La Bhakti d'une reine : : Śiva à Tiruccen̠n̠ampūṇṭi / / Charlotte Schmid.

• VerfasserIn: Schmid, Charlotte,
• Place / Publishing House: Pondichéry : : Institut Français de Pondichéry,, 2014.
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: French
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (vii, 405 pages)
• Other title: Bhakti d'une reine
• Hierarchical level: Monograph
• Statement of Responsibility: Charlotte Schmid.

The heart of this book is a temple built in the Tamil-speaking South in the late 9th or early 10th century CE, at Tirucce?ampu?i, near Trichy. Now abandoned, that temple is one of the earliest known Saiva temples of the Co?a period. The evidence gathered here suggests that this shrine, dedicated to Siva as "the great god of Tirukka?aimu?i", was raised in honour of a deity who is lauded in the Tevaram (7th - 9th centuries), a poetic anthology of the earliest surviving Tamil Saiva hymns. A Pallava queen, Ma?ampavai, whose inscriptions are engraved on pillars found half-buried on the site, was the most prominent among its early patrons. The difficulty pinning down her complex identity echoes the difficulty of defining the site, which seems like a missing link connecting different corpora of evidence: poetic texts, epigraphs, carvings, Pallava monuments and Co?a-period art. The site is therefore explored here in three ways: by an attempt to define "Co?a art" while acknowledging the contribution of Pallava royal temples and monuments raised by minor dynasties which call into question the use of any such dynastic label; by an investigation of the relation between the world of texts and that of archaeology through the study of one particular iconographic ensemble and one epigraphical corpus; and by an examination of the relation between royal and local, particularly in the realm of "Bhakti". As a woman active in this region who claims in Tamil inscriptions to be a member of a Pallava family famed for its Sanskrit epigraphy, and who appears more closely linked to a merchant community than to Brahmins, Ma?ampavai crystallises the encounters between several worlds. The divine realm is not the least complex of them, for Viu, Brahma and female deities are an integral part of the sacred court of the Siva wedded to this place.