Temples in Tiruvakkarai

Tiruvakkarai is a village on the banks of the Varaha (Gingee)i river and lies about 19 km. from Villupuram on the Mailam-Gingee road. It is in the Villupuram taluk of the South Arcot district. It has a temple which has been in existence from the days of Aditya I. It is a stone temple, then known only as that of Karralip-perumal-adigal.

Chandramoulisvara temple (Mandapa)

In the campus of this temple there are the following two shrines:

i) A ruined Siva shrine, called in the inscriptions that of Sivalokamudaiya-Paramasvamin, built by Sembiyan Mahadevi-yar: vide a 16th year inscription of Rajaraja I (ARE 200 of 1904).

ii) A Vishnu shrine, dedicated to Varadaraja Perumal. It is mentioned in the Sanskrit portion of a bilingual Grantha-Tamil inscription of the second year of Udaiyar Adhirajendra deva, found on the west wall of the mandapa in front of the shrine, that the srivimana, which had been previously built of brick by Kochchola (i.e., Kochchenganan of the late Sangam period) was reconstructed of stone (ARE 206 of 1904).

We are concerned here with a multi-pillared mandapa in the second prakara of the temple. On the south wall of the mandapa, there is a second year inscription of Kulottunga Chola deva ‘who took Madurai and the crowned head of the Pandya’ (i.e., Kulottunga III), recording the building of the mandapa by a certain Ammaiyappan Gandara-Suriyan Sambuvarayan, ‘who took the Fandya Country’ (ARE 190 of 1904). This is a hundred-pillared hall and not a thousand-pillared hall as has been wrongly mentioned in the records {vide my correction in Early Chola Art, Pt. I, pp. 193-95 and also Early Chola Temples, pp. 201-2). This mandapa could thus be dated as belonging to a.d. 1180. Gandara Suriyan was the builder of the outer gopwram also. (PI. 301).