My dissertation challenges the canonical understanding of the Indian temple to foreground the intelligence and intentionality underpinning the design of the Deccan’s earliest extant sacred spaces and to redress their conceptual fragmentation. First, I show that the Deccan temple is in fact constitutively distinct from its Nāgara and Drāvida counterparts. Second, by adopting the Deccan temple cluster as a holistic analytical category, I draw attention to the interrelationships between, and disposition of, its component buildings and to the locative, symbolic, and organizing role of water bodies.
My study analyzes sacred sites founded from the sixth to the eighth century, clustered in the Malaprabha and the Krishna-Tungabhadra river valleys, in today’s postcolonial states Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, respectively. I call this dynamic architectural period Early Deccan, self-consciously avoiding the dynastic labels applied so far and the implication that political agents were the sole architectural and stylistic innovators. I argue, rather, that architects, artists, and
The dissertation also highlights the temple cluster’s organization and establishes the water body as its symbolic and spatial focus. Though water bodies—natural, engineered, or a combination of the two—are visually and ritually constitutive of sacred centers throughout the Deccan, this aspect has received little scholarly comment. Indeed, landscape studies of the premodern Deccan remain in their infancy. My dissertation contributes to this nascent field by reading traditional art-historical evidence alongside literary constructions of premodern landscape cultures and phenomenological and experiential perspectives. For example, I read architectural manuals and treatises and a range of prescriptive texts, exhorting waterfront locations for sacred sites and providing directives on the design and siting of water monuments, against the topography and spatial layout of Early Deccan sites to find correspondences and departures. Sculptural and epigraphic sources add another valuable perspective: they establish a homology between kingship and the control and management of water, demonstrate aristocratic patronage of water monuments, and record the donation of water resources, gardens
Members' Research Report Archive
Shiva’s Waterfront Temples: Reimagining the Sacred Architecture of India’s Deccan Region
Subhashini Kaligotla, [Columbia University]
Ittleson Fellow, 2012–2014
Since India’s colonial period and the publication of James Fergusson’s History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (1876), architectural discourse has undervalued the Deccan temple and misinterpreted its formal structure as the organic outcome of its location. This facile understanding has been carried forward to the present day by a succession of scholars who posit the vast Deccan plateau as a “borderland” in which the “natural” temple forms of North India (Nāgara) and South India (Drāvida) come together, either wholly or as “hybrids.” Deccan temples have thus been relegated to a secondary position by a binary taxonomy that denies both their intrinsic artistic value and the agency of their makers. Most studies instead emphasize chronology, and all have privileged the agency of the region’s Chālukya rulers and their affiliates (543–757 CE) on the basis of a handful of securely attributable buildings. Moreover, the hegemonic Nāgara-Drāvida binary has resulted in the fragmentation of the Deccan’s dense temple clusters, with
Temple cluster at Pattadakal, Karnataka, India, seventh to eighth century, view from the north. Photograph: Caleb Smith