Last November, I visited the Chola-era temples of Thanjavur and Gangaikondacholapuram. The grandeur of the Brihadeshwara temple - towering vimanas, massive Nandi sculptures, the 81 carved dance positions on the upper walls was very inspiring and .... intriguing. But what stayed with me were the silences. chipped inscriptions, broken carvings, walls with missing context. The feeling that so much is still here, and yet so much has already been lost.
This talk is about a quiet, personal effort to understand what remains. I started with the photographs I took during my visit, collected images from open datasets I could find online, and began piecing together fragments-of architecture, sculpture, text, and layout to try and tell a small part of the story of these temples.
I came across things that surprised me. One sculpture, when seen from the left and right, looked exactly the same - a visual palindrome. A few lines of text extracted from the walls pointed to Kamban’s version of the Ramayana - a retelling rooted in Chola poetic tradition, different from the one most of us know.
I’ll walk through what I learned. From the symbolic design of the temple complex and the socio-economic life it once supported, to the inscriptions that reference Rajaraja Chola and the mythical yali creatures carved which makes its appearance everywhere. I’ll also share how free and open-source tools helped me: from extracting Tamil and Sanskrit inscriptions using OCR, to mapping the layout with QGIS, and visualizing temple forms with Meshroom and open data.
Temples, especially ones like Brihadeshwara, were not just places of worship, they were centers of life, knowledge, and art! This talk is a reflection on what it means to try and listen to them today, using what’s accessible and open.
P.S you can find some of the pictures and the inferences in the doc attached .
