Architectural Invention in Sacred Structures: The Case of Vesara Temples of Southern India

Abstract

The article explores the nature of architectural invention in Indian sacred structures by analyzing a group of eleventh-century sandstone temples in the Karnataka region of southern India. Identifying a variety of experiments in a closely related group, it refutes a commonly held scholarly assumption that Indian temples follow architectural norms ordained by India's religious traditions-an assumption fed by Western definitions of individuality and originality. These Karnataka temples demonstrate that their architects-while mostly unknown-fundamentally changed the formal as well as the conceptual basis of southern architecture they had inherited. Their formal choices, manipulating regional conventions as well as opening up their structures to include references from other regions, led to a new, consciously modern form of architecture whose modernity has been overlooked by scholars. Scholars have tended to call this new regional invention Vesara (Sanskrit "mule" or "hybrid"), defining it as a derivative style of temple created by mixing typical features of North Indian and South Indian architecture. The article traces the emergence of Vesara's conceptual logic in the eleventh century through architectural anomalies and daringly unprecedented play with the formal means of regional architecture, arguing that the makers of these temples exercised a level of inventiveness we have not been willing to credit them with so far.