It was the architectural culmination of the Pallava dynasty that ruled south India for five centuries. For long, historians believed that the granite shore temple in Mahabalipuram, 60 km south of Chennai, stood alone in its sea-facing splendour for over a millennium, surviving the pounding surf and the recent tsunami and making it to UNESCO's World Heritage Site for its simple but breathtaking architecture. But was it always alone?

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PRECIOUS STONE: The famous shore temple at Mahabalipuram

Local legends swirled around a complex of seven temples that once stood there-apparently so spectacular that it invited the jealousy of the Gods who unleashed the seas on it. Foreign travellers and mariners, who described the Seven Pagodas of the Coromandel Coast visible from the sea, and William Chambers, the celebrated English architect who travelled across Mahabalipuram in 1772, recorded accounts of locals who spoke of submerged temples whose copper domes glinted in the sunlight. In January this year, when a team of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and the Indian Navy, combining diving and archaeological expertise, arrived at the site, it was looking for evidence that would conclusively prove or refute the myth.

Four years ago preliminary surveys had unearthed a 70-m-long stonewall arranged like railway tracks and shooting out into the sea, possibly the boundary of a complex, and the existence of man-made structures in the sea dating to the early Pallava dynasty which ruled from its capital at Kanchipuram between the 4th and 9th centuries A.D.

In January, the first dives yielded stone blocks shaped by human hands and now encrusted with thick marine growth. So the team turned its attention landwards, to the mounds on the beach south of the shore temple, to correlate the finds in the sea. Overcoming the difficulties of digging in the sand -the team ingeniously mixed Fevicol and water and sprayed it on the trench walls to ensure that they did not collapse-the archaeologists shoveled 3 m beneath the surface. The expedition uncovered the ruins of a granite temple, a five-tier structure one-and-a-half times larger and one tier higher than the present shore temple. "It was a complete surprise," says Alok Tripathi, head of ASI's underwater archaeology wing. Before the team wound up in April, it had uncovered a smaller shore temple further into the sea.

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The large, east-facing temple had a square garbhagriha (sanctum sanctorum) with an entrance porch and a terracotta ring well. No idol was found but the discoveries were significant- a 2-ft-tall sandstone lion and a Tamil inscription, the oldest found in Mahabalipuram, which dated the temple to 8th century A.D., to the reign of Narasimhavarman II also called "Rajasimha", simha meaning lion.

Hundreds of stonemasons, probably under Rajasimha's imperial decree, must have toiled with hammer and chisel on the stone blocks, some weighing over a tonne, which were then put together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. No bonding agent was used. Centuries later, the masons' signatures, childlike scrawls of birds and eyes, survive on the stones they carved.

The temples might have been done in by their weak foundation. Unlike the existing shore temple built on hard rock, the newly discovered ones were built on soft sand. At least one frantic attempt had been made to repair the collapsed structures: the ASI team found a layer of lime slapped between stones. But soon the temples were abandoned to the tides and lost in time.

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SHORING UP EVIDENCE: ASI workers excavate the base of the buried temple

How significant is the rediscovery of the temples? While it has neatly reversed the myth of the sole shore temple, it can also provide valuable information on the Pallavas, a minor dynasty that expanded through growing wealth and power under kings like Rajasimha. Evidently to celebrate their imperial grandeur, they patronised an explosive growth of temple construction, beginning with the nine monolithic rathas and culminating in shore temples.

Says Tripathi: "The larger quest is for the archaeological history of Mahabalipuram.'' Megalithic burial sites that are 3,200 years old are found here but little is known of Mahabalipuram between the 3rd century B.C. and the 4th century A.D. when the city was second in importance only to Kanchi. Says temple architecture expert M.A. Dhaky: "The discoveries establish Mahabalipuram as a great site for temple architecture. As the southernmost centre of Indian temple architecture, it preserved features like clarity and austerity which had since disappeared in north India.''

But what prompted the Pallavas to build their temples here? Experts say the dynasty moved its port to Mahabalipuram when its earlier port Punjeri silted up. B. Arunachalam, author of Ancient and Medieval Ports of Tamil Nadu, believes the complex was, in fact, a wharf where ships from southeast Asia offloaded cargo: "Though it was sanctified, the shore temple, which is just 12 m high, might not have been a shrine. It could have been a decorated wharf like the Gateway of India to welcome sailors." When the ASI begins to scan the coast with its ground penetrating radar, there may be answers to the tantalising questions the temples have silently thrown up.

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