We now wish to take our readers, who are already well acquainted with Mamallapuram, once more to that place.

It has been more than three hundred years since the time when Mahendra Pallava and Mamalla Narasimha transformed this port city into a dreamland through their wondrous works of sculpture.

The city’s appearance has somewhat faded. The change does not bring joy to our hearts. Tall mansions have crumbled and lie in ruins. There is no longer the bustling crowd in the streets and at the harbor as there once was. The thriving trade has diminished. There are no longer great warehouses. The streets are not piled high with mountains of goods for export and import.

Once, we saw how the sea had entered the land, forming a deep canal, creating a natural harbor where ships could safely anchor. Now, that canal has silted up with sand, its depth greatly reduced. Only small boats and canoes can now enter that shallow backwater. The larger ships and wooden vessels must anchor farther out at sea. Goods must be loaded onto boats and ferried out to those ships.

Yet, during the intervening years, Mamallapuram has acquired some new distinctions as well. Most notably, the beautiful stone temple shining on the seashore captivates both our eyes and our minds. It is not like the cave temples hewn into the hills during the time of Mahendra and Mamalla. This temple was built by bringing stones from the hills and assembling them. It gleams like a splendid jeweled crown placed upon the head of the King of the Ocean. Ah! How can one describe the beauty of that temple’s structure?

Besides this, in the center of the city stands the Vishnu temple of Vinnagara, where the Lord who measured the three worlds reclines. This Vinnagara was constructed by Parameswara Pallava, who cherished both Shaivism and Vaishnavism as the two eyes of his realm. Thirumangai Azhwar came to this temple, worshipped the reclining Perumal, and sang Tamil hymns that overflowed with waves of devotion. From his verses, we learn that even in his time, the Pallava empire flourished in glory, and Mamallapuram was a prosperous port city:

“With heaps of precious gems, With mighty tusked elephants, With piles of splendid navaratna stones, I have wandered everywhere, bearing these treasures, In ships that sail the Mallai sea, To the sacred reclining place at Mallai, To those whose minds are full of virtue, Go around them in worship, O my gentle heart!”

A hundred years after the time of Thirumangai Azhwar, the sun of the Pallava Empire had set. The glory of the great city of Kanchi, famed as ‘unmatched in learning’, had diminished. The commercial prosperity of ‘Mallai, where ships sail the sea’, had waned.

Yet, the wondrous sculptural arts of that immortal city, which bestowed everlasting fame upon the Tamil land, suffered no decline. The intricate and marvelous sculptures carved into the rocky walls, the temple towers and chariots hewn from the hills—these, even after three centuries,