The Pallava rule in the Tamil country bought with it greater influence of Sanskrit culture. They devised a script around the 5th century CE for writing Sanskrit in the Tamil country. The need arouse because the tamil script does not have glyphs to represent a number of Sanskrit letters. The new script came to be known as the Pallava Grantha. Brahmi is the origin for Pallava Grantha, like all other scripts for native Indian languages. There is a lot of closeness of the Grantha script to the Malayalam script, and to some extent, to the Tamil script. Moreover, Pallava Grantha was the inspiration for the scripts of most of the South-east Asian languages like Javenese, Thai, Balinese, Khmer etc.
All Sanskrit works that originated in the Tamil country came to be written exclusively in the Grantha script. The Grantha is in use among the Vedic scholars of Tamil Nadu even today,though its popularity is not as it existed in the past. Over the years, the Grantha script changed. The present day Grantha is very different from what was there in Pallava inscriptions. …show more content…
Pallava architecture
3.1. Classification of types of monuments of mahabalipuram
The monuments at Mahabalipuram can be grouped according to the mode of their construction.
3.1.1. MONOLITHS
They are free standing temples cut out of solid rock, most of which are locally styled Rathas or chariots. The five monoliths in Mahabalipuram were basically cut out of solid rock to form five free standing monolithic temples. The temples, like many monuments all over the land, are associated with the five Pandavas of Mahabharatha. They were excavated during the reign of Narasimhavarman, and are the first monuments of their kind in India.
Figure 5 : Panoramic view of the five monoliths of Mahabalipuram.
Source :