Thanjavur

In about 1010 CE Rajaraja Chola finished a temple meant to show what his empire could do. The Brihadeeswarar — the Big Temple, as everyone calls it — rises about 66 metres, a single tower of granite built in a delta that has no granite of its own; the stone was hauled from quarries far away. Its capstone is said to weigh around eighty tonnes. A thousand years on it is still a working temple, and with the Chola temples at Gangaikonda Cholapuram and Darasuram it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Cholas were followed by Nayaks and then, from the seventeenth century, by a line of Maratha kings, who left the palace, a Marathi-tinged Tamil, and the Saraswathi Mahal Library. Serfoji II, the most learned of them, filled it with palm-leaf manuscripts, European books and his own notes in the margins.

Thanjavur's crafts are its living memory. Tanjore painting — gods in gesso relief, laid with gold foil and set with glass stones — is still made in workshops across the city. The Thanjavur veena, carved from a single block of jackwood, carries a GI tag, and you can watch one take shape. A few kilometres away at Swamimalai, bronze casters still use the lost-wax method the Chola sculptors used. The palace's art gallery holds Chola bronzes of startling grace.

This is also the heartland of Carnatic music and Bharatanatyam. Thyagaraja, the greatest of the composers, lived at Thiruvaiyaru, 13 km away, where musicians gather each January for the Aradhana in his memory; the dance took much of its modern form in the Thanjavur court. Food is Cauvery-delta vegetarian at its best: banana-leaf meals, kozhukattai and adai, sakkarai pongal, and filter coffee boiled up the old way at small stalls.

See the Big Temple twice: in the early morning, when the granite is cool and the light is low, and again at dusk, when the tower is lit. You walk barefoot, and by noon the courtyard stone burns. The story that the tower's shadow never touches the ground is just that — a story, which your Saint will happily disprove at four in the afternoon. Darasuram, 35 km away near Kumbakonam, is smaller, finer-carved and almost always quiet. If you want a Tanjore painting, buy from the workshop where you watched it being made, and ask how much of the gold is real.

The Big Temple is a place of worship before it is a monument — dress modestly, keep your voice low and don't photograph inside the sanctum. Buy paintings, veenas and bronzes from the artisans or their cooperatives; most of the margin at emporiums never reaches them. The Cauvery delta is farming country under water stress, so treat water in your hotel as precious.

Thanjavur is one stop on a long Tamil temple road. Travellers who loved it usually go on to Madurai, three hours south-west, where the Meenakshi temple shows what Tamil temple-building became five centuries after the Cholas.