Mahabalipuram is a corruption of the word MahaMalla Puram, the city of the great wrestler — MahaMalla — an epithet for the seventh century Rajah, Narasimha Varma Pallava, and also his descendant Rajasimha Pallava.

The town is today popular as a tourist spot and a seaside resort.

Hiuen Tsang, a Chinese traveler who came to study Buddhism in India, visited Kanchipuram during Narasimha Pallava’s reign, and perhaps Mamallapuram too, as he mentions a city by the sea. Dandin, a famous Sanskrit poet in Rajasimha Pallava’s court, also mentions the town in his work Avanti Sundari Katha.

Mamallapuram is the birthplace of a Vaishnavite poet, Bhuthathu Alwar. It was called Kadal Mallai in the Tamil poems of Tirumangai Alwar, and was perhaps a thriving commercial port then.

The poet describes ships, bearing cargoes of grains and riches, anchored along its shores. Some historians believe the town Neerpeyatru, mentioned in the Sangam works several centuries earlier, may also refer to Mamallapuram.

Mahendra Pallava — the innovative thinker often called Vichitra Chitta — launched the era of building cave temples in his kingdom, and his successors continued it. Besides architecture of unparalleled variety, the Pallava sculptures of Mamallapuram exhibit grace and balance rarely surpassed elsewhere in India.

It is the only place in the world where four types of temple monuments — cave temples, monoliths (rathas), structural temples and open-air bas-relief sculptures — co-exist. And one can not only see the greatest diversity of architecture but also see its evolution in these monument types.

The Pallava Grantham script that was used to write Sanskrit in South India, traveled to Southeast Asian countries like Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, Java, Sumatra, Sri Vijaya, etc., and formed the basis of the scripts of those languages.