Vijayanagara's successors
The Madurai Nayaks were appointed as Vijayanagara governors in the early sixteenth century and became independent as the empire collapsed after 1565. They ruled the country south of the Kaveri, competing with the Thanjavur and Gingee Nayaks and with Mysore.
Tirumala Nayak, ruling from 1623 to 1659, is the dynasty's central figure: he rebuilt much of the Meenakshi Sundareswarar temple complex at Madurai, adding the great outer gopurams, the thousand-pillared hall and the Pudu Mandapam, and built the palace at Madurai whose surviving audience hall, with its enormous columns and scalloped arches, mixes Indian and European forms.
Rani Mangammal
Rani Mangammal governed as regent from 1689 to 1704 and is remembered in Tamil Nadu chiefly for public works — roads, avenues of trees, rest houses, tanks — a number of which still bear her name. Her regency ended in circumstances the sources describe variously and unreliably.
The dynasty declined through the eighteenth century under Maratha and Mysorean pressure and was ended in 1736 by the Nawab of the Carnatic. The Nayak period's real legacy is architectural: the great temple complexes of the southern Tamil country — Madurai, Srirangam, Rameswaram — owe their present scale and their painted gopurams largely to these two centuries.
Further reading
- Clothey, Fred W. The Many Faces of Murukan. Mouton, 1978
- Cutler, Norman. Songs of Experience: The Poetics of Tamil Devotion. Indiana University Press, 1987
- Kramrisch, Stella. The Hindu Temple. Motilal Banarsidass, 1976
- Michell, George. The Hindu Temple: An Introduction to Its Meaning and Forms. University of Chicago Press, 1988
- Peterson, Indira Viswanathan. Poems to Siva: The Hymns of the Tamil Saints. Princeton University Press, 1989
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.