Vijayanagara period, is one of the 108 sacred shrines of Vishnu praised by the Alvar poet-saints. But its Pallava monuments gradually lost their meaning as their inscriptions became unreadable to later generations.

European scholarship began with William Chambers (1788) and John Goldingham (1798), whose copies of the inscriptions he could not read helped later scholars decipher them. Benjamin Guy Babington published a fuller account with plates in 1830 in the Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society, and in 1869 M. W. Carr collected these and other papers in Descriptive and Historical Papers relating to the Seven Pagodas on the Coromandel Coast. Artists such as Thomas and William Daniell, John Gantz and Henry Salt drew the monuments; from the 1850s photographers followed, and in the 1880s the newly organised Archaeological Survey in Madras, under Alexander Rea, documented the caves. The Pallava inscriptions were systematically published by E. Hultzsch in South Indian Inscriptions from 1890 onwards.

In 1984 UNESCO inscribed the Group of Monuments at Mahabalipuram on the World Heritage List. Today the town is also a living centre of stone carving: the Government College of Architecture and Sculpture, founded in 1957, trains sculptors in traditional methods, and workshops along the main roads still turn out deities in granite for temples across India and abroad. Every winter the Mamallapuram Dance Festival is held with the Arjuna's Penance relief as a backdrop, and in October 2019 the town hosted the informal summit between India's Prime Minister and China's President, chosen partly for its ancient links with China.

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