ABSTRACT
This study of ritual food explores the medieval inscriptional corpus of the Chola period (9th–13th centuries), the theological height of embodied temple worship. An unprecedented activity arose during this period: increased elaboration of food offerings cooked in temple kitchens and served to gods housed in those temples. From my archive – the vast array of Tamil temple inscriptions – I have isolated dishes, reconstructed their recipes and contextualized them using contemporaneous literature and theology. I reveal that the Chola era witnessed the development of greater culinary elaboration, epigraphical elaboration and greater elaboration of this ritual form itself. Such documentation on food was entirely absent from earlier Pallava-era records, while the subsequent Vijayanagara period popularized this practice more extensively.
I present my case studies of dishes as daily, monthly, calendrical and festival ritual offerings and as an expression of material bhakti that physically confirmed a more abstract devotion to deities. This underutilized archive enriches our understanding of Hindu temple activity beyond scholarship traditionally centred on economics, dynastic history and power structures. This glimpse into lived Hinduism reveals the importance that food preparation held for temple devotees and sheds new light on medieval bhakti, substantiated physically through feeding material food to material gods.
