Dravidian architectural grammar.

Indian temple architecture, by the eleventh century, had divided into two regional grammars that did not really converse. North of the Vindhyas, the shikhara — a curvilinear tower — dominated. South of the Vindhyas, the vimana — a stepped pyramid of receding storeys — held the field. Both forms shared a religious purpose; almost nothing else.

The Brihadeeswara temple is, by general consensus, the apex monument of the southern tradition. To understand what makes it the apex, it helps to understand what the tradition is — how the Dravidian form took shape, what its grammar consists of, and how the Cholas inherited and transformed it.

Two grammars.

The classical sources — the Vastu Shastras and the architectural treatises of the medieval period — recognise three regional types: Nagara (northern), Dravida (southern), and Vesara (the Deccan hybrid). The Nagara temple is built around the curvilinear shikhara, its profile a long, smooth, parabolic curve. The Dravida temple is built around the vimana, its profile a stack of receding squares, each storey a miniature of the one below.

These are not just shape preferences. The two traditions differ in plan, in proportion, in the placement of subordinate shrines, in the treatment of the entrance gateway, in the use of free-standing pillared halls. A Nagara temple at Khajuraho and a Dravida temple at Thanjavur are different buildings, doing different things, governed by different sets of rules.

The vimana, defined.

The Dravidian vimana is built as a stack of receding talas — storeys — decreasing in plan as they rise. Each storey carries its own register of sculptural decoration: niches with deity images, parapet figures, the small kuta and panjara corner-shrines that punctuate the upper levels. Above the top storey the geometry pivots from square to octagonal (the griva, “neck”), then to the bulbous shikhara (in the southern usage, the dome rather than the tower) and finally to the kalasam finial.

The whole assembly is read, in Saiva cosmology, as a stone diagram of Mount Meru — the cosmic mountain at the centre of the universe. The square base represents earth, the octagonal neck the realm of the air, the spherical shikhara the heavens, the finial the point of consciousness above all categories.

Gopuram, mandapa, prakara.

The vimana is the heart of the temple, but it is rarely the largest visible structure. The standard Dravidian temple sits inside one or more concentric enclosure walls — theprakaras — each pierced by a gateway tower, the gopuram. In the early Chola period the vimana was the tallest element of the complex; by the later Pandyan and Vijayanagara periods the gopurams had overtaken it, sometimes spectacularly — at Madurai, the four gopurams are each over 50 m tall while the central vimana is just 18 m.

Between the gateway and the sanctum lies the mandapa, the pillared hall. Mandapas are functional rather than iconographic: they shelter worshippers from the sun, accommodate processional ritual, house seated assemblies. Larger temples have multiple mandapas in sequence, each with a specific function — a thousand-pillared hall for general assembly, a smaller hall for sanctum-side worship, a kalyana mandapa for ceremonial marriage of the deities.

The Dravidian tradition.

The tradition is old. Recognisable Dravidian temples appear in the Tamil country from the seventh century onwards under the Pallava dynasty of Kanchi; the rock-cut Mahabalipuram complex (650 – 720 CE) is the textbook starting point. Before that, the Tamil temple was a wooden affair — none of which has survived. The shift to stone, and the codification of the vimana form, is essentially a Pallava innovation.

Three South Indian dynasties carried the tradition: the Pallavas (7th – 9th c.), the Cholas (9th – 13th c.), and the Vijayanagara empire and its Nayak successors (14th – 17th c.). Each pushed the form in a different direction. The Pallavas codified it; the Cholas monumentalised it; the Vijayanagara extended it horizontally with vast prakaras and tall gopurams.

Pallava to Chola to Vijayanagara.

The Pallava temple is small, dense and finely carved — the Kailasanatha at Kanchipuram (c. 720 CE) is the canonical example. The Chola temple is large, austere and structurally ambitious — the apex examples are Brihadeeswara (1010), Gangaikonda Cholapuram (1035) and Airavatesvara (1166). The Vijayanagara temple is sprawling, ornate and characterised by towering gopurams — the Virupaksha at Hampi and the Meenakshi at Madurai are the iconic examples.

The Chola moment is the structural maximum. After Brihadeeswara, the vimana never gets bigger; subsequent temples elaborate the surrounding precinct, the gopurams and the mandapas instead. The Cholas pushed the central tower to its physical limit and the successor dynasties built outward.

“The history of South Indian temple architecture from the seventh century to the seventeenth is the history of an essentially conservative form expanding through three successive dynasties without ever losing its grammatical core.”— George Michell, The Hindu Temple, University of Chicago Press, 1988

Brihadeeswara as apex.

Brihadeeswara is the apex monument of the Dravidian tradition in three specific senses. First, in scale: at 66 m the vimana is the tallest pre-modern stone tower in India. Second, in structural ambition: the dry-jointed granite construction on a river-sand foundation is technically unprecedented and has not been attempted at this scale since. Third, in austerity: the eleventh-century Chola surface is broad, planar, sculpturally restrained — a kind of monumental classicism that the later Pandyan and Nayak traditions consciously rejected in favour of dense surface ornament.

It is the temple at which the form reaches its physical and aesthetic ceiling. After Brihadeeswara, the tradition could only elaborate; it could not grow.

After the Cholas.

The Vijayanagara and Nayak temples of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries — the Madurai Meenakshi, the Srirangam Ranganathaswamy, the Tiruvannamalai Annamalaiyar — push the Dravidian form in a different direction. The central vimana shrinks; the gopurams swell; the prakaras multiply; the surface ornament becomes vastly more elaborate. This is the form that most modern visitors encounter as “the South Indian temple”.

Brihadeeswara stands apart from this later tradition. It is an earlier kind of building — more austere, more monumental, less encrusted. Visiting Brihadeeswara after the Madurai Meenakshi is, architecturally, a step back into a more confident and less decorated style of imperial building.

Further reading

• George Michell, The Hindu Temple: An Introduction to its Meaning and Forms, University of Chicago Press, 1988 — the standard introduction.
• K. R. Srinivasan, Temples of South India, National Book Trust, 1972 — the condensed Indian reference.
• Adam Hardy, Indian Temple Architecture: Form and Transformation, IGNCA, 1995 — for the formal-typological analysis.