92

SUBHASHINI KALIGOTLA

A TEMPLE WITHOUT A NAME

Deccan Architecture and the Canon for Sacred Indian Buildings

If one looks at a work and then lists whatever other works have served
to influence it, one does not necessarily take into account the attitude of
the work itself to those discovered sources.
—Norman Bryson1

When I first encountered the temples of Pattadakal in a survey course on the

Indian temple, I was so struck by their visual glamor that I wrote a hurried
note to myself: “Must see this place, though it seems difficult to reach.” Visiting
Pattadakal and nearby temple towns in late 2008 confirmed that initial impres-
sion: the earliest surviving stone constructions of India’s Deccan heartland are
gorgeous. Their locally quarried red sandstone comes alive in the late afternoon,
showing off the buildings’ fine figural sculpture and deeply faceted exteriors.
Their locations—on riverbanks, alongside waterfalls and artificial lakes, and
atop sandstone bluffs—offer scenic vistas.
But my historiographic encounter with this architecture completely baffled
me. Whereas visitors to Pattadakal experience this early medieval temple cluster
as an integrated whole as they duck in and out of buildings and stroll within the
densely packed architectural assemblage, the Pattadakal constructed by art his-
torical writings is altogether different. There, the canonical binary taxonomy for
Indian sacred spaces splits this compact temple complex into northern Indian
(Nagara), southern Indian (Dravida), and so-called hybrid temple styles, usually
discussed in independent volumes or separate chapters of the same study. The
reader must therefore consult discrete, fat volumes of a publication to learn about
buildings that stand cheek by jowl, or must leap back and forth between volumes
to read about the same hybrid building. The current conceptualization recog-
nizes, and names, only northern Indian and southern Indian temple types, so that
both Deccan built environments and individual buildings emerge as composites
of architectural modes that are presumed to originate elsewhere. The art histori-
cal canon for Indian architecture thus casts Deccan architecture as an outsider.
 A TEMPLE WITHOUT A NAME 93

What were the beginnings of that canon, and what values and epistemolo-
gies informed it? Where do the conceptual categories for Indian temples come
from, and how have they changed over time? How has the Deccan’s geographic
situation between two dominant South Asian cultural zones, namely the Indo-
Gangetic plain and the Kaveri river belt or, more generally, between north India
and south India, affected the aesthetic values burdening the region’s cultural
productions? How can architectural history reimagine this geographic cross-
roads that has traditionally interconnected Asia’s major social and cultural
spheres, including China, central Asia, and Southeast Asia? By failing to recog-
nize Deccan buildings in their own right, the canon, I shall argue, not only fails
to acknowledge the agents and agencies involved in their making, but also fails
to historicize the formal heterogeneity it acknowledges.
* * *
A UNESCO World Heritage site in India’s Karnataka state, the temple cluster
at Pattadakal is located on a bend where the Malaprabha River turns north-
ward dramatically. There, on the left bank of the river, in a compact area not
much larger than a New York City block, eight principal sandstone temples
and numerous smaller structures are densely arranged (fig. 1). Constructed
during the seventh and eighth centuries ce, the eight shrines face east and are
oriented toward the river. Scholars believe that Pattadakal was the coronation
Fig. 1.
capital of the Chalukya kings who ruled the Deccan from 543 to 757 ce.2 Indeed, Pattadakal, Karnataka, view
of the temple cluster from the
members of this ruling family, whose dynastic name is typically attached to the north, 2011.
94 KALIGOTLA

architecture I have reframed as Early Deccan,3 built the three most impressive
shrines. Other important temple groups in the Malaprabha valley are located at
Aihole, Badami, and Mahakuta. Along with assemblages in the eastern Deccan,
in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana states, these clusters comprise a corpus of
about two hundred buildings. These Early Deccan structures, which date from
the sixth through the eighth centuries, are valuable because, together with
inscriptions and land grants of the Chalukyas, they constitute the predominant
historical sources for the Deccan of this period.
Since the mid-nineteenth century and the publication of India’s first archi-
tectural histories, scholars have highlighted Pattadakal’s formal heterogeneity.
In Architecture in Dharwar and Mysore (1866), James Fergusson, one of the
founding figures of South Asian art history, wrote that Pattadakal “possesses
a group of temples, not remarkable for their size or architectural beauty, but
interesting because they exhibit the two principal styles of Indian architec-
ture in absolute juxta-position [sic].”4 Fergusson thus inaugurated the binary
understanding of Indian temple architecture, as well as the view that the Deccan
region was a meeting place of architectural styles.
More recently, the Encyclopaedia of Indian Temple Architecture (1983– ; hereaf-
ter referred to as the Encyclopaedia), the authoritative multivolume compendium
of Indian sacred buildings, described Pattadakal and other Early Deccan temple
clusters as places where “a bewildering array and variety of temple forms and
architectural and sculptural styles are encountered along with a promiscuity of
styles on a scale unknown in other regions.”5 Yet most studies do not satisfacto-
rily explain or analyze the formal variety they celebrate. The Encyclopaedia treats
three of Pattadakal’s temples in its South India volume and five others in its North
India volume. Basing its classification scheme on tower form, the Encyclopaedia
separates buildings that are interrelated not only in space and time but also, in all
likelihood, through their building, worship, and patronage communities.
Consider the closely knit triad of structures at Pattadakal, built about the
mid-eighth century (fig. 2). The Encyclopaedia describes the Kashi Vishvanatha
in the North India volume and the other two buildings, the Mallikarjuna and
Virupaksha Temples, in the corresponding South India volume. The Kashi
Vishvanatha is an east-facing temple organized into a rectangular hall that
leads to a square sanctum crowned by a curvilinear tower. The tower is fur-
ther articulated into longitudinal ribs made up of interlacing horseshoe shapes
that enhance its verticality. It is this specific tower morphology that accords
the Kashi Vishvanatha Temple its place in the North India volume.6 On the
other hand, the Mallikarjuna Temple, which is located on the very same ter-
raced area as the Kashi Vishvanatha and only a few feet away to the south, has a
pyramidal tower with a tiered profile over its sanctum sanctorum. A pyramidal
 A TEMPLE WITHOUT A NAME 95

Fig. 2.
Pattadakal, Karnataka, triad of
(left to right) Virupaksha, Kashi
Vishvanatha, and Mallikarjuna
Temples, 2011.

tower divided into stories also crowns the far grander Virupaksha Temple. The
Virupaksha and Mallikarjuna temples are coupled through their spatial proxim-
ity, commonalities in plan and sculptural detail, and shared patronage. The two
queens of Chalukya monarch Vikramaditya II (733–45 ce) commissioned these
Fig. 3.
putative southern temples, which are located in adjoining walled compounds.7 Pattadakal, Karnataka,
Virupaksha Temple, tower
Although a curvilinear tower crowns the Kashi Vishvanatha Temple and projection, 2011. 
tiered towers crown the Mallikarjuna and Virupaksha Temples, a “parrot’s beak”
Fig. 4.
projection, called a shukanasa in Sanskrit architectural manuals, unifies all Pattadakal, Karnataka, Kashi
Vishvanatha Temple, tower
three superstructures (figs. 3, 4). The shukanasa is an extension of the tower that projection, 2011.
96 KALIGOTLA

expands over and crowns the sanctum’s antechamber. Its front, which engages
a worshipper facing the building, is typically carved with a prominent figu-
rative image that points to the religious affiliation of the temple. Importantly,
this architectural device becomes a standard feature of later Deccan temples
and distinguishes them from their southern Indian counterparts, which also
have tiered towers. I argue that Early Deccan makers adapted and translated
the shukanasa projection for the diverse tower forms known to them—cur-
vilinear, pyramidal, or otherwise. They have transcribed the shukanasa of the
Mallikarjuna and Virupaksha temples using elements from the Dravida archi-
tectural vocabulary, while that of the Kashi Vishvanatha is massed into projec-
tions of interlacing Nagara motifs to integrate it into its corresponding Nagara
tower. In so doing, the builders have formally interrelated the three buildings,
for the shukanasa projections and the buildings’ proximity and spatial arrange-
ment give them a cohesive profile that is visible from the north, south, and east
in Pattadakal’s compact skyline.8 The three buildings should thus be understood
as Deccan buildings, not as northern Indian or southern Indian.
The north-south binary also historiographically segregates the nearby
Papanatha Temple (720–50 ce) from the Virupaksha and Mallikarjuna Temples.
Located just a few hundred yards south of the two temples on the very same
riverfront, the Papanatha shares significant formal and inscriptional corre-
spondences with the Virupaksha and Mallikarjuna Temples, but it is cordoned
off in the North India volume of the Encyclopaedia because of its curvilinear
tower (fig. 5). However, the pillared halls of the three temples are divided into
the same number of aisles and bays; sculptural features, including Ganesha
and goddess imagery, appear in identical locations in all three structures; and
miniature sculpted representations of southern temples demarcate the ritual
approach to the sanctum in all three shrines.9 These formal similarities should
not be surprising, since inscriptions carved onto the buildings themselves
inform us that the architects of the Virupaksha and Papanatha belonged to the
same building community.10 These texts describe and praise the two builders
using a nearly identical formulation, which I have argued elsewhere should be
read as “architect of the Deccan.”11
The Durga Temple (725–30 ce) at nearby Aihole is the last example I will
present (fig. 6).12 The Encyclopaedia bifurcates the analysis of this single build-
ing, with passages in both the North India and South India volumes—a fate the
building shares with many others that are deemed hybrid. For a discussion of
the temple’s date, religious affiliation, tower, and gateway, the reader will need to
consult North India;13 for an analysis of the plinth, basement moldings, sculp-
tural niches, and doorframes, South India14 must be referred to, creating a diz-
zying, fractured reading of a single sacred space. Reviewing the scholarship on
 A TEMPLE WITHOUT A NAME 97

Fig. 5.
Pattadakal, Karnataka,
Papanatha Temple, 2011.

Fig. 6.
Aihole, Karnataka, Durga
Temple, 2011.

Early Deccan architecture is therefore akin to visiting the South Asia collections
of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the subcontinent’s Islamic
art is located in a wing spatially distant from the region’s Buddhist, Hindu, and
Jaina artworks. The Encyclopaedia’s north-south divide, like the Metropolitan’s
curatorial choices, reinforces the incommensurability of these cultural produc-
tions, their presumed independent genealogies, and discrete spheres of influ-
ence and operation.
98 KALIGOTLA

The examples of the temple cluster at Pattadakal and Aihole’s Durga Temple
index a generalized attitude that affects the entire corpus, one that does not con-
sider the conjunctions and affinities of regional propinquity, whether these are a
common artistic community or a shared formal vocabulary. While the current
paradigm anatomizes Early Deccan temples and temple clusters into northern
and southern constituents, it does not ask what attitudes or leanings informed
these choices nor how Nagara and Dravida forms were adapted, transformed,
and translated by agents in the Deccan for their own Deccan milieu; it does
not ask, in other words, about Deccan reception of Nagara and Dravida. In the
sections that follow, I chart the historiography for Early Deccan architecture,
from its beginnings in the orientalist interventions of colonial India, to the sub-
sequent nationalist reactions, and on to the present moment. I begin by looking
at understandings of the Deccan itself and examine the sources, institutions,
and approaches responsible for conceptualizing the region and the history of its
architecture. I close with some remarkable recent methodological and theoreti-
cal interventions which, by getting us out of the present conceptual bind, make
it possible to approach Early Deccan architecture anew.

Lack of a Coherent Core and Other Difficulties of Definition

The question “What is the Deccan?” is not simple to answer, because no sta-
ble or unifying sense of the Deccan emerges from historical sources, whether
Indian or foreign. Contemporary understandings are equally contingent, rang-
ing from boundaries defined by geography to geology to language. Let us begin
with the geographic feature that is allied with the cultural zone. The Deccan
plateau is the high basalt tableland in peninsular India whose northern bound-
ary is the Vindhya Range. It is bounded by the Eastern and Western Ghats,
mountain ranges that run along the east and west coasts of the Indian peninsula
and come together in the south as the Nilgiri Hills. Extending from the Arabian
Sea in the west to the Bay of Bengal on the east, this arid plateau is watered by
the Godavari, Krishna, and Kaveri river systems.
The term Deccan is a corruption of the Sanskrit word dakshina, mean-
ing the southern direction or the right side.15 References to the Deccan
appear in some of the earliest Indian texts and inscriptions, where the stan-
dard term is dakshinapatha.16 The great Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and
Mahabharata, and a third-century political treatise from the Mauryan court,
the Arthashastra, use the term. They employ it, however, both in the sense of
region or territory and in the sense of route or a set of routes.17 The Periplus of
the Erythraean Sea, an anonymous Greek travel book of the first century ce,
calls the region “Dachinabades” and mentions various market towns on the
 A TEMPLE WITHOUT A NAME 99

west coast,18 while the fifth-century travelogue of the Chinese monk Faxian
calls it “Ta-Thsin.”19
Historical understandings of the Deccan’s geographic boundaries are quite
varied. The broadest definition is that the Deccan encompasses all of peninsular
India; a more specific variant is that it is peninsular India south of the Vindhya
Mountains and the Narmada River. Another, more focused, view excludes the
southernmost part of peninsular India, namely Tamil country or south India,
from Deccan country.20 Firishta, a fifteenth-century chronicler, held a language-
based view: to him, the Deccan encompassed the Marathi, Kannada, and Telugu
speech communities.21 According to historian Richard Eaton, the Deccan “has
no enduring political or cultural center.”22 “In history’s larger sweep,” Eaton
contends, “this dry and mainly undifferentiated upland plateau never possessed
a single, perennial political core, no lasting hub of imperial rule on the order
of Delhi or the Kaveri delta.”23 That is, unlike the succession of polities, includ-
ing the Delhi sultanates and the Mughal Empire, which controlled north India
from their administrative seat in Delhi, the Deccan had no such stable cen-
ter. Consider the Deccan’s Chalukya dynasty: though ousted from their capital
Vatapi in 642 ce, the Chalukyas did not reestablish themselves at their erstwhile
administrative center, even after resuming power twelve years later.24 Probably
remaining itinerant, the Chalukyas issued land grants and charters from vari-
ous military camps across the region. Their successors to Deccan sovereignty—
the Rashtrakutas (750–973) and later Chalukyas (973–1189)—built other capital
cities, other bases from which to wield power, even while redeploying many
of their predecessors’ political, inscriptional, and visual modes of authority.
Notwithstanding the establishment of Indo-Persianate modes of kingship in
the fourteenth century, the region possessed multiple centers of influence,
and power was contested among five Deccan sultanates and the Vijayanagara
Empire during the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries.
In other words, a single language community does not unify the Deccan,
nor does it possess an “enduring geopolitical center.”25 It is perhaps no won-
der, then, that we lack a separate analytical category for Early Deccan buildings
whose “hybrid” forms also lack a “coherent” style vis-à-vis their more homoge-
neous northern and southern Indian counterparts.
Modern political and administrative divisions present a different set of his-
toriographic problems for the study of the region’s built environments. Until
recently, the Early Deccan corpus was divided across three states in present-
day India—Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Maharashtra—but the creation
of Telangana state in 2014 has increased that number to four. This means that
responsibilities for archaeology, epigraphic analysis, conservation, and museol-
ogy are apportioned among organizations dispersed across the Deccan and in
100 KALIGOTLA

the nation’s capital. On the one hand, the monuments’ jurisdiction is divided
among the central Archaeological Survey of India (based in Delhi) and various
state-run archaeology departments; on the other hand, sculpture, architectural
fragments, photo archives, coinage, and inscriptions are spread across so-called
site museums located in close proximity to architectural sites; state museums at
regional capitals, such as Hyderabad and Bangalore; and museums with broader
purviews in metropolitan centers like New Delhi and Mumbai. Similarly, per-
missions for access privileges need to be made separately to an array of institu-
tions and officials.
The language competencies required for study present an additional com-
plication. The majority of inscriptions are in Sanskrit, with a small percentage
in the Deccan languages Kannada and Telugu. However, while Sanskrit reading
knowledge may suffice for epigraphic analysis, spoken abilities in Kannada and
Telugu are required for fieldwork. Perhaps as a result, studies replicate modern
political and linguistic divisions, with scholars focusing on either Karnataka
sites or on sites in Andhra, producing yet another conceptual fragmentation of
Deccan material. It remains to be seen how Telangana’s separation from Andhra
will complicate scholarship as both material remains and administration
become more fragmented. A final problem worth highlighting is that sites in
the eastern Deccan have received much less attention than those in Karnataka
in the west. Since Karnataka is perceived as the “center” or “core” of Chalukya
authority and culture in the dominant dynastic approach to India’s architec-
tural history, scholars have presented Andhra productions as less accom-
plished, “provincial” variants,26 where “crude workmanship” and inexperience
abound.27 But this view of Andhra architecture can hardly be separated from
the larger historiographic problem afflicting the Deccan, itself long viewed in
archaeological and historical scholarship as a “developmental backwater” com-
pared to its putative betters, north India and south India.28

Colonial Era Beginnings and the Problem of Categories

James Fergusson (1808–86), a Scottish indigo merchant who lived and traveled
in colonial India between 1835 and 1842, authored the first comprehensive his-
tory of the subcontinent’s architecture. The conceptions he laid out in History
of Indian and Eastern Architecture (1876) remain influential today.29 Fergusson
characterized European classical art as the supplier of uncontested universals,
and deemed Indian art as derivative, constituted by religion and race, and char-
acterized by decline from antecedents in an aesthetically pure but historically
distant past. He articulated his race-based views on the value of studying Indian
architecture in a lecture at London’s Society of Arts in 1866. For a country that
 A TEMPLE WITHOUT A NAME 101

possessed no trustworthy written records, he asserted, architecture provided

the only reliable means of constructing history: “It affords the readiest and most
direct means of ascertaining the ethnological relations of the different races
inhabiting India. It points out more clearly than can be done by other means,
how they succeeded each other, where they settled, how they mixed, or when
they were absorbed.”30 Architecture was indispensable, then, to Britain’s colo-
nial project because of its “bearing directly on our knowledge of India itself.”31
Fergusson published History of Indian and Eastern Architecture in 1876 as
the third volume in a series on the history of architecture. The six-hundred-
page work covered almost five hundred monuments grouped into nine books;
it included two hundred illustrations. With books devoted to Buddhist, Jaina,
Hindu, and Islamic (called “Indian Saracenic”) architecture, it divided the
buildings by religious affiliation, regardless of whether they were designed
for worship or for civic or residential purposes.32 Progressing chronologically
from the fourth century bce to the nineteenth century, Fergusson’s volume
classifies the subcontinent’s “Hindu” architecture into three styles: northern or
Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, and Chalukyan, corresponding respectively with north
India, south India, and the Deccan region. Not unlike Hindu/Muslim, Hindi/
Urdu, and other incommensurable categories that colonial historiography and
colonial knowledge constructed, Fergusson posited Indo-Aryan and Dravidian
as antithetical architectural styles.33 He located the spatial limits of the first style
in the regions where Sanskrit or Sanskrit-based languages were spoken and
the second among the speakers of Tamil or cognate languages.34 Architectural
styles were coterminous, in other words, with ethnic and linguistic boundaries.
Fergusson espoused the importance of ethnography as an explanatory model:
“That two people, inhabiting practically the same country, and worshipping
the same gods under the guidance of the same Brahmanical priesthood, should
have adopted and adhered to two such dissimilar styles for their sacred build-
ings shows as clearly as anything can well do how much race has to do with
these matters, and how little we can understand the causes of such contrasts,
unless we take affinities or differences of race into consideration.”35
Significantly for the purposes of my argument, Fergusson illustrated the for-
mal differences between his Indo-Aryan and Dravidian styles with a woodcut
of Pattadakal, launching the tower-based epistemology still replicated today
(fig. 7). While he located his third Hindu style, Chalukyan, in the Deccan,
deeming it “a borderland between the other two styles,”36 he did not consider
Early Deccan buildings stylistically Chalukyan. In his view, Pattadakal and
other Early Deccan centers simply juxtaposed northern and southern styles,
for the buildings “either show the curvilinear outline of the northern style, or
the storeyed pyramids of the Dravidians.”37 Indeed, Fergusson’s History is the
 102
Fig. 7.
View of Pattadakal illustrating
“Dravidian” and “Indo-Aryan”
temple styles.
From James Fergusson,
History of Indian and Eastern
Architecture, vol. 3 (London:
J. Murray, 1891), 411.
KALIGOTLA
first to divide Pattadakal’s temples across two chapters, which he calls “books”:
book IV (“Dravidian Style”) and book VI (“Northern or Indo-Aryan Style”).
It is essential, however, that we situate Fergusson’s oeuvre within the wider
ambit of the British colonial state’s accumulation and production of knowledge
about India. Colonial rule officially began in the subcontinent in 1757 with the
East India Company’s assumption of revenue collection in Bengal following
the Battle of Plassey and ended with India and Pakistan’s independence from
Britain in 1947. Colonial knowledge production included large-scale enumera-
tive projects: censuses, gazetteers, and ethnological studies of India’s castes,
tribal groups, rulers, occupations, and customs; collection and translation of
an extensive range of manuscripts and inscriptions; compilation of histories,
grammars, and dictionaries; and detailed topographical surveys, producing
maps, plans, and architectural drawings.38 This enterprise became far more
instrumentalized once the British Crown took over the administration of India
from the East India Company in 1858, after the brutal suppression of an upris-
ing led by company soldiers that resulted in yearlong hostilities across much of
northern India. From then on, the mechanics and means by which the British
 A TEMPLE WITHOUT A NAME 103

investigated India became official; it was transferred away from orientalists,

travelers, amateurs, and officers of the company to agents of the British govern-
ment. These forms of knowledge were to aid and ensure governance, to solidify
Britain’s control over its Indian possessions, and to justify British presence in
India. As Gary Tartakov writes, “The entire British Indological experience—no
matter how careful—carried within it the need to demonstrate the failure of
the civilization it was dedicated to explaining.”39 Thus, as Partha Mitter finds,
the periodization of Indian art history into succeeding Buddhist, Hindu, and
Islamic periods crystalized between 1874 and 1927, as did the analytical catego-
ries by which the West grasped Indian art.40
Fergusson was enormously influential in shaping the European reception of
Indian art during this formative period. As is almost universally acknowledged,
he and his contemporary, the archaeologist-surveyor Alexander Cunningham
(1814–93), who inaugurated the Archaeological Survey of India in 1861 and was its
first director, laid the theoretical and methodological foundations for the inter-
related disciplines of architectural studies and archaeology of the subcontinent.41
Moreover, the prevailing intellectual environment—which we have come to
understand as orientalist—was such that Fergusson’s contemporaries and succes-
sors, thinkers like Henry Cole, George Birdwood, and Vincent Smith, espoused
similar views based on racial determinism and Eurocentric aesthetic universals.42
Subsequent editions of Fergusson’s History, including James Burgess’s 1910 revi-
sion, which had a higher page count and more illustrations than the original,
do not amend Fergusson’s categories. Though published fifty years later, in 1926,
Henry Cousens’s expanded architectural history of the western Deccan adopts
the same stylistic categories and echoes the belief that Early Deccan builders
juxtaposed or “overlapped” two regional styles.43 Only with the appearance of
Ananda Coomaraswamy’s History of Indian and Indonesian Architecture in 1927
did the discourse allow for what might be called Indian forms of thought.44
If European scholars dominated the nineteenth century’s intellectual history,
then the twentieth century saw the increasing participation of Indian national-
ist scholars and thinkers who sought to refute colonial discourses. Along with
the artist and thinker Ernest Binfield Havell (1861–1934), Coomaraswamy advo-
cated approaching Indian art on its own terms. Coomaraswamy and Havell dis-
avowed Western classical aesthetic ideals, particularly mimetic representation,
and demanded that Indian art be judged by standards that were intrinsic to the
tradition rather than by those derived from European systems and contexts.45
While Fergusson’s use of photographic documentation was foundational to the
discipline’s methods, Coomaraswamy’s writings were significant for introduc-
ing indigenous categories for temple architecture, based on his considerable
knowledge of Sanskrit and extensive reading of Indian art and architectural
104 KALIGOTLA

treatises (shastras).46 Emphasizing the importance of geography over religion

and race,47 Coomaraswamy mapped Fergusson’s Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, and
Chalukyan onto the native Nagara, Dravida, and Vesara respectively.48 He also
inaugurated a shift to a dynastic conceptualization of Indian art history that
continues to dominate today. However, he, too, saw Early Deccan buildings as
characterized by a combination of styles innovated elsewhere, whether in the
Pallava south or in the Gupta north, two important Indian polities.
Though the scholarship adopted architectural terms drawn from Sanskrit
treatises, considerable confusion remained about the meanings of these terms
and their applicability. Thus, for instance, were Tamil, or southern, understand-
ings of the terms Nagara, Dravida, and Vesara the same as northern Indian
understandings? Was there a universal or common South Asian understand-
ing? Temple historians acknowledge Stella Kramrisch’s important two-volume
work, The Hindu Temple, published in 1946, for demystifying such problems
of definition.49 In an analysis that included pan-Indian texts as well as those
coming from regional building traditions, Kramrisch’s pioneering work noted
local differences in the understanding of the Nagara-Dravida-Vesara ternary.
Despite the widespread use of the same terms across traditions, Kramrisch
pointed out that when Tamil texts used them, they were referring to the form
of the crowning element of a temple tower, whereas texts from northern India
used the terms in the sense we do today, to delineate independent, regionally
based architectural systems. Significantly, Kramrisch saw the “mixed” character
of Deccan architecture as natural to a region “betwixt two powerful schools.”50
Moreover, in a chapter on the temple tower, Kramrisch discusses the architec-
ture of Pattadakal and other Early Deccan clusters and, noting their singularity
for juxtaposing three kinds of towers,51 puts in place the tower-based epistemol-
ogy later taken up by the Encylopaedia and many general and specialist works
on temple architecture.52
Despite the conceptual inroads that Coomaraswamy and Kramrisch forged,
comprehensive works on Indian art of the mid-twentieth century, published
after India’s independence from colonial rule in 1947, continued to harken back
to Fergusson’s racialized terminology. Two examples are Benjamin Rowland’s
The Art and Architecture of India (1953) and Percy Brown’s Indian Architecture
(1956).53 Both works reinforce several key ideas: one, that northern and south-
ern temple styles come together in the Deccan; and two, that they are either
found side by side in separate buildings or else hybridized in the body of a
single temple. “Certain of these temples which are in one style,” Brown notes,
“contain architectural details belonging to the other contrasting style.”54 Thus,
well into the twentieth century, the idea that northern and southern are “con-
trasting” or incompatible styles persisted.
 A TEMPLE WITHOUT A NAME 105

Postcolonial Approaches to Early Deccan Architecture

The period between the late 1960s and the late 1980s was an extremely pro-
ductive one for research on Early Deccan architecture. Scholars solved long-
standing problems related to the chronology, religious affiliation, iconography,
and patronage of buildings. And, unlike colonial-period scholars, these schol-
ars, who were located both in India and the West, were trained in Indian lan-
guages and could make extensive use of Indian sources.55 Their research has
been collected and codified in the Encyclopaedia of Indian Temple Architecture,
published, starting in 1983, as a series of volumes edited by M. A. Dhaky and
Michael Meister, two authorities who have defined temple studies in the second
half of the twentieth century.56 The aspirations to comprehensiveness of this
monumental project, produced more than a hundred years after Fergusson’s
History, are no smaller than those of that earlier publication. An indispens-
able reference work for any historian working on South Asia’s geographi-
cally dispersed and formally diverse architecture, the Encyclopaedia gathers
together decades of research in architectural history, epigraphy, numismatics,
political history, and religious studies, and makes available thousands of pho-
tographs, measured drawings, and plans. It covers monuments built between
the first centuries bce up until the eighteenth century, organizing them by time
period, region, and polity across the North India and South India volumes. The
Encyclopaedia has established a method for describing Indian monuments that
is rigorously uncompromising in its use of Sanskrit nomenclature and indig-
enous categories excavated from a variety of art and architectural treatises.
One major drawback to its approach is the emphasis on morphology and style,
often to the exclusion of relating typological findings to historical phenomena;
another problem is the continued instantiation of the north-south binary.
The Encyclopaedia accommodates Early Deccan temples within its binary
scheme as Deccano-Dravida, a category related to, but distinct from, the Tamil-
Dravida tradition practiced farther south.57 The Encyclopaedia’s conception not
only fragments the Deccan’s dense temple clusters, as I noted at this essay’s
outset, but it also privileges and assumes certain geographic origins for Nagara
and Dravida. Although the term Deccano-Dravida acknowledges Deccan
buildings’ indigeneity and their independence from Tamil architecture, it does
not account for the ways in which Deccan architects adapted or translated
“northern” forms, suggesting that these were somehow alien to the Deccan, or
else vogue elements.58 This model thus assumes the mobility of cultural forms
unmediated by the receiving culture and is premised on the anteriority of cer-
tain visual ideas. A second problem is that structures that do not fall within
the north-south binary are relegated to the hybrid category. Thus, Deccan built
106 KALIGOTLA

environments and individual buildings both emerge as stylistically incoherent

hybrids, situated at the margins of two putatively stable, coherent, and anterior
styles: the aesthetic value of Early Deccan architecture and the agency of Early
Deccan social actors are both diminished in this discourse.59
But how can we approach Early Deccan buildings and built worlds and their
nuanced instantiations of Nagara and Dravida from the perspective of their
makers’ intercessions? While Sanskrit art and architectural treatises for other
South Asian regions—such as Tamil country, Gujarat, and central India—have
come down to us, we have no textual clues for Deccan building practice. We
do, however, have epigraphic texts from the thirteenth century that make sev-
eral cogent arguments: first, that Deccan makers were conscious of diverse
architectural systems; and second, that they were aware of and used the terms
Nagara, Dravida, Vesara, Kalinga, and Bhumija. Consider this thirteenth-cen-
tury epigraph inscribed on a stone temple in Karnataka: “[Within this village
of Kuppaţūr] was built, as if by the heavenly architect himself, out of sublime
devotion for the god Shiva, this elegant, equipoised and shapely temple, freely
ornamented with Drāvid.a, Bhūmija, and Nāgara, and, with bhadra-offsets
manipulated in many ways.”60
This is one of the few texts from the Deccan that employs the indigenous
architectural categories Nagara, Dravida, and so on while at the same time rec-
ognizing their difference as alternative visual languages for making the temple.
The inscription also makes it clear that the architect’s intervention is essential—
it is because of his mediating role, because of his manipulations, and, I would
argue, because of his negotiations among the various ways of making a temple
that the “elegant, equipoised, and shapely temple” came into being. While we do
not possess similar epigraphic evidence to confirm the awareness or discursive
practices of Early Deccan builders, the evidence provided by the built environ-
ment in conjunction with these (albeit later) inscriptions is nonetheless strongly
suggestive of the intentionality of seventh- and eighth-century builders in their
deployment of visual and stylistic differences.
By reading such inscriptions against the visual evidence of the temples,
M. A. Dhaky speculated about how Deccan makers understood Nagara and
Dravida (and the other forms named in the epigraphs) within the framework
of their own building tradition.61 Taking Dhaky’s work as a point of departure,
Philip Wagoner and Ajay Sinha each established Deccan processes of “seeing
and knowing”62 as well as Deccan ways of altering the logic of the temple based
upon that knowledge.
Wagoner’s scholarship on the eastern Telangana region of the Deccan from
1000 to 1300 ce gets us out of the current typological dualism in two significant
ways. First, Wagoner attends to the formal makeup of the temple in its entirety,
 A TEMPLE WITHOUT A NAME 107

from the plinth to the articulation of the walls to the tower form, and, in so
doing, he demonstrates that buildings should be understood as “comprehensive
systems of articulation”63 in which all the details of the elevation, not merely the
tower form, are significant. Second, he connects the multiple systems of orga-
nization that builders created with social, functional, ritual, and other kinds
of meaning.64 Published in 2000, Ajay Sinha’s Imagining Architects is ground-
breaking for arguing against the purely typological and style-based understand-
ing of temple architecture and the problematic biological metaphors—from
evolution to mutation to hybridity—that have governed the discourse. Sinha
demonstrates the agency and intentionality that eleventh century and later
Deccan builders deployed through their architecture, which Fergusson under-
stood as Chalukyan and Coomaraswamy and later scholars labeled as Vesara.
According to Sinha, Vesara does not synthesize or blend Nagara and Dravida
elements, nor is it an outgrowth of Dravida, as had been commonly under-
stood. Instead, he says, “It is the continuing separate ‘function’ of these two for-
mal systems in Vesara that I find intriguing.”65 Endeavoring to explain Vesara
historically as “the maker’s response to the surrounding world, conveyed into
the works of arts themselves,”66 he connects the “conditions of making” with
broader historical processes.

Conclusion

These reconsiderations of Deccan sacred architecture and their emphasis on

the centrality of historical agents in its creation advance temple scholarship
from an ahistorical charting of stylistic progress—and even, arguably, from a
purely formalist exercise—to an enterprise that links formal choice to social
and cultural processes governed by common conditions of time and space. In
the absence of similar epigraphic evidence for the Early Deccan, the temples
and built spaces remain the most eloquent advocates of their makers’ values,
reflecting not only how they viewed Nagara and Dravida but also how Nagara
and Dravida were received or perceived in their Early Deccan milieu. Such a
focus on reception makes it possible to consider how Deccan agents of the sixth
through the eighth centuries responded to, interacted with, viewed, translated,
understood, used, and adapted67 the variety of cultural forms that they encoun-
tered, irrespective of their putative origins. Furthermore, we need not empha-
size the role of makers to the exclusion of other Deccan social actors, whether
courtly elites, patrons, priests, worshipping communities, or trading classes;
approaching the built environment as a reflection or manifestation of the cul-
tural values of its time permits a consideration of the gamut of responses that
produced it. Deccan architectural cosmopolitanism can be situated, therefore,
108 KALIGOTLA

with Deccan ways of “thinking and acting beyond the local”68 in the linguistic,
political, religious, landscape, and other social realms. For Early Deccan agents
adopted a range of transregional cultural forms and ideas alongside Nagara and
Dravida architectural styles—Sanskrit language, courtly values about beauty,
ornament, and aesthetic enjoyment, the Siddhamatrika script, the cult of god
Shiva, and attitudes towards geopolitical space—that communicated to an “all-
India audience,” on the one hand, while encoding them with regional concerns
and values, on the other.

Notes
My thanks to the editors of this volume, Larry Silver and Kevin Terraciano, for
giving me the opportunity to analyze and elaborate upon a topic that has inter-
ested me for some time. Much gratitude to Katherine Kasdorf, Nancy Lin, and
the anonymous reviewer of this essay for their close reading and thoughtful sug-
gestions for improvement.

1. Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 250.
2. John Faithful Fleet was the first scholar to propose that Pattadakal was a place
of coronation for Chalukya kings, based on the etymology of Pattadakal and
its ancient name Pattada Kisuvolal. See John Faithful Fleet, “Sanskrit and Old-
Canarese Inscriptions,” Indian Antiquary 10 (1881): 162–63.
3. I self-consciously adopt the Early Deccan category for this architecture in lieu of
Badami Chalukya or the other dynastic appellations (early Chalukya, early west-
ern Chalukya, and western Chalukya) that have been the norm so far, in order to
emphasize region and time period as more useful analytics in the development of
an architectural style.
4. James Fergusson, Architecture in Dharwar and Mysore (London: J. Murray,
1866), 64.
5. Michael Meister and M. A. Dhaky, eds., Encyclopaedia of Indian Temple
Architecture, vol. 1, pt. 2, South India: Upper Drāvid.adesa, Early Phase,
a.d. 550–1075 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 7.
6. As a point of comparison, the Encyclopaedia also places the Galaganatha,
Jambulinga, Kada Siddhesvara, and Papanatha Temples—all equipped with cur-
vilinear towers whose verticality is articulated by bands composed of interlock-
ing horseshoe motifs—in its North India volume. Such towers are also typically
crowned by a ribbed capstone called the amalaka.
7. Vikramaditya II’s (733–45) chief queen, Lokamahadevi, is confirmed as the
patron of the Virupaksha Temple by inscriptions on the temple’s eastern gateway
(Fleet, “Sanskrit,” 164–65) and the Lakshmikambha pillar, a freestanding column
situated in the architectural compound north of the temple (Fleet, “Sanskrit,” 168;
and Fleet, “No. 1—Pattadakal Pillar Inscription of the Time of Kirtivarman II,”
Epigraphia Indica 3 [1894–95]: 1–7); the Lakshmikambha inscription also allows
 A TEMPLE WITHOUT A NAME 109

an attribution of the Mallikarjuna Temple to Lokamahadevi’s younger sister and

cowife, Trailokamahadevi.
8. For the full argument about the shukanasa, see Subhashini Kaligotla, “Beyond
Borderland: Claiming a Conceptual Space for Early Deccan Buildings,” Getty
Research Journal, no. 8 (2016): 1–16.
9. These miniature relief temples, depicted frontally or in cross section, appear on
doorway lintels and on the clerestory beams of porches and pillared halls. They
work in conjunction with other ornaments of the temple to emphasize and adorn
the axial approach to the sanctum.
10. The Papanatha inscription is carved on the east elevation of the building, to the
south of the porch. See Fleet, “Sanskrit,” 170–71. The Virupakhsa Temple inscrip-
tion is on the eastern gateway, on the eastern elevation of the southern pillar.
See Fleet, “Sanskrit,” 164–65. Both inscriptions suggest that the architects of the
buildings belonged to a community of makers called the Sarvasiddhi Acharyas.
11. See Subhashini Kaligotla, “A Name of One’s Own: Claiming a Conceptual
Space for Early Deccan Architecture,” chap. 4 in “Shiva’s Waterfront Temples:
Reimagining the Sacred Architecture of India’s Deccan Region” (PhD diss.,
Columbia University, 2015).
12. Dates as proposed by Gary Tartakov, The Durga Temple at Aihole: A
Historiographical Study (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 95.
13. Michael Meister, M. A. Dhaky, and Krishna Deva, eds., Encyclopaedia of Indian
Temple Architecture, vol. 2, pt. 1, North India: Foundations of North Indian Style,
c. 250 b.c.–a.d. 1100 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 298–300.
14. Meister and Dhaky, Encyclopaedia, 1.2:49–52.
15. Ghulam Yazdani, The Early History of the Deccan (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1960) 3.
16. Yazdani, Early History, 3.
17. See Dilip Chakrabarti, The Archaeology of the Deccan Routes: The Ancient Routes
from the Ganga Plain to the Deccan (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 2005),
1–5, for a variety of textual understandings of the term Dakshinapatha.
18. Yazdani, Early History, 20.
19. Yazdani, Early History, 3.
20. A notion that finds precedent in the great Indian epics the Ramayana and the
Mahabharata. See Yazdani, Early History, 3–4, for a detailed enumeration of
diverse understandings of the Deccan and the textual sources from which they
come.
21. H. K. Sherwani and P. M. Joshi, History of Medieval Deccan (Hyderabad: The
Government of Andhra Pradesh, 1973), 1:4.
22. Eaton, Eight Indian Lives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1.
23. Eaton, Eight Indian Lives, 1.
24. See B. N. Sarvamangala, “The Careers of Vinayaditya and Vijayaditya,” in
Chalukyas of Badami: Seminar Papers, ed. M. S. Nagaraja Rao (Bangalore: Mythic
Society, 1978), 98.
25. Sarvamangala, “Careers,” 2.
110 KALIGOTLA

26. For example, this is how Carol Bolon frames the Kudaveli Sangamesvara
Temple: She describes its location as an “outpost,” and finds the treatment of the
niches and windows on the temple’s exterior walls “bizarre” and “provincial,”
which she attributes to the work of “local artists.” Whereas the sculpture con-
tained in the niches is of acceptable quality since she believes it to be imported
from Aihole in Karnataka. Carol Radcliffe Bolon, “The Durga Temple, Aihole,
and the Saṅgameśvara Temple, Kūd. avelli: A Sculptural Review,” Ars Orientalis 15
(1985): 50.
27. These qualities are imputed to the central shrines at Satyavolu and Kadamara
Kalava in Andhra. See, for instance, Carol Radcliffe Bolon, “Early Chalukya
Sculpture” (PhD diss., New York University, 1981), 331. Susan Locher Buchanan,
“Calukya Temples: History and Iconography” (PhD diss., The Ohio State
University, 1985), 336, also characterizes these temples in the very same manner
using the same language.
28. For a further elaboration of this point see Kathleen Morrison, “Trade, Urbanism,
and Agricultural Expansion: Buddhist Monastic Institutions and the State in the
Early Historic Western Deccan,” World Archaeology 27, no. 2 (1995): 203–21.
29. James Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (London: John
Murray, 1876).
30. James Fergusson, On the Study of Indian Architecture (London: John Murray,
1867), 22.
31. Fergusson, Indian Architecture, 5.
32. For instance, temples, palaces, and water monuments are all classified as “Hindu”
monuments. The same is true for the monuments placed in the other broad
religion-based rubrics.
33. In discussing the “Indo-Aryan” style of Orissa (which was officially renamed
Odisha in 2011), Fergusson says: “One of the most marked and striking peculiari-
ties of Orissan architecture is the marked and almost absolute contrast it pres-
ents to the style of the Dravidian at the southern end of the peninsula.” He goes
on to describe the particular ways in which Orissan towers are different from
Dravidian towers: “no Orissan towers present the smallest trace of any storeyed
or even step-like arrangement.” See Fergusson, History, 414.
34. Fergusson, History, 406–8, spells out the geographic extent of each style.
35. Fergusson, History, 415.
36. Fergusson, History, 406.
37. Fergusson, History, 387.
38. See Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) for a comprehensive account of
the “epistemological violence” perpetrated by the colonial state and its various
modalities of operation in India.
39. Gary Michael Tartakov, “Changing Views of India’s Art History,” in Perceptions
of South Asia’s Visual Past, ed. Catherine Asher and Thomas Metcalf (New Delhi:
Oxford, 1994), 17.
40. See Partha Mitter, “Towards the Twentieth Century: A Reassessment of Present
Attitudes,” chap. 6 in Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions
to Indian Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). Mitter finds that between the
 A TEMPLE WITHOUT A NAME 111

publication of Henry Cole’s Catalogue of the Objects of Indian Art Exhibited

in the South Kensington Museum in 1874 and the appearance of Ananda
Coomaraswamy’s History of Indian and Indonesian Art in 1927, these views solidi-
fied through the writings and opinions of a group of writers, among whom Mitter
situates James Fergusson and Henry Cole in the “archaeological” school and
Coomaraswany and Ernest Binfield Havell within the “transcendental” school.
41. For an extensive analysis of the two figures’ parallel trajectories and their con-
tributions to architectural history and archaeology, including the ideologies and
biases that informed their methods, see Tapati Guha-Thakurta, “The Empire and
Its Antiquities: Two Pioneers and Their Scholarly Fields,” chap. 1 in Monuments,
Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004), 3–42.
42. For a capsule account of the interventions of these three figures, see Tartakov,
“Changing Views,” 24–28; and Mitter, “Toward the Twentieth Century,” for Cole
and Smith’s part in the intellectual history.
43. Henry Cousens, The Chalukyan Architecture of the Kanarese Districts (Calcutta:
Government of India Central Publication Branch, 1926), 17.
44. Ananda Coomaraswamy, History of Indian and Indonesian Art (London: Edward
Goldston, 1927; reprint New York: Dover, 1985).
45. See Mitter, “Toward the Twentieth Century,” 270–86, for Havell and
Coomaraswamy’s contributions to the countervailing discourse.
46. I am not suggesting, however, that Coomaraswamy was the first or only scholar
to look to indigenous sources to locate precolonial or “Indian” systems of
thought. Two notable precursors in the field of architectural history were Ram
Raz (1790–1833) and Rajendralal Mitra (1822–1921). Raz, recognized as a pio-
neer in collecting, collating, and translating an extensive array of architectural
treatises, or shastras, drew in particular on the Tamil country texts Manasara
and Mayamata for his Essay on the Architecture of the Hindus (published by the
Royal Asiatic Society in 1834). For an extensive analysis of Raz’s historiographic
approach and place, see Madhuri Desai, “Interpreting an Architectural Past:
Ram Raz and the Treatise in South Asia,” Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians 71, no. 4 ( 2012): 462–87. For Mitra, who published on the architecture
of Orissa and Bodh Gaya and also famously challenged Fergusson and incurred
the latter’s condemnation, see Tapati Guha-Thakurta, “Interlocuting Texts and
Monuments: The Coming of Age of the ‘Native’ Scholar,” in Monuments, Objects,
Histories, 85–111. Neither scholar treated Deccan material, however, nor did they
achieve Coomaraswamy’s comprehensiveness or influence.
47. See Coomaraswamy, History, 106–7, for his views on geography versus race, in
clear opposition to Fergusson.
48. Coomaraswamy, History, 107, provides the equivalences for Fergusson’s categories
as well as their geographic span.
49. Stella Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1976).
50. Kramrisch, Hindu Temple, 291.
51. Termed Latina, Phamsana, and Dravida in current scholarship.
52. Kramrisch, Hindu Temple, 184–86.
112 KALIGOTLA

53. Benjamin Rowland, The Art and Architecture of India: Buddhist, Hindu, Jain
(London: Penguin Books, 1953); and Percy Brown, Indian Architecture: Buddhist
and Hindu Periods (Bombay: Taraporevala, 1956).
54. Brown, Indian Architecture, 82.
55. For comprehensive works with a focus on Karnataka, see Gary Tarr (now
Tartakov), “The Architecture of the Early Western Chalukyas” (PhD diss.,
University of California Los Angeles, 1969); George Michell, Early Western
Calukyan Temples (London: Art and Archaeology Research Papers, 1975); Bolon,
“Early Chalukya Sculpture”; and Buchanan, “Calukya Temples.” For a focus
on the eastern Deccan and on establishing relationships between the East and
West: M. Rama Rao, Early Chalukyan Temples of Andhra Desa (Hyderabad:
Government of Andhra Pradesh, 1965); M. Radhakrishna Sarma, Temples of
Telingān.a: The Architecture, Iconography, and Sculpture of the Cāl.ukya and
Kākatīya Temples (Hyderabad, 1972); Odile Divakaran, “Les Temples d’Alampur
et de ses Environs au Temps des Calukya de Badami,” Arts Asiatiques 24 (1971):
51–101; Bruno Dagens, Entre Alampur et Srisailam: Recherches Archeologiques
en Andhra Pradesh (Pondicherry: Institut Francais d’Indologie, 1984); and B. R.
Prasad, Chalukyan Temples of Andhradesa (New Delhi: Abhinav, 1983). For
a detailed political history through a close analysis of the inscriptions of the
Chalukyas: Durga Prasad Dikshit, Political History of the Chālukyas of Badami
(New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1980); and K. V. Ramesh, Chalukyas of Vātāpi
(Delhi: Agam Kala Prakashan, 1985).
56. Though Dhaky and Meister are the guiding figures, contributions to the volumes
have been made by other prominent architectural historians of South Asia.
57. The term Deccano-Dravida appears in Meister and Dhaky, Encyclopaedia, 1.2:12;
other notable publications which distinguish between the Dravida architecture
of the Deccan and that of Tamil country are: Gary Tartakov, “The Beginning
of Dravidian Temple Architecture in Stone,” Artibus Asiae 42, no. 1 (1980):
40; George Michell, Pattadakal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002),
8; Adam Hardy, Indian Temple Architecture: Form and Transformation, The
Karnata Drāvid.a Tradition, Seventh to Thirteenth Centuries (New Delhi: Indira
Gandhi National Centre for the Arts and Abhinava Publications, 1995), 5–7; and
Ajay Sinha, Imagining Architects: Creativity in the Religious Monuments of India
(Newark: University of Delaware Press), 39–45.
58. See, for instance, Bolon, “Early Chalukya Sculpture,” 157; Buchanan, “Calukya
Temples,” 120; Meister, Dhaky, and Deva, Encyclopaedia, 2.1:282–83; Michell,
Pattadakal, 10; and Hardy, Indian Temple Architecture, which devotes an entire
chapter (9) to the “non-Dravida” (particularly Nagara) temples of the Deccan.
59. For a concise and compelling articulation of the problems of hybridity as an
intellectual framework, see Tony Stewart and Carl Ernst, “Syncretism,” in South
Asian Folklore: An Encyclopedia, ed. Margaret A. Mills, Peter J. Claus, and Sarah
Diamond (New York: Routledge, 2003), 586–88. Though Stewart and Ernst are
primarily interested in questions of religious syncretism, I have been able to use-
fully adapt many of their arguments for the Deccan’s so-called formal hybridity.
 A TEMPLE WITHOUT A NAME 113

60. I have amended the translation from M. A. Dhaky, The Indian Temple Forms in
Karn.āt.a Inscriptions and Architecture (Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1977), 3. The
inscription is dated to 1231 ce and the language of the original is Old Kannada.
61. See Dhaky, Indian Temple Forms. It should be emphasized that Dhaky’s work is
concerned with Deccan temples that are coeval with the inscription, that is, those
designated as Kalyani Chalukya or Vesara.
62. Sinha, Imagining Architects, 27.
63. See Philip Wagoner, “Modal Marking of Temple Types in Kakatiya Andhra:
Towards a Theory of Decorum for Indian Temple Architecture,” in Syllables of
Sky: Studies in South Indian Civilization in Honour of Velcheru Narayana Rao,
ed. David Shulman (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 436, for a further
elaboration of this concept.
64. See Philip Wagoner, “Mode and Meaning in the Architecture of Early Medieval
Telangana (c. 1000–1300)” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1986).
65. Sinha, Imagining Architects, 29.
66. Sinha, Imagining Architects, 29.
67. These are only some of the possibilities, as Michael Baxandall notes in his
“excursus against influence.” See Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the
Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 58-62.
68. This useful definition of cosmopolitanism is articulated in Sheldon Pollock et
al., “Cosmopolitanisms,” in Cosmopolitanism, eds. Carol Breckenridge et al.
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 10.