Past People Places : Stop 2: Nageswaraswamy temple

Kumbakonam Trip: Stop 2: Nageswaraswamy temple and sun worship: We drove into the heart of Kumbakonam town, and past the other big temples, to another one which, according to the brochure, had been vandalised and was on the list so that we could see it before everything was gone.
Entering the temple by the main gopuram, you come across a large open space. To one side is a passage that runs along the wall on one side, and the temple on the other. Nithya Balaji and I found a chariot there; a horse and a wheel. Her theory was that the alternating spokes were for the different hours of the day, and another set of lines for day and night.
Appa later pointed out the various distanced lines on the wheel, marking hours, minutes, seconds, days , months and years.
It was a very pleasant day, so the lack of sunlight didn't let us see whether it was true or not.
But a Pradeep Chakravarthy moving at full speed form the gopuram into the temple caught our attention- that as well as his calling to us, and we entered the temple's mandapams.
We had soon gone into an open-to-sky section though, with a lot of inscriptions and figurines.
According to Pradeep Chakravarthy: This was an Aditya I (Chola) temple, constructed when the Cholas had left Parzeyarey as dominion chiefs, and wanted to be the supreme rulers of the Tamirz lands. They had had enough of being petty chieftains, so the warlord Vijayalaya Chola seized Thanjavur in the mid 800's. That was the beginning for them, and the end for the Pallavas. Soon they had conquered most of the delta region and shifted the capital to Thanjavur. Now they wanted to be seen as great rulers, so they started building larger temples, and associating themselves with long forgotten Sangam ancestors who were acclaimed as having done some great deed or the other.
Their temples started to get more complex only with Aditya I and Parantaka I.
This is one of those temples built by Aditya, and has verya simple style. It has a base piece with some simple carvings, a plinth, some idols in niches, some pillars around them, a piece above their heads, again simply carved, and another piece on top before the gopuram. The temple in its originality had only 1 shrine, and the niche images(which unfortunately have been damaged due to sandblasting) around it with inscriptions. Each succeeding dynasty added to the temple, right upto the Nayaks and Marathas. I think I even saw a Tamil Nadu Arasu(Government of Tamilnadu) elephant.
Some of the idols in these niches are believed to be of the royal family. They are being vandalised and defaced now, though.
We looked at the inscriptions, trying to decipher them for a few minutes.
Then we went inside to listen to some songs sung on the temple. As we were moving round the temple though, we spotted an Ardanadeeswarar. Pradeep jumped at it and said " You can see an example of how men and women are of different proportions here". The Arthanadeeswar has been made of stone, with one hip higher than the other, and that leg bent, keeping both sides the same height, but maintaining the male:female ratio.

After listening to the songs, we were directed to a small temple on the outside of the mandapam we were sitting in. This is a sun worship temple. One of the original gods in Vedic times, and still slightly worshipped at the time of the Cholas, this was built for the sun worshppers. Sun worship was not practiced in the Vedic region alone, but also in Zorastrianism.
The Sun slowly evolved and merged with Vishnu. Who is worshipped in Konarak. This temple, with its time chariot and sun temple, may have been the basis for the Konarak temple in Orissa.

We then left exited the temple, and went back to the common area outside. Here, I asked Pradeep Chakravarthy about a pair of lions that i had seen. He then told me the difference between Chola lions and Pallava lions. These were Chola lions, identifiable by the shape of the pillar, the space between the head and the pillar and the decorations on the pillar.
We then took pictures with the horses and wheels, and everyone stood around posing with them. As I walked to the chariot on the other side of where I had seen it first, I noticed a set of steps going up to behind them. I made a mental note of it, and after taking my pictures, walked up those stairs and stood behind the horse, and took some pictures from there. Someone asked Priya Thyagarajan to sit on the horse for a picture, and she started climbing up the plinth by the side of the horse. Then when she had been struggling for a few minutes, she noticed me standing there, and said "how did you get up there?" . "There are stairs" I said.
She:" couldn't you have told me that earlier?".

Then I descended and after some more clicking, it was time to leave. We got back into the bus, but got out the same instant as our destination was very close by.