Tārācuram

Few years ago I was in a small hamlet, called Paḻaiyāṟai (meaning “old river course”) in the company of few of my German colleagues who took me to a high medieval Cōḻa temple for study.* This place is little known to scholars when compared with the much familiar Tañcāvūr, Kaṅkaikoṇṭacōḻapuram, Tārācuram, Tirupuvaṉam and Kuṃbhakōṇam (Nanda et al. 1997: fig. 1).  Paḻaiyāṟai and its antiquely integrated villages (infra) lay within a radius of 8 kms away from Tārācuram to its southeast (Map). There is a middle Cōḻa temple, originally Arumoḻideveśvaram,  today called Somanātha.  I had no idea to work on either the temple or the village at that time but in due course an idea crept into my mind when I thought of the melancholic natives of the village whose faces were awfully serene and mysteriously silent as though they had lost something (infra). I thought an article should be written to honour these forgotten psychic people that were steeped in oblivious glories and vanishing memories, handed down orally from generation to generation. The mental disposition and ideas expressed by the people were interesting from the socio-cultural point of view. Perhaps they wanted to forget their great grandfather’s attestations few of them were related to the Cōḻas, members of the royal household, servants of the palace or inhabitants of the village where the ruling family had its capital-villa. It was this psychology of the innocent people that persuaded the author to work on this brief article.