Indian Temple Research Articles

PROPORTIONS IN ARCHITECTURE

The uniqueness of His creation is reflected in different fields of life by the great masters throughout the ages that have born with the formation of the universe, from the big bang, till times still to come. Special ratio that can be used to describe the proportions of everything from nature’s smallest building blocks, such as atoms, to the most advanced patterns in the universe, such as unimaginably large celestial bodies.
 One of the key evidences presented for creation is the recurring appearance of the Divine proportion, or golden section, throughout the design of the human body and other life forms. An attempt has been made to relate Sri yantra and golden ratio and the various forms that seem to exemplify in the plan and elevation of the Indian temple. The yantra which is a complex geometry has been perfected to be used for the development of temple forms of different eras. The following paper will be a tool for the researchers to use the yantra in deriving the spaces of Indian temples.

Review: Reinstallation of the South Asian Galleries

Reinstallation of the South Asian Galleries Philadelphia Museum of Art October 2016 Perhaps first among the Philadelphia Museum of Art's many distinctions is the extent to which historic architecture is integrated into its galleries—vestiges, together with period rooms, of director Fiske Kimball's transformation of the institution from a museum of craft to one of contextualized material culture.1 Nowhere is this legacy more evident today than along the approach to the museum's South Asian collection, via the south wing's central galleries, through a series of medieval European architectural ensembles. The eastward turn to the wing's outer arm corresponds to an analogous cultural shift. The view along this axis reveals, in nested succession, a barrel-vaulted Sassanian portal, an archway flanked by Safavid tile work, and finally, the figured granite pillars of a South Indian temple hall (Figure 1). Figure 1 Interior of a pillared temple hall from Madurai, Tamil Nadu, ca. 1550, installed in the South Asian Galleries, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2016 (photo courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art). So strong is the pull along this axis of monumental architecture that only the most astute might notice a small doorway—to an introductory gallery—on the right. The rest of us, indulgently, will proceed ahead to the South Asian galleries’ centerpiece: an assemblage of architectural elements from …

인도 전기 석굴사원벽화의 구조와 보존

인도 전기 석굴사원벽화의 구조와 보존

Old fights, new meanings: Lions and elephants in combat

Old fights, new meanings: Lions and elephants in combat

Improvisation, Creativity, and Agency in South Indian Temple Rāga Performance

This article explores the question of improvisation in the context of South Indian (Tamil) temple nāgasvaram music, with a focus on the genre ālāpana. It shows that improvisation and creativity rarely come into conflict with the conventions of genre, culture, and society and demonstrates—through a dialogic process between the musical analysis of the performance and the insights of the musicians on their own practice—that the emotional effectiveness of a musical phrase depends not only on its idiosyncratic qualities but also on the process that prepares it and the context in which it is enunciated. It challenges most ethnomusicological approaches, in which musical improvisation is thought in terms of models and not as much in terms of creativity and/or agency in the heat of the performance, and calls for a better articulation of explanatory models with emic perceptions and lived experiences.

English

Guruvayur is a very important pilgrimage centre as well as one of the major south Indian temple attractions. It is also known as the Dwarka of the South. God Krishna in Guruvayur is popularly called Sri Guruvayoorappan. The whole life of this town revolves around the temple and there is very little activity beyond what is connected with the temple even though there are a few other noteworthy temples in the area. Core of activities occur within an area coming within the outer ring road surrounding the temple. Therefore, for the purpose of environmental status assessment, this area has been considered in this study. Under environmental status assessment of Guruvayur temple precincts, Municipal Solid Waste Management, Sewage Management & Storm Water Drainage and Crowd Management are covered, keeping in mind the fragile environment of the temple precincts. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) has been applied to identify most suitable use for some of the existing parking lots. It is a structured technique for organizing and analysing complex decisions, based on mathematics and psychology.

Decoding a Hindu Temple: Royalty and Religion in the Iconographic Program of the Virupaksha Temple, Pattadakal by Cathleen Cummings

BOOK REVIEWS Cathleen Cummings. Decoding a Hindu Temple: Royalty and Religion in the Iconographic Program of the Virupaksha Temple, Pattadakal. Woodland Hills, CA: South Asia Studies Association, 2014. ISBN: 9780983447269 Paperback: 706 pages Cathleen Cummings' Decoding a Hindu Temple provides readers a thorough examination ofa Hindu temple's sculptural program. The author exposes the myriad forces involved in the decoration ofHindu sacred architecture, including patronage , religious sectarianism, and political exigencies, as well as provisions for images serving as foci for religious devotion and instruction in their requisite contexts. Although the topics she engages apply to a wide swath of Hindu temples, Cummings offers the Virupaksha Temple at Pattadakal as a case study for the interconnection of architecture and sculpted imagery. Her approach is iconographic and iconologic in that she seeks not only the accurate identification of divine forms, but also the underlying principles and motivations for their placement and inclusion. Pattadakal, the royal commemorative site of the early Chalukya dynasty (544-757), is located presently in Bagalkot district, Karnataka, India. The early Chalukyas, principally a South Indian dynasty, ruled a vast empire stretching at its fullest extent from Gujarat in the north to Odisha in the east and as far southward as Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Their period ofrule is acknowledged as a formative era for the development ofthe South Indian temple style, with rock-cut and structural temples from the well-known sites of Badami, Aihole, and Ellora dating to the reign of the early Chalukyas. While archaeological excavations indicate an importance to Pattadakal perhaps as early as the Satavahana era, this royal site features seven main temples from the early Chalukya period and a later Rashtrakuta temple. The Virupaksha Temple dates from the reign ofKing Vikramaditya II (733-745), the penultimate early Chalukyan ruler in control of the site. An inscription (although lacking a specific date) relates that Queen Lokama66 hadevi commissioned the Virupaksha Temple to celebrate the conquest of Kanchipuram by her husband, Vikramaditya II. This temple, the largest surviving early Chalukya monument and the most lavishly decorated, offers a glimpse into South Indian conceptions ofroyal identity and pious duty, in addition to providing a well-documented example of female patronage in pre-modern India. Cummings' book focuses predominantly on images carved in niches along the exterior surfaces ofthe VirupakshaTemple. As a microcosm of the Hindu pantheon, the temple displays stone reliefs ofShiva in his various forms, Vishnu, his avatars, and scenes from the Ramayana, as well as depictions ofloving couples and celestial females frequently represented in Hindu sacred architecture. These reliefs serve to emphasize and illustrate common themes that demonstrate - far from a haphazard collection ofloosely associated iconographic forms - a premeditated program ofdecoration to serve royal and religious constructions of meaning. For example, Shiva and Parvati Gaming with Dice relates to an analogous game of chance played as part ofa king's consecration, and Shiva Lingodbhavamurti , with the form ofthe god as an unfathomable cosmic pillar, compares with similar imagery evoked in consecration rituals. Cummings explains their presence on the temple in part through the concept ofrajadharma, or the righteous duty and manner ofthe king. Ofcourse, these images are polyvalent, and the author meticulously uncovers various layers ofmeaning in her analysis ofthe reliefs' iconographic peculiarities. A significant contribution of Cummings' analysis is her explanation ofthe Virupaksha Temple's iconographic parallels with images associated with the Pallavas, dynastic rivals to the earlyChalukyas, whose defeat byVikramaditya II the Virupaksha Temple commemorates. According to the author, the insertion ofthese features into the iconographic plan was deliberate and constituted a practice she terms "symbolic looting." In this case, the image ofShiva Gangadhara (or Descent ofthe Ganges) seems to appear first on the Virupaksha Temple among early Chalukya monuments. Perhaps its most famous depiction in South Asia, its precise interpretation still controversial, occurs with the Pallava-era rock-cut monuments at Mamallapuram (also known as Mahabalipuram). Cummings argues that the inclusion of the image symbolically appropriates the Ganga River valley into Chalukya domains and also stakes a claim over Pallava-held regions as a symbolic bounty of war. That the relief faces the Malaprabha River in Pattadakal further associates the Ganga River with Chalukya geography and King Vikramaditya II with Shiva...

The Physicality and Spirituality of the Hindu Temples of Kerala

Every culture can stir a type of architecture that can range from landmarks to everyday homes. History has proved that the various architectural styles have developed in response to climate, lifestyle, geology and geography of a place, religious philosophy of the people and availability of building materials. Religion and lifestyle seem to be the most common influences overall. Culture, in fact, underlines the important role that economics, politics, religion, heritage and the natural environment play in shaping the built environment. Kerala (the southern-most state of India), the land of temples appears unique in this context as the temples here were the pivot of religious, social, economic and cultural life of every Keralite. The typical Hindu temples of Kerala stand out from among the Indian temple typology in its form, structural clarity, stylistic tradition, symbolism and above all, in its construction and craftsmanship in wood. They show a distinctive style which is a local adaptation of the Dravida or the South Indian tradition of temple construction, considerably influenced by the various geographical, religious, cultural and political factors. Most of the temples of Kerala are traditionally neighborhood institutions of worship, rich in both tangible and intangible cultural values. The spatiality of Kerala temples follows the general Indian philosophical concepts of the centre, axis and the human relatedness to cosmic reality, while its implementation in the built form follows the Vedic religious practices. This paper attempts to explore the evolution of the generic built form of temples of Kerala and the philosophical and spatial concepts of their architecture.

The Design of the Spire from Temple 45 at Sanchi

This article investigates the original design of the ruined spire from Temple 45 at Sanchi in Madhya Pradesh through the detailed analysis of hundreds of fallen architectural fragments that are stacked near the monument. These remains indicate that Temple 45 was a ninth-century Latina temple, a north Indian temple type distinguished by its curved spire, and that it shows anomaly and ingenuity in many aspects of its design and context. The question of how early Indian architects achieved the characteristic curves of Latina superstructures has not yet been answered by contemporary scholarship in a way that would allow the fragments to be virtually reassembled into an authentically shaped spire: the proposals are either unconvincing, or they do not contain enough information to complete the task. This paper critiques these accounts, and examines verses pertaining to Latina spires from a particular Vastuśāstra called the Dīpārṇava, turning them into diagrams of temple spires, analysing their proportions and outlines, and comparing them to the measurements taken from Temple 45. It then builds on this information, and proposes a new and more detailed account of Latina spire design than has previously been offered. Finally, this methodology is used to reconstruct an elevation of the spire from Temple 45.

Review: Temples of the Indus: Studies in the Hindu Architecture of Ancient Pakistan, by Michael W. Meister

Michael W. Meister Temples of the Indus: Studies in the Hindu Architecture of Ancient Pakistan Leiden: Brill, 2010, 85 pp., 149 b/w illus. $132, ISBN 9789004186170 Masonry temples built in the sixth to tenth centuries in what is now northwest Pakistan remain neglected in the historiography of South Asian temple architecture. In exploring a group of monuments built in the Salt Range and along the Indus River, Michael Meister’s monograph draws attention to a significant architectural experiment with the North Indian temple form called Nagara. The experiment produced a distinct regional variant of Nagara using architectural vocabulary and building techniques from previous Buddhist monastic structures of the greater Gandhara region, of which the Salt Range is a southern periphery. More importantly, Gandhara-Nagara architecture provides missing links for understanding the earliest evolution of this major North Indian temple form. The book is put together like a puzzle, worked out from inside out. It represents the author’s fieldwork in the Salt Range in the 1990s, including two seasons of excavation in 1996 and 1998 in close collaboration with scholars from the Peshawar University, the Pakistan Heritage Society, and the Department of Archaeology of the Government of Pakistan. The project overlaps the author’s engagement with a multivolume Encyclopedia of Indian Temple Architecture , now a standard reference for describing religious structures according to architectural continuities instead of shifting political boundaries of successive dynasties of rulers in different regions.1 The present volume brings the Salt Range within the framework of the Encyclopedia , and applies a technical vocabulary for describing architecture from the point of view of local and regional designers developed for the Encyclopedia from a synthesis of Sanskrit architectural treatises by the eminent Indologist, M. A. Dhaky. Sanskrit terms are explained in a separate glossary, and placed within the narrative to encourage a student to learn them in relation to the architectural logic for structural components and surface ornaments being developed in each chapter. For forty years, …

FIRST REPORT OF LEAF SPOT OF NYCTANTHES ARBOR-TRISTIS CAUSED BY CORYNESPORA CASSIICOLA IN INDIA

Nyctanthes arbor-tristis, family Oleaceae (Nyctaginaceae), grown in many Indian garden and temple compounds for its fra- grant blossoms, possesses multiple pharmacological properties (Chopra et al., 1958). A leaf disease characterized by irregular red- dish-brown spots with dark margins and brown to whitish centre was observed during the post-rainy season at Jaipur and Udaipur (India). Adjoining lesions coalesced resulting in large pustules. In- cidence of infection and its severity in the surveyed area were al- most 40 and 30-60%, respectively. Surface-sterilized diseased tis- sue plated on tetracycline-amended (250 mg/l) potato dextrose agar (PDA) yielded grey fungal colonies with a black backside af- ter incubation at 22±2°C for 7 days. Conidiophores were cylindri- cal, straight or curved and unbranched, 3-10 septate, smooth and pale brown. Conidia were isolated or formed acropetal chains, had a variable shape, were 25-190 μm long and 5-10 μm thick, with a rounded apex and truncate base, 5-15 pseudoseptate, yel- lowish brown and smooth. Based on these morphological features, the fungus was identified as Corynespora cassiicola (Ellis and Holi- day, 1971). The identity was confirmed by the National Fungal Culture Collection of India (NFCCI), Agharkar Research Insti- tute, Pune, India (Culture No. OP 98). To confirm pathogenicity, disease-free plants were inoculated with a conidial suspension containing 1000 conidia/ml. Controls were inoculated with sterile distilled water. After 1 week, spots similar to those observed on the original diseased plants appeared on the leaves of inoculated but not in the contro plants. The pathogen was re-isolated from symptomatic leaves, fulfilling Koch’s postulates. C. cassiicola is known as a pathogen to many plants in India (Jamaluddin et al., 2004), but, to our knowledge, this is its first report as a pathogen of N. arbor-tristis in the country.

The Evolution of Tibetan Temple’s Plane Form

This paper analyzes the evolution of Tibetan temple’s plane form from three periods. It describes the historical background, which leads the temple’s pattern from imitation of the Indian temple to have their own mature fixed form, and analyzes the temple forms of each period through a series of examples.

Editor's Foreword

We are delighted to publish this collection of articles on the world of the Paramāra dynasty, edited by Dr Michael Willis FRAS of the British Museum. Between 2006–10 Dr Willis led an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project in collaboration with the Department of History at SOAS and the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff, entitled ‘The Indian Temple: Production, Place and Patronage’. This project examined how Indian temples were designed, built and patronised and explored the social and economic role played by temples in medieval India. The project formed the backdrop for the articles which are brought together in this special issue.

To curate in the field: archaeological privatization and the aesthetic ‘legislation’ of antiquity in India

This paper strives to pluralize notions of taste in relation to the canonized category of the Hindu or Indian temple. I put ‘Hindu’ in italics because I include Jain temples in my discussion and I put ‘Indian’ in italics because the architecture I discuss predates India as a nation-state and in the twenty-first century includes buildings in South and Southeast Asia as well as the Diaspora. Through a discussion of the Archaeological Preservation Aesthetic (APA) and multiple variants of the Ritual Renovation Aesthetics (RRA), new ways of looking emerge. This paper seeks to reconcile the hegemonic assumptions about art historical taste and the temple within an increasingly global environment. The main argument is predicated on temple users’ practice as a form of curatorial practice in the field and provides a deep description of the multiplication of aesthetics due to increasing privatization of temple administration in India. The tenth-century cluster of temples from the Medapata region (Southern Rajasthan) serves as case study for a widespread phenomenon of putting ancient temples ‘back’ into worship during the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Review: The Toraṇa in Indian and Southeast Asian Architecture by Parul Pandya Dhar

Parul Pandya Dhar . The Toraṇa in Indian and Southeast Asian Architecture . New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 2010, xviii + 317 pp., 330+ illus., 43 in color, 57 line drawings. $140 (cloth), ISBN 8124605343 This well-produced, well-conceived, and lavishly illustrated study of garlands and gateways as parts of the structure and decorative ornamentation of architecture in South and Southeast Asia is dedicated to Madhusudan Amilal Dhaky, under whose supervision a preliminary version was prepared as a doctoral thesis at the National Museum Institute (NMI), New Delhi. The author completed the manuscript while on a postdoctoral fellowship in Berlin. She follows that eminent scholar's methodological model, widely surveying existing monuments and coordinating inscriptional, literary, and textual references to establish an appropriate terminology and classification for an architectural and decorative element of great proliferation and importance in southern Asia. Its use and evolution spans than 2,000 years. Dhaky set a pattern for this type of rigorous analysis of elements of South Asian architecture in his studies The Ceilings in the Temples of Gujarat (coauthored with J. M. Nanavati, 1963);1 The Indian Temple Forms in Karṇāṭa Inscriptions and Architecture (1977);2 and most recently, The Indian Temple Traceries (2005).3 Leaf garlands are ritually hung across doorways today, temporary toraṇas are constructed to welcome godlike politicians, and torii gates lead up to Shinto shrines in Japan. Such gateways and garlands mark a progression to more ground (not profane to sacred): toward a stupa or Buddha himself; into a sacred compound, temple entry, sanctum doorway; as frame for the enshrined image. Their forms proliferate remarkably, as …

Ajay Sinha. Review of "Gods on the Move: Architecture and Ritual in the South Indian Temple" by Crispin Branfoot.

Ajay Sinha. Review of "Gods on the Move: Architecture and Ritual in the South Indian Temple" by Crispin Branfoot.

An Analysis of Indian Temple Architecture

Art HistoryVolume 33, Issue 1 p. 189-191 An Analysis of Indian Temple Architecture Gerard Foekema, Gerard FoekemaSearch for more papers by this author Gerard Foekema, Gerard FoekemaSearch for more papers by this author First published: 25 January 2010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8365.2009.00729.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume33, Issue1February 2010Pages 189-191 RelatedInformation

Between Jesus and Krishna: Christian encounters with south Indian temple dance

Between Jesus and Krishna: Christian encounters with south Indian temple dance

Divine Marriage in a South Indian Temple

Divine Marriage in a South Indian Temple

Response: Modernism in India: A Short History of a Blush

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsAjay SinhaAjay Sinha teaches courses on Asian art and Indian films at Mount Holyoke College. He has authored Imagining Architects: Creativity in Indian Temple Architecture (2000) and edited, with Raminder Kaur, Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens (2005) [Department of Art and Art History, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Mass. 01075, asinha@mtholyoke.edu].