THE REGIONAL KINGDOMS OF EARLY MEDIEVAL INDIAthe Gahadavalas. The king was obviously keen to strengthen his hold on
this newly conquered region and did not mind the substantial loss of
revenue which he incurred in this way.
This new function of the land grants became even more obvious in the
South in the context of the rise of the great royal temples which symbolised
the power and religious identity of the respective realm. From the eleventh
to the thirteenth centuries such large temples were built in various regional
kingdoms of India. They were often three to four times bigger than earlier
temples. Some important examples are the Kandariya Mahadeva Temple at
Khajuraho (around 1002), the Rajarajeshvara Temple at Thanjavur
(Tanjore) (around 1012) and the Udayeshvara Temple at Udaipur, the
capital of the North Indian kingdom of the Paramaras (c. 1059–80). Orissa
can boast of a particularly impressive sequence of such temples: the
Lingaraja Temple at Bhubaneshwar (around 1060), the Jagannath Temple
of Puri (c. 1135) and the great Sun Temple (c. 1250). So far these temples
have mainly attracted the attention of the historians of art and architecture
and they have not been placed into the context of political history.
The construction of these temples coincided with the increasing
samantisation of the regional kingdoms of India. The temples were
obviously supposed to be a counterweight to the divisive forces prevailing
in those kingdoms. In order to fulfil this function they were endowed with
great grants of land often located near the capital but also sometimes in
distant provinces and even in the territories of the samantas (see Map 10).
For the performance of the royal ritual hundreds of Brahmins and temple
servants were attached to these temples. The very detailed inscriptions of
donors at the great Temple of Thanjavur tell us exactly from which villages
the 137 guards of the temple came. The inscriptions contain instructions to
the respective villages to supply the guards coming from those villages with
rice. Samantarajas and royal officers were obliged to perform special
services in the temple. The personal priest of the king, the Rajguru, was
also the head priest of the royal temple and the manager of its enormous
property.
Although the construction of such great temples was very expensive
they soon became self-supporting and were of great benefit to the king.
Thus Rajaraja, the king who built the great Temple at Thanjavur, donated
altogether the equivalent of 502 kg of gold to this temple until the twenty-
ninth year of his reign (1014). But the annual deliveries of grain to the
temple from the land granted to it were worth about the same amount.
Surplus funds of the temple were lent to villages in the core area of the
realm for agricultural development projects at the rate of 12 per cent
interest per annum.
The economic and political functions of the temple were realised in the
role of the king in the royal ritual. The Linga, the phallic symbol of Shiva,
in the sanctum of the temple was often named after the king who had