Tourism was a highly-developed economic and cultural activity in South India during the medieval period with even people from Kashmir in the far north ventured deep into the region to support temples and cultural activities, an expert in the field says.

"From the epigraphs available of the period, it is clear that there was a lot of north-south movement. Generally, people from North India are termed as Aryan in the inscriptions. You can see people from Kashmir and Bengal in many pilgrim centres of South India," historian and epigraph-specialist S. Chandni Bi of the Aligarh Muslim University's history department told IANS in an interview.

"There are many inscriptions in Tamil denoting the presence of Kashmiri people. They are seen as donors, making endowments to the Sri Rangam, Tiruvottiyur, Kancheepuram and Chidambaram temples, to mention only a few. There are at least eight Tamil epigraphs that mention Kashmiri donors between the 11th and 13th centuries," she added.

Defining tourism as the "movement of people from one place to another, a considerable distance away, for a stay longer than a day, with or without a purpose," Chandni Bi said "Hiuen-Tsang's accounts tell us that he came from China, travelled to many places in India, and finally got into the ship from Sri Lanka to return home."

Not only the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, but the Silapathikaram, one of the five great epics according to later Tamil literary tradition, and the Thevaram, a 63-volume collection of Tamil devotional songs, also give us a vivid picture of common people and saints continuously moving to different parts of the country for a variety of reasons.

In modern times, entertainment is the main focus of tourism, but in ancient India, the purpose was religious, cultural or simply business, the historian clarified.

For instance, in the Sri Rangam Vaishnava temple, engraved on the eastern wall is a Kashmiri referred to as Arya Vasudeva Bhattan alias Rajaraja Brahmarayan from Anishtanam of Kashmirdesam. Rajaraja stands for king and brahmarayan denotes he was a Brahman occupying a very high and distinguished administrative office in the regime of Kulottunga I. These inferences make clear that the people from north India were settled in the Tamil land and played significant roles in politics and religion, Chandni Bi added.

People from not only different parts of south India but also from many parts of the north extensively toured the south for political, economic and philanthropic reasons. Thus, the Sri Rangam inscriptions are written in Tamil, Sanskrit, Oriya, Telugu, Marathi and Kannada, pointing to visitors from these lands.

Rulers from outside India also showed great interest in constructing religious buildings and mutts for pilgrims from their countries.

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