Socio Economics of building temples

As told in my earlier post and in a comment in subha's page, here is part1 of the email, i wrote to my friend on the socio economics of temples.
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Apart from being a place of religious activity, the temples had a big socio-economic role to play. They doubled up with roles like, public meeting place, centre of education, the granary, the community centre in the communitist society. [A perfected form of communism and socialism which existed in India, much before the other two came.] So does the feasts of Car festival, Float festival were community events more than religious ones.

But before that, building of such huge temples also was a part of shrewd economic strategy.
The 8th to 12th centuries AD, were the time when most of these temples were believed to be built.

The demography of the the tamil nadu represented concentration of population along the cauvery delta, and some scattered around the palar, pennar, vaiga and thamiraparani, and the chief occupation being agriculture.
This means that the people of the region were employed from the aani[mid june], when the tiling of the land started, to aadi, when the sowing happened [the aadi pathinettu, or aadi perukku, is when the Tamil rivers are full, with the south west monsoons setting over their western ghat chatchment areas.]. After the weeding and other crop bringing measures, the harvesting happens by Jan [Thai pongal time].

Now, from thai to aani, the 6 months period, the whole population is going to be unemployed. This is when the administration had the challenge of utilizing the man power and providing employment. When people in rest of the world were mainly into attacking neighbours for providing employment and boosting the domestic economy [even for the latest armed conflict which we witnessed, this was told as one of the reasons].

The administration did the following.
1. Heavy taxing in the harvest months.
2. Compulsory community employment in the dry months with wages from the collected taxes.
3. Highly subsidised food during the sowing/nursing months.

This model of society was highly effective with everybody have defined roles to play. Interdependence of the elements of the community and balance in the society was maintained.

Now, for the compulsory community employment, the main activity was building temples, followed by building dams/bridges, business with neighbouring societies, strengthening of the armoury, compulsory education to qualify oneself for his role in the society and sports activities.

This is how the construction of temples had maintained the balance in the society and kept the people active. There was no devils workshop there.

Did we ever think, we have so many temples standing through all tough times, but we do not find royal palaces/forts/castles anywhere around, even 1 palace to 100 temples,?? So, were the administrators so self less?? Was temple and society a higher priority than building their own palaces??

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