#SembiyanMahadevi

“When she tore down an old brick wall to rebuild it in stone, she had every donation record on it copied and re-engraved on the new wall — other people's gifts, other people's names. The great builder of the early Chola age was also its great archivist, and we can read the tenth century today because a widow refused to let demolition mean forgetting.”

“She turned mourning into infrastructure. Widowed at perhaps thirty, she spent four and a half decades rebuilding the crumbling brick shrines of the Tamil saints in permanent stone — and in doing so invented the look, the sculptural program and the record-keeping habits that her great-nephew Rājarāja would take to their climax at Thanjavur.”