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Ayodhya isn’t new. Chola kings were probing temple scams a thousand years ago

Chola inscriptions record treasure stolen by temple priests, donations used for tax evasion, and land scams that bankrupted entire villages.

It is a headline that could have happened in 2026. A temple committee caught up in a scam. Two men murdered in the dead of night. Jewels meant for the deity vanishing into private hands. Inspectors arriving at midnight to find where the treasure had gone. Except the temple was on the Tamil coast, nearly a thousand years ago; the inspectors were the officers of a Chola king; and the whole affair survives as an inscription carved into stone. Just as shockingly, when the medieval culprits were finally brought to justice, they were not thieves or heretics who had crept in from outside. They were the temple’s own priests.

We tend to assume that temples in premodern India were pious houses of god, that their wealth was sacred, that it was donated for noble causes and honestly used by the faithful. Yet today, the temple trust of the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya, one of the country’s richest, is under investigation over missing offerings and jewels, and land purchased at many times its worth.

Not long ago, the self-styled godman Jaggi Vasudev of the Isha Foundation spearheaded a “Free Tamil Nadu Temples” campaign, later echoed by the Art of Living’s Ravi Shankar. The campaign argued that temples wither under government supervision and should be managed by devotees. While we might like to believe that spiritual enterprises float above the grubby ledgers of corruption and scams, the medieval evidence warns us of the exact opposite.

Temples and properties

To see why, we have to picture what a great temple actually was in South India, around the year 1100. By this time, the Kaveri Valley was studded with rapidly growing temple complexes, ringed with lofty walls and gopurams, frequently with markets and residential layouts nearby. Surrounding them were hundreds of acres of prime agricultural real estate partitioned by mazes of canals, bushes, and trees into fields. A single temple might own land in dozens of villages, not necessarily the ones closest to it. It might be visited by donors who journeyed for days or weeks, offering gold, animals, land, jewels, or bronzes. Substantial endowments were required to pay, for example, Brahmin ritual specialists working in multiple sub-shrines, import fineries such as camphor, and support an extensive workforce. Even a modest shrine held land, lent money, and employed dozens.

The concentration of resources and people naturally drew both political and financial interest. The Madras Museum Copper Plates, issued in Kanchipuram in the late tenth century, inscribe an arrangement in which the Ulagalanda Perumal  temple lent gold to local weavers and cotton-producing villages. (South Indian Inscriptions, volume III, 128.) Its accounts were maintained by the weavers and checked annually by the city’s senior merchants — an arrangement sealed with the authority of the Chola king Uttama (c. 973–985 CE). This is a relatively early example and somewhat exceptional for its manufacturing focus. Most temple inscriptions are more unwaveringly focussed on land-based endowments.........

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