Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Serious students of history have compared the genealogy traced out in the Anbil
plates of Sundara Chola and the Tiruvalangadu plates of Uttama Chola. These
plates, along with the Kanyakumari inscription of Virarajendra and the Leiden
plates, provide a wealth of information about the Chola period. The Tamil
classic Kalingathu Parani too dwells on the mythical ancestry of the Cholas as
eulogised in these inscriptions. K.V. Subrahmanya of Coimbatore published the
results of his extensive study of the plates in Epigraphia Indicain the mid1930s. We owe a great deal to this seminal work and from it we learn a lot about
the contents of the plates.
As a matter of physical detail, all the 21 plates are held and bound by a circular
copper ring and the impressive regal seal is mounted on this ring. The Chola
emblem, the tiger, along with two lamps and fish forms, and a Sanskrit text are
etched in the seal. It is the extensive Tamil portion consisting of 332 lines that
sets out all the practical details of the grant in amazing detail. While the Sanskrit
section deals with the ethereal, the Tamil section dwells on the practical. This
portion specifies that it was on the 92nd day after the 21st year of Rajarajas
reign that the intent of grant was declared by the emperor to take effect from the
very same day. That an income of 8,943 kalam, 2 tuni, 1 kuruniand 1 nali of
paddy accruing from the assessment of some 97 veli of land (the charter
specifies sophisticated subunits and fractions that needs to be added to the
97 veli) would constitute the grant. It lists out the 26 villages that border
Anaimangalamconstituting a scheduleand the officials who surveyed it and
the authorities who signed on behalf of these villages concurring with the grant.
Further, taxes from the village, which would have been naturally the right of the
king, is bequeathed again on the vihara and the monastery.
The taxes levied make an awesome listwater cess, taxes due to the state when
people marry, taxes on sheep herds, grazing, cloth taxes on looms, washermen
stones, pottery, etc. The Tamil phrases used are specific for each kind of tax.
The officialdom and the nomenclature used to describe bureaucracy are equally
impressive, establishing yet another versatile facet of the Tamil language. One
finds phrases like Tirumandiravolai-nayagam, denoting the superintendent of
royal writs, naduvirukkum,meaning arbitrator, puravuvari, the tax department,
and varipottayam, officials who maintained the tax registers. The recording of
dates is so meticulous that one can infer that the survey of Anaimangalam took
two years and 72 days to complete and that the construction of the vihara took
no less than nine years.