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In many of the oldest known sites of the Pāṇḍya country located not far from the Kāverī River in Tamil Nadu, a dual Hindu obedience, Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva, was developed concomitantly. Alongside these Bhakti deities, others are present in these places of communication with the sacred. As stone figures attached to the site and texts evoking the place are the two means used to give form to their deities, one would expect these two mediums to interact, but it is often difficult to correlate them in the Tamil country of the first millennium. This paper aims at exploring such possible relationships at Tiruveḷḷaṟai, the earliest remains of which date to the 8th c. The site has unique archaeological features, such as a svastika-shaped well and the earliest known depictions of some of Kṛṣṇa’s feats; it inspired hymns of the Tamil Vaiṣṇava devotional corpus, the Divyaprabandham, and offers numerous inscriptions. The link between Śiva, Viṣṇu and local goddesses proves to be as remarkable here as that between texts and archaeology.

In many of the oldest known sites of the Pāṇḍya country located not far from the Kāverī River in Tamil Nadu, a dual Hindu obedience, Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva, was developed concomitantly.1 Alongside these Bhakti deities, others are present in these places of communication with the sacred. As stone figures attached to the site and texts evoking the place are the two means used to give form to their deities, one would expect these two mediums to interact, but it is often difficult to correlate them in the Tamil country of the first millennium. This paper aims at exploring such possible relationships at Tiruveḷḷaṟai, the earliest remains of which date to the 8th c. The site has unique archaeological features, such as a svastika-shaped well and the earliest known depictions of some of Kṛṣṇa's feats; it inspired hymns of the Tamil Vaiṣṇava devotional corpus, the Divyaprabandham, and offers numerous inscriptions. The link between Śiva, Viṣṇu and local goddesses proves to be as remarkable here as that between texts and archaeology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents and analyses a corpus of thirty Tamil inscriptions located in the region of the Kāvēri river related to a Pāṇḍyan king called Māṟañcaṭaiyaṉ Varaguṇa Mahārāja. This king, identified as Varaguṇa ii whose reign may have begun around 862a.d., appears to have conquered the Kāvēri region and maintained his sovereignty over this highly coveted territory over a period of 13 years, starting in his 4th regnal year. Almost half of the epigraphs gathered in this corpus record donations by the king himself, and, if the places where they were engraved seem to echo a sacred pattern found in the Tamil hymns of Bhakti, bestowing upon Varaguṇa an aura of kingdevotee, these gifts, inserted in a network of significantly powerful locations in the socio-political and religious context of the 9th century, become "gifts of power". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the origins of the Nataraja cult in the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India. The trajectory of the dancing Shiva is traced: from the processional worship of metal icons outside the sanctum to the cultic elevation of the Nataraja bronze into the sanctum at Chidambaram. Archaeometallurgical, iconographic and literary evidence discussed shows that the Nataraja bronze, depicting Shiva's anandatandava or 'dance of bliss', was a Pallava innovation (seventh to mid-ninth century), rather than tenth-century Chola as widely believed. That this formulation was informed of 'cosmic' or metaphysical connotations is also argued on the basis of the testimony of the hymns of Tamil saints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper emphasizes the role played by the sculptural tradition in the elaboration of religious narratives that today are mostly studied through texts. It aims to demonstrate that according to the documents we know, the legend of Kṛṣṇa has been built through one continuous dialogue between different media, namely texts and carvings, and different linguistic areas, Indo-Aryan and Dravidian. Taking the motif of the butter theft as a basis, we stress the role played by the sculptural tradition and Tamil poetry, two elements less studied than others, at the foundation of a pan-Indian Kṛṣṇa-oriented heritage. We posit that the iconographic formula of the cowherds' station as the significant background of the infancy of Kṛṣṇa led to the motif of the young god stealing butter in the texts, through the isolation of one significant element of the early sculpted images. The survey of the available documents leads to the conclusion that, in the southern part of the peninsula, patterns according to which stone carvings were done have been a source of inspiration in Tamil literature. Poets writing in Tamil authors knew texts transmitted in Sanskrit, Prākrit, and Pāli, and they certainly had listened to some others to which we have no access today. But we give reasons to assume that the authors of the said texts were also aware of the traditional ways of representing a child Kṛṣṇa in the visual domain. With these various traditions, poets of the Tamil country in the later stage of Tamil Caṅkam literature featured a character they may not have consciously created, as he was already existent in the visual tradition and nurtured by the importance of one landscape animated by cowherds in the legend of Kṛṣṇa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]