The Vaikuntha Perumal Temple in Kanchipuram, Built Under the Pallava King Nandivarman II, Carries the Dynasty's History on Its Cloister Walls and Three Shrines of Vishnu in One Tower

The Vaikuntha Perumal temple in Kanchipuram, Tamil Nadu, puts three shrines of Vishnu in one tower and carries a sculpted history of the Pallava dynasty on the inner face of its cloister. India’s tentative-list dossier for UNESCO, submitted as “Temples of Kanchipuram” on 13 April 2021, credits it to the Pallava king Nandivarman II Pallavamalla, dates his reign to 731 to 796 CE, and calls it a royal edifice next only to the Kailasanatha temple.

Inscriptions inside call the temple Paramesvara Vishnugriham, Sanskrit for house of Vishnu. The saint Tirumangai Alvar called it Paramechchura Vinnagaram in a hymn of ten verses. Today it is the Vaikuntha Perumal temple, and the Archaeological Survey of India looks after it, according to the jurisdiction table in the UNESCO dossier.

Three Vishnus, one tower

The dossier describes a vimana (the tower over the sanctum) with three working storeys, a shrine on each, so that Vishnu can be worshipped in three forms. On the ground floor he sits (asanamurti, Irundan in Tamil), on the first floor he reclines (sayanamurti, Kidandan), and on the second floor he stands (sthanamurti, Ninran). The dossier says this scheme of depicting and worshipping Vishnu is the recommended method, and it calls the tower an ashtanga vimana.

Alexander Rea surveyed the building for the Archaeological Survey and published his account in 1909. He called it second in size and importance, among the Pallava temples of Kanchi, to the Kailasanatha. He described three shrines one over the other, the lowest ringed by three walls and two covered passages, and a tower he thought resembled the ancient viharas (Buddhist monastery buildings). The upper shrines are entered from platforms on the east and a stone stair climbs the tower. Tamil and Sanskrit inscriptions run along its base.

The World History Encyclopedia notes that the temple is dedicated to Vishnu, unusual for a Pallava temple, and counts it among the latest surviving Pallava buildings. The Friends of Heritage Sites exhibit on Google Arts and Culture says it resembles the Kailasanatha in having a granite base under sandstone upper parts. The Kailasanatha, with its own founder’s inscription, is covered in the Kailasanathar temple at Kanchipuram.

A dynasty on the cloister wall

The feature the dossier singles out is a series of narrative panels on the inner face of the cloister mandapa, the pillared hall that runs round the courtyard. By the dossier’s account the panels follow the Pallava story from the dynasty’s legendary ancestors down to the rule of Nandivarman II, and the genealogy given in the Pallava copper-plate grants has been carved almost like a comic strip.

Label inscriptions placed under some panels made it possible to identify them. The panels also carry detail on coronations, with the king’s ornaments shown minutely, on horse sacrifices (asvamedha), on warfare and the make-up of a marching army, and on types of lion throne, hairstyles, jewellery, dress, and the temples and gods of the day. The dossier says no other Indian monument shows a dynasty’s history this way, before or after Nandivarman’s time. That is the State Party’s own claim, made in a nomination document.

The earliest inscription the dossier lists is a label on the south wall of the cloister, dated to the time of Nandivarman II, 751 CE. The Friends of Heritage Sites exhibit on Google Arts and Culture adds that the south wall shows the events leading to the king’s coronation, though some of its figures are now featureless, and that inscriptions sit beneath the panels of Paramesvara’s coronation, with empty spaces near other panels.

How the panels were first read

Rea could not read them. In 1909 he saw a continuous series of panels on the inner court walls that looked to him like scenes from one of the Puranas, and he wrote that it was difficult to say which. He added that the temple priests had refused a non-Hindu entry even to the outer precincts, so he could describe the panels only from drawings.

The identification came in 1941, when the Archaeological Survey published C. Minakshi’s monograph on the sculptures as No. 63 in its Memoirs series. Krishnamurthy’s study of Pallava historiography says the monograph came out of her doctoral work, awarded by the University of Madras in 1936, and describes it as the finest attempt to match the panels against known inscriptional history. For the accession story below he cites the inscription under the panels, in volume 4 of South Indian Inscriptions, and pages 54 and 55 of her book.

A twelve-year-old chosen by the court

Krishnamurthy’s summary of those labels runs as follows. The Pallava king Paramesvaravarman II apparently died around 731 CE in battle with the Ganga king Sripurusha, and the court could not agree on a successor. The inscription says the court officials, named in the study as the Mattras, the Ghatikayars and the Mulaprakrtis, sent a message to Khambhojadesa, where Hiranyavarma Maharaja of a collateral branch of the Pallava family ruled from Bhimapura. Of his four sons, Srimalla, Ranamalla, Samkramalla and Pallavamalla, the twelve-year-old Pallavamalla accepted the offer.

He travelled with a general, Udayachandra of the Pu-Ca race, and was received at the edge of Kanchi by a chieftain and then at the palace by the court and a Muttaraiyar chief named Kadaka. He was crowned with the name Nandivarman. The Kasakkudi copper plates agree that he was chosen by the people, and name his father as Hiranya and his mother as Rohini.

The choice was not uncontested. Krishnamurthy says a rival, Chitramaya, also called Pallavaraya Skandasishya, was backed by the Chalukyas of Badami and the Pandyas of Madurai, and that the struggle lasted from about 731 to about 752 CE. The Udayendiram plates of Nandivarman’s twenty-first year, around 752 CE, credit Udayachandra with defeating the Pandya army at Mannaikkudi, beheading Chitramaya and restoring the king to the throne. The Chalukya king Vikramaditya II took Kanchi around 734 CE, and the Kailasanathar article above covers the Kannada inscription in which a Chalukya king returned that temple’s property. Pattadakal covers the Virupaksha temple, built to commemorate the Chalukya conquest of Kanchi.

A saint’s hymn for the temple

Periya Tirumozhi 2.9, verses 1128 to 1137, is Tirumangai Alvar’s decad (ten-verse hymn) on the temple. A published English rendering on the 4000 Divya Prabandham site says that in every verse the first half praises Vishnu and the second half praises the Pallava king for his service to the shrine. That site names the builder as Nandivarman II. Google Arts and Culture lists the temple among the 108 Divya Desams, the Vishnu shrines sung by the Alvars.

The hymn names the king’s wars. In the rendering, the first verse calls him lord of Mallai, which the commentary links to Tirukkadalmallai on the coast. Verse two has him defeat the Pandya king in battle, and verse three speaks of his spear and of the enemies of Mannaikkudi, the same place the Udayendiram plates give as the scene of a Pandya defeat. Verse eight places a fight at a city the rendering spells Nenmeli. The closing verse says those who recite the ten will become great charioteer-kings and rule the earth. The hymn and the copper plates therefore name the same battle, though the hymn gives no date.

The UNESCO dossier says the Alvar celebrated the shrine in his hymns, and the publisher’s description of D. Dennis Hudson’s 2008 book The Body of God says the temple’s structure and images can be read in the light of a ten-stanza poem by Tirumangai. The Pallava coast the hymn alludes to is the subject of Mahabalipuram.

Two ways to read the stone

Minakshi read the wall as dynastic history. Hudson, whose book tours 56 sculpted panels, reads the temple as a planned mandala (a diagram laid out in stone), and the publisher’s description says he correlates the stories with stages in the spiritual growth of the king, using the Bhagavata Purana and Tirumangai’s poem. His book dates the temple to about 770 CE.

These are different questions asked of the same building. The label inscriptions give the history reading its footing, and the featureless figures that Google Arts and Culture notes on the south wall limit what any reader can recover there.

Who built it, and when

Sources agree that Nandivarman II is the patron and disagree on his years. The UNESCO dossier gives 731 to 796 CE. Krishnamurthy gives “circa” 731 to 796. S. Paramasivan, a chemist at the Government Museum in Madras writing in Nature in 1938, gave 725 to 790 for the same king, citing a chapter of Minakshi’s book then in the press. The World History Encyclopedia says only that the temple was built in the late 8th century.

One dissent is on record. Krishnamurthy reports that R. Nagaswamy argued in 1962, from his reading of the inscriptions, that the monuments at Mamallapuram were Rajasimha’s work, and that he also attributed the Vaikuntha Perumal temple to Rajasimha. That would put it about 700 to 728 CE, when the dossier places the Kailasanatha. Krishnamurthy reports it as one opinion among others, and the dossier and the other sources cited here name Nandivarman II.

The name is also a point of detail. Google Arts and Culture gives Parameswara as Nandivarman II’s own name. Krishnamurthy gives Pallavamalla as his personal name and Nandivarman as the name he took at his coronation. The sources do not settle which man “Paramesvara” in the temple’s title honours.

Later gifts and what a visitor finds

The dossier records two later inscriptions in the temple from the reign of the Chola king Kulottunga I, dated 1116 to 1118 CE, each recording a land gift to feed Sri Vaishnavas, the devotees of Vishnu.

For visitors, the Inditales travel writer Anuradha Goyal reported in May 2019 that the temple is owned by the Archaeological Survey, that it gets few visitors, and that it was open from 7:30 AM to 12 PM and 4:30 PM to 7:30 PM, with photography allowed except inside the sanctum. The writer was told the middle shrine opens only on Ekadashi, the eleventh day of each lunar fortnight, and that the top floor was closed. These are one visitor’s notes from 2019, so confirm hours and access at the site.

The temple is one of eleven that India put forward in “Temples of Kanchipuram” under UNESCO criteria (iv) and (vi) on 13 April 2021. As of 5 November 2026 the property appears on UNESCO’s tentative list, the stage before a formal nomination.