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The temple had surpluses from its annual income. Occasionally, such surpluses were utilised in celebrating festivals, etc or in helping the poor people. Kings, chiefs, merchants and land owners vied with one another in presenting rich offerings to their favorite places of worship. The gifts of the temple were of numerous kinds. In several ways, the temples were centers of hoarded wealth.

The temple was a growing institution of uncommon influence of great wealth and power. Besides being a center of religious worship, it also functioned as a center for the learning of cultural enjoyment and for economic and political transactions.^[1]

The village assembly often met in the local temple and transacted its business. It possessed a large acreage of the devadana lands, which were given for cultivation to the ryots under agreed contracts. Its vast premises housed many families of working people like weavers and oil pressers. They served the temple in their own turn, which the king recognised and so rewarded them with the remission of certain taxes. Often the temple authorities collected taxes on behalf of the king and paid him in a lump amount.^[2]

Indirectly, the gifts of land to temples were considered meritorious and pious people thought it worthy to reclaim land in order to gift it to the temple. Gifts of money to the temples are numerous in the records of this region. They were made for various objects like the maintenance of services in temples, festivals monthly annual or occasional, the feeding of Brahmans and improvement of tanks. Gifts in kind took the form of animals like sheep or oxen, produce of the fields, vessels and ornaments useful for the gods.

The growth of urbanization and the expansion of commerce were interlinked which unfolded with the over-arching frame work of the temple and evolved into an integrative central institution in medieval Tamil Nadu. Donations to the temples were made by several classes of donors -royalty, landed elite, military officials, merchants as well as corporate bodies. It was the income from the donations or deposits which would be used to pay for the service for which the endowment was made. Most of the services for which endowments made were lamps, the ritual bath, turmeric paste, flower garden or supplying flowers and so on.

There are references to the endowment of land belonging to the village, which formed the part of the common land of the Sabha in this village. All sorts of income were remitted to this temple. Another inscription mentioned Konerinmai Kondan Virarajendra Chola about the donation of a village to the Panchavaraveswarar temple of Uraiyur as devadana.^[3]

Footnotes and references:

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[1]:

A.R.E., 163 of 1910.

[2]:

Appadorai, A., op.cit., p.292.

[3]:

Sitaram Gurumurthy, Coimbatore Mavatta Kalvettukal, Vol.II, Coimbatore, 2007, p.91.