SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES South Asian Studies ROUTLEDGE Routled Taylor & Francis BASAS Routledge ISSN: 0266-6030 (Print) 2153-2699 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsas20 Biographies of South Indian Temple Inscriptions Leslie C. Orr To cite this article: Leslie C. Orr (2019) Biographies of South Indian Temple Inscriptions, South Asian Studies, 35:2, 193-205, DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2019.1641972 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2019.1641972 Published online: 24 Oct 2019. Submit your article to this journal C Article views: 3 Q View related articles View Crossmark data C Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rsas20
South Asian Studies, 2019 Vol. 35, No. 2, 193-205, https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2019.1641972 ROUTLEDGE Routledge Taylor & Francis Group Check for updates Biographies of South Indian Temple Inscriptions Leslie C. Orr* Department of Religions & Cultures, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada This paper is a preliminary investigation of South Indian temple inscriptions from the perspective of their production and of their physical character - as material objects and as documents produced for particular purposes, making history and having histories of their own. I explore this topic through several case studies of groups of inscriptions engraved on the walls of Hindu temples in Tamilnadu, at different points in medieval history, from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries. I consider the oral, material and performative processes that resulted in the production of inscriptions and investigate their 'afterlives'. This paper tries to make sense of the mixed functions and statuses of South Indian temple inscriptions - as both objects and texts, as authoritative yet often illegible or ephemeral, as highly local yet engaged with cosmopolitan (royal, professional, legal) and even transcendental realms - to explore the intersection of material culture and religious life. Keywords: inscriptions; Tamil; temple; documents of stone; text as object Introduction Stone inscriptions engraved on the walls of temples - fre- quently records of gifts made to the temples - were pro- duced in the region of South India today known as Tamilnadu, in very substantial numbers (tens of thou- sands), starting in the eighth century and continuing for the next thousand years. Through much of the twentieth century, scholars used these inscriptions, composed in Tamil and Sanskrit, as sources for political history. In more recent times, the inscriptions have been employed by scholars - including myself - to construct religious, economic, and social histories of South India. What we have barely undertaken in the study of South Indian inscriptions, or in Indian epigraphy more generally, is a consideration of the inscriptions from the perspective of their production and of their physical character - as mate- rial objects and as documents produced for particular pur- poses, making history and having histories of their own." Those of us who use the inscriptions as 'sources' often consider them as fossils, frozen in time - traces of a vanished past - and those who composed and engraved the inscriptions in medieval times were concerned for the future, intending them to be permanent documents, fixed in stone. Yet those who interacted with the inscriptions