ABSTRACT
The terms ‘right’ and ‘left’ have very marked ritualistic significance across the whole of India, denoting a distinction between the sacred and the profane, life and death. This distinction also animates a whole range of practices and roles. Rituals related to birth, marriage, etc., are done with the right hand, and those related to death are done with the left hand. In Tamil Nadu too, castes are slotted into right and left and the hierarchical relations between them are defined through their location. A sort of stratification had taken form by the beginning of the eleventh century ce. Two Thanjavur inscriptions of Rajaraja I dated 1014 supply people information relating to the separate quarters respectively for landholders artisans and the Paraiya. Noboru Karashima, who has extensively studied the Chola inscriptions, point to a kind of urbanization that began during the Chola period. He has studied 40 villages and found three among them with an urban character.
