Udaya

Dravida temple architecture

திராவிட கோயில் கட்டிடக்கலை द्राविड

Also Dravidian style, Vimana style, Agamic temple.

Building Tamil Nadu

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What it is#

The Dravida temple is the southern style: a pyramidal tower of receding storeys over the sanctum, a walled enclosure, and from the Vijayanagara period onward enormous gateway towers on the outer walls that dwarf the shrine itself. The logic runs inward and downward: the sanctum is small, dark and low, and everything around it is larger and brighter, so that a visitor moves from a vast gopuram through diminishing spaces to a chamber the size of a cupboard holding the deity. That reversal of expectation is the design.

How it is built#

The sanctum is the garbhagriha, the womb chamber, with the vimana over it, built in talas, storeys, diminishing upward and capped by a stupi. The mandapas lead to it in sequence; the ardha mandapa, the maha mandapa, the thousand pillared hall in the large temples. The whole stands in a prakara, a walled courtyard, often several concentric, with gopurams on the axes. The temple tank is outside. The plan is set out from a vastu purusha mandala grid, and the measurements are given in the Agamas and the Shilpa Shastras in multiples of a module.

How it is learnt#

The question a family actually has

The sthapati learns the measurement system as a text based discipline: the Mayamata, the Manasara and the Agamas give the proportions, and a traditional architect can recite the rules for a dimension. Training is hereditary in the Vishwakarma families and takes fifteen years or more, and the Government College of Architecture and Sculpture at Mamallapuram teaches it formally. A temple architect must also know the rites, because the plan is set by ritual requirements such as the circumambulation path and the alignment of the deity.

Whose lineage is whose#

Where a claim is contested, by whom

The style is traced from the Pallava rock cut shrines and the Shore Temple at Mamallapuram, through the Chola achievement at Thanjavur and Gangaikonda Cholapuram, to the Pandya and then Vijayanagara and Nayaka periods, when the gopurams grew to their present size and the enclosures multiplied. The Chola vimana at Thanjavur, sixty six metres, is the tallest of its own period; the later tradition put its height into the gateways instead, which is the clearest single change in the style and is usually read as a shift from the shrine to the city around it.

Worth knowing#

The gate is bigger than the god

At Madurai or Srirangam the gopurams rise over fifty metres and the sanctum is a dark room a few paces across. Visitors often assume the proportions are a decline from the Chola period, when the tower was over the shrine. The Nayaka period architects were doing something else: the temple had become a walled town with streets, markets and tanks, and the gateway is addressed to the city while the sanctum is addressed to one person at a time. The two are not competing, and Srirangam, with seven concentric enclosures, is a town you enter rather than a building you look at.

The shadow that is argued about

It is widely said that the shadow of the Thanjavur vimana never falls on the ground at noon. It is a good story and it is not true; the shadow falls, as it must, and photographs show it. What is true is more interesting: the eighty ton capstone sits sixty six metres up on a structure with no mortar, the tower is built so that it tapers to keep the load inside the walls, and the whole thing has stood through earthquakes for a thousand years. The myth is repeated by guides and the engineering is the thing worth repeating.

Where the regions differ#

  • Tamil
  • Kerala
  • Telugu
  • Kannada
  • North
  • Maharashtra
  • Bengal
  • Punjab
  • Assam
  • Sri Lanka
  • Nepal
  • Gujarat
  • Odisha
  • Mithila
  • Kashmir
  • Tulu Nadu
  • manipur
  • rajasthan
  • konkani
  • sindhi
  • jharkhand
  • himalayan
  • kodava
Where it is kept: 5 of the 23 traditions this app follows. The filled one is where it is from.
Tamil Nadu
The Pallava, Chola, Pandya, Vijayanagara and Nayaka phases are all in Tamil Nadu, and the great temple towns are the style at full size.
Kerala
Kerala developed its own variant with sloping tiled roofs, circular and square srikovils and the koothambalam, in response to the rain.
Karnataka
The Hoysala and Chalukya temples are a distinct Vesara tradition that borrows from Dravida and Nagara both.
Andhra and Telangana
The Kakatiya and Vijayanagara temples of Andhra and Telangana belong to the same family, with Tirumala and Lepakshi the great examples.
Sri Lanka
The Tamil temples of the north and east are built in the style, with Nallur the largest.

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