| Reproduced, by permission of Mr John Murray, from Dr Burgess’s The Cave Temples of India. |
| Fig. 5.—Plan of Kailās at Ellora. |
Buildings in the Dravidian style are very numerous in proportion to the extent of the area in which they are found. The temples generally consist of a square base, ornamented externally by thin tall pilasters, and containing the cell in which the image is kept. In front of this may be added a mantapam or hall, or even two such. Over the shrine rises the spire, of pyramidal form, but always divided into storeys and crowned by a small dome, either circular or polygonal in shape. The cornices are of double curvature, whilst in other Indian styles they are mostly straight with a downward slope. Another feature of these temples, especially those of later date, is the gopurams or great gateways, placed at the entrances to the surrounding courts, and often on all four sides. In general design they are like the spires over the shrines, but about twice as wide as deep, and very frequently far more imposing than the temples themselves.
The style is distinctly of wooden origin, and of this the very attenuated pilasters on the outer walls and the square pillars of small section are evidences. As the contemporary northern styles are characterized by the prevalence of vertical lines, the Dravidian is marked by horizontal mouldings and shadows, and the towers and gopurams are storeyed. The more important temples are also surrounded by courts enclosing great corridors and pillared halls.
One of the best examples of this style is the great temple at Tanjore. It would appear to have been begun on a definite plan, and not as a series of extensions of some small temple which, by accident, had grown famous and acquired wealth by which successively to enlarge its courts, as that at Tiruvallur seems to have grown by a series of accretions. The body of the Tanjore temple is of two storeys and fully 80 ft. high, whilst the sikhara or pyramidal tower rises in eleven storeys to a total height of 190 ft. This dominates the gopurams over the entrances to the court in which it stands, and to an outer court, added in front of the first, but which does not, as in other cases, surround it. The central shrine, so far as we know, was erected about A.D. 1025.
The Srirangam temple in Trichinopoly, the largest in India, is architecturally the converse of this: it is one of the latest in date, the fifth court having been left unfinished in the middle of the 18th century. The shrine is quite insignificant and distinguished only by a gilt dome, whilst proceeding outwards, the gopurams to each court are each larger and more decorative than the preceding. The successive independent additions, however, proved incompatible with any considered design or arrangement of parts.
Most of the Deccan was ruled by the Chalukya dynasty from early in the 6th century, and the style prevailing over this area, from the Tungabhadrā and Krishnā rivers to the Taptī and Mahānadī, may be styled, from them, as Chalukyan.
| Fig. 6.—Temple at Tanjore. |
The earliest temples in this style, however, are not very clearly marked off from the Dravidian and the more northern styles. Some of them have distinctly northern spires, others are closely allied to the southern style; and it was perhaps only gradually that the type acquired its distinctive characteristics. Till a late date we find temples with towers differing so little in form from Dravidian vimānas that, other details apart, they might readily be ascribed to that order.
| Fig. 7.—Temple at Tiruvallur, near Tanjore. |
Among Chalukyan temples a prevalent form is that of three shrines round one central hall. The support of the roofs of these halls is almost always after the Dravidian plan of four pillars, or multiples of four, in squares, so that larger domes were never attempted. Both in Dravidian and northern temples the projections on the walls are generally formed by increments of slight thickness added flatly to their faces, and, however thick, they are so placed as to leave the true corners of the shrines, &c., more or less recessed. In the Chalukyan temples the sides are often made prominent by increments placed over them, or the whole plan is star-shaped, the projecting angles having equal adjacent faces lying in a circle, as in the temple of Belūr in Mysore, built about A.D. 1120, and in others. The roofs are stepped and more or less pyramidal in form, with breaks corresponding to the minor angles made on the walls.