Mahabalipuram - Tamilnadu

Other Tourist Places of Tamilnadu

Kanchipuram |Kanyakumari |Kodaikanal |Mahabalipuram |Rameshwaram |Thanjavur | Madurai |Chennai |Ooty |Trichy

Mahabalipuram, the Temple Town of Tamil Nadu, located at a distance of 58-km from Chennai, Mahabalipuram has everything that makes a site memorable; tradition, history, piety, western annals and current importance as a centre of tourism. The history of Mahabalipuram shows the past of two thousand years old, it contains nearly forty monuments of different types including an "open air bas relief" which is the largest in the world, for centuries it has been a centre of pilgrimage, it figures in the early annals of the British search for the picturesque in India in the 18th century, today it attracts shoals of foreigners in search of relaxation and sea bathing, and most strange of all, it has an atomic power plant for neighbor. A small library has been written on it. Over its history and that of its monuments a number of scholarly controversies rage.

Mahabalipuram - A Classical Site Of Indian Historical Archaeology

When the first British visitors went to Mahabalipuram in the eighteenth century, they found the monuments under sand, a few completely so. It must have fallen into neglect after the fall of the Vijayanagar Empire or, at least, Vijayanagar authority. It had prospered under the Cholas and their successors until about the seventeenth century. Europe knew of it as early as the 13th century when, following Marco Polo's visit, it appears in the Catalan Map of 1275. The first European to mention it directly, but with no personal knowledge, of it, did so in 1582. The first English visitor was William Chambers in 1788. Following this, earnest antiquarians from Madras puzzled over it. One of them, Colin Mackenzie, dug out some of the monuments from sand and deputed assistants to collect its traditions and coins. In this way Mahabalipuram became one of the classical sites of Indian historical archaeology.