Beyond Borderland: Claiming a Conceptual Space for Early Deccan Buildings

Abstract

Ever since the publication of the first architectural histories of South Asia, scholars have explained the celebrated formal eclecticism of the Deccan region as the natural result of its location between North India and South India. This “borderland” view is still applied to the region’s earliest surviving stone temples, which are dated from the sixth to eighth centuries and classified into Nagara (North Indian), Dravida (South Indian), and “hybrid” styles. Taking the temple cluster at Pattadakal as an entry point, this paper will highlight the weaknesses of this now canonical taxonomy—and the conceptual fragmentation it engenders—of the Deccan’s dense temple clusters. Rejecting the tower form as the sole basis for classifying temples and analyzing hitherto unexamined formal features, such as architectural representations and tower projections, I will argue that Deccan builders not only deployed forms from multiple building traditions but also combined, translated, and reconstituted them in meaningful ways. I will thus foreground human agency and the formal distinctness of the Early Deccan temple, and also make possible the reexamination of a corpus of nearly two hundred structures.