Living Traditions 4: Sculpted mountain, starry walkway
First published in February, 2025; background to my forthcoming reflections on 'Ancient India, Living Traditions', at the British Museum, May-October, 2025.
The final part of my 2013/2014 trip to South India was to the Hoysala temples at Halebid and Belur, built in the 13th century.
Hoysala temples are not the most refined or beautiful temples in India, but they are some of the most ornate. They provide a wonderful example of alankara1, which I talked about before in relation to the role of ornamentation in Indian aesthetics.
An Indian temple usually has one main shrine, the garbha griha (‘womb house’), which houses the image, the living embodiment of God. This is generally completely dark, lit only by flickering oil lamps. Above the shrine is a mountain-like tower (shikhara), reaching up to the sky, representing the mythical Mount Meru, ‘ a sacred, five-peaked mountain present within Hindu, Jain and Buddhist cosmologies, revered as the centre of all physical, metaphysical and spiritual universes’2 . The sacred centre is generally approached indirectly; either through circumambulating the shrine (inside or outside), or approaching it directly through a number of halls, which often take the worshipper off to one side just before they reach the shrine itself. As the worshipper approaches, it becomes darker and darker, slowly leaving the bright sunlight of the outside world behind with each circumambulation or arrival at a further inner hall.
This is the floor plan of the Keshava temple at Somnathpur, the photograph above:
Unusually, this temple has three shrines. The circumambulation takes place by walking around the outside of the structure, on a beautiful star-shaped walkway that echoes the incredibly ornate exterior of the three shrines. The detail of the exterior carving made me think of fractal coastlines, of the edges of leaves, all those forms in nature that go on repeating their shapes at ever increasingly fine levels of detail.
Often in Indian temples there are elements of the carved shikharas that are almost literally fractal, with images of smaller shrine mountains, which contain even smaller shrine mountains, being carved into the main tower. You can see this here:
The dusty villages of rural Karnataka had no smart tourist facilities, just simple hotels, torn sheets, malfunctioning fans. I burnt my feet day after day on the hot, smooth stones of temple compounds and paved walkways, feeling as far from being an outsider as it seemed possible to be, just another pilgrim amongst hundreds visiting the temples every day.
Oblivious to the hot sun, I looked and looked and looked. The details of the richly-carved exteriors mesmerised me, pulling me into dark corners, beckoning me to come closer to the rows and stacked layers of elephants and chariots, warriors, dancers and musicians protecting the temple and the deity inside.
Despite having written a whole dissertation many years before on the embodiment of God in the Hindu image, I wasn’t really interested in the sculptures of Vishnu and Shiva. I found myself drawn to the small details around the main characters, and the reliefs carved into the outer walls.
I marvelled at how the stone-carvers had managed to fit their compositions into the angles and awkwardness of differently-shaped pieces of stone; whole friezes and chunks of temple into corners that probably no-one would even glance at.
There were also all sorts of unfinished areas, making me think about the process of carving. I could feel the presence of those craftsmen so long ago, chiselling into the soft sandstone with hands just like mine. I photographed the broken, the incomplete, the too-far-up-to-see, the clumsy, the out-of-proportion. Perhaps apprentices were put to work on those out-of-the way places, I don’t know. Many of the images were also defaced, presumably by the Mughal invasions that ended the Hoysala empire which created these temples.
The most interesting temple of all was at Belavadi, a car trip away from the main pilgrim centres of Belur and Halebid. It was small and quiet, completely deserted in the sun, with only two guards watching over its ancient stone. It also, unusually, had three shrines, carefully tended to every day by a solitary priest.
The Hoysala temples were massively ornate, with carvings that were not always well-executed. Damaged by invaders, and then neglected, they’re not nearly as beautiful or refined as the temples in places such as Khajuraho (Madhya Pradesh) or Bhubaneswar (Odisha). But, like the paintings at Sravanabelagola, they were where I happened to be, and I took great pleasure in studying them just as they were.
Alankara can be translated as ‘decoration’, though in Anglophone countries this carries a subtle derogatory nuance. ‘Decoration’ is often associated with either craft or folk art, both of which are placed low in a hierarchy of art snobbery that sees ‘fine art’ as the pinnacle of sophistication, and functional or decorated things as somehow lesser. Vidya Dehejia, in her book ‘The Body Adorned’ (2009), points out that people often refer to Indian sculptures as being naked, when in fact they are ‘adorned’:
The perfectly formed body of the Indian tradition, whether male or female, is decorated with fine fabrics, jewelled ornaments, and flowers. It is further adorned with an entire range of conventions … [which] includes elaborate hairstyling; the heightening of the body’s beauty by anointing it with oils, pastes, cosmetics, fragrances; and a range of other refinements, such as elegance of gait, gesture and posture’. (p24)
As well as representing a complex and refined ideal of beauty, she explains that the Sanskrit word alankara literally means ‘to make sufficient or strengthen, to make adequate’, and that it suggests ‘enhancement in the efficacy of the thing or person thus adorned’. In other words, it makes the person stronger and more powerful. She also talks about another Sanskrit word for ornament, abharanam, which means ‘to bring near, to attract (through magical power)’, in the sense of attracting forces that act to protect the person:
Ornament is auspicious; ornament is protective; ornament makes the body complete, whole beautiful and desirable. To be without ornament is to provoke the forces of inauspiciousness, to expose oneself to danger, even to court danger ... In the context of India, the significance of ornament cannot be overstated. (pp24,25)
Architecture is also protected and beautified by ornament, particularly temples and palaces:
Frequently, barely an inch of plain space remains visible, so that this tendency toward overflowing ornamentation has been termed ‘horror vacui’.4 But the underlying idea is not so simplistic: alankara is much more than a mere dislike or abhorrence of plain surfaces. The ornamentation of buildings in pre-modern India is not ‘mere’ ornament; alankara had a symbolic content of auspiciousness, protection… (p71)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Meru
Astonishing complexity. Saw something similiar in Ubud, a temple hidden in rainforest.
Beautiful images! I'm always fascinated by how much religious imagery in Japan and India involves deities dancing or playing. I'm struggling to think of where in Christianity that's a big thing. It feels like there's something missing...!