Ram's Cafe

A YouTube Video on Raja Raja Cholan, the Tamil king (emperor?) who lived around the year 1000CE. Interesting stuff - but not sure if the producer got a little carried away in some of his interpretations of history - but an impressive production, no doubt. This documentary also includes temples built by other Tamil kings (such as the Madurai Meenakshi Temple built by Pandiya kings, Madurai being the capital city of the Pandiya kings. As a quick note, the major dynasties that ruled what is today's Tamilnadu (and parts of Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, and occasionally parts of today's Sri Lanka - but mostly Tamilnadu - were the Pallava, Chera, Chola and Pandiya kings). Another dynasty that ruled southern India was the Vijayanagara Empire, also covered briefly in this documentary. Other items of interest in this are the use of elephants for work as well in warfare, the techniques used in making the sculptures - both granite and bronze, and an interesting theory on how the massive capstone weighing over 80 tons (possibly made of two pieces) was moved to the top of the Thanjavur Big Temple tower - check it out.

South Indian architecture is also known as Dravidian architecture.

You can watch these on YouTube as well - but I thought it would be much quieter around here. You can click on one of the five tabs below - it's easier to step through the parts that way. Sorry about the background color for the tabs - I know, it's really hard to read, I'll fix it one of these days :)