01Rajasimha’s temple
Before Rajasimha the Pallavas cut their temples from living rock. He built in blocks of sandstone on a granite base, and the Kailasanatha was his finest work. Fifty-eight small shrines line the inner wall, each once painted; traces of the colour survive. Around the base runs a line of Rajasimha’s titles in the ornamental Pallava Grantha script, more than 250 of them. The sanctum holds a sixteen-sided black linga, and the walls show Shiva in many forms: Gangadhara, Tripurantaka, Urdhva Tandava, Somaskanda.
02The conqueror who gave
Around 740 the Chalukya king Vikramaditya II defeated the Pallavas and entered Kanchi. Instead of plundering, he returned the temple’s treasures and added gifts, and he had that recorded in a Kannada inscription on a pillar of this temple. His queens then built the Virupaksha temple at Pattadakal, and its plan follows this one. The temple is in the care of the ASI and is still in worship.
The life of this place
- c. 700–728Rajasimha builds the temple.
- c. 740Vikramaditya II takes Kanchi and records his gifts here in Kannada.
On the western edge of town by the Vegavati. Bend low to enter the narrow passage around the sanctum.
