ABSTRACT
Tiruchirappalli itself is a crowded town rather tightly packed within the circuit of the old walls which made it the greatest fortress in the south of India during the eighteenth-century wars between the English and French East India Companies, although those walls have been pulled down. A great high-road crosses the Cauvery by a fine bridge at Tiruchirappalli, and the Coleroon by another at a short distance northwards, where stands the sister city Srirangam, famous for the greatest Vishnu temple in South India, as Madura is the site of the greatest Siva temple. The establishment of monastery and college with its chapel and gardens stand on land once occupied by fortifications and the area just outside the walls. Siva to the Saivites is primarily the God of Life and Creation, only consequentially and secondarily also the God of Death and Destruction, and so is Vishnu to the Vaishnavites.
