Temples, Inscriptions and Historical (Re)construction: The “Epigraphical Persona” of the Cōḻa Queen Cempiyaṉ Mahādevī (Tenth Century)

Abstract

Taking a bronze sculpture housed by the prestigious Freer Gallery of Art of Washington, D.C., as point of departure, this paper aims to retrace historians’ (re)construction of the tenth-century Cōḻa Queen Cempiyaṉ Mahādevī’s biography in a vivid illustration of the omnipotence often allotted to epigraphical sources when it comes to dealing with material culture. Wife and mother of Cōḻa kings, Cempiyaṉ Mahādevī is unanimously hailed nowadays as one of the greatest historical figures of medieval south India, a queen who “carved a niche for herself” (Balambal 1998: 176) in History by her impressive patronage of the holy places of Tamil Śaivism. What people are less aware of, however, is that without the numerous inscriptions mentioning her name which have been collected since the turn of the twentieth century and the launch by the Archaeological Survey of British India of its program for south Indian epigraphy, the destiny of the “Queen Mother of the Cōḻa house” would have simply remained unknown to us. The article points how interpretive strategies implemented by successive generations of scholars in order to engage in dialogue with a largely unknown and scattered corpus of epigraphical testimonies lead to the elaboration and diffusion throughout the secondary literature of what can be called Queen Cempiyaṉ Mahādevī’s “epigraphical persona”.