Shiva's Waterfront Temples
Subtitle: Reimagining the Sacred Architecture of India's Deccan Region
By: Subhashini Kaligotla
Publisher: [publisher not identified]
Published: 2015
Place of publication: [New York, N.Y.?]
Language: eng
Description: This dissertation examines Deccan India’s earliest surviving stone constructions, which were founded during the 6th through the 8th centuries CE and are known for their unparalleled formal eclecticism. Whereas past scholarship explains their heterogeneous formal character as an organic outcome of the Deccan’s “borderland” location between north India and south India, my study challenges the very conceptualization of the Deccan temple within a binary taxonomy that recognizes only northern and southern temple types. Rejecting the passivity implied by the borderland metaphor, I emphasize the role of human agents—particularly architects and makers—in establishing a dialectic between the north Indian and the south Indian architectural systems in the Deccan’s built worlds and built spaces. Secondly, by adopting the Deccan temple cluster as an analytical category in its own right, the present work contributes to the still developing field of landscape studies of the premodern Deccan. I read traditional art-historical evidence—the built environment, sculpture, and stone and copperplate inscriptions—alongside discursive treatments of landscape cultures and phenomenological and experiential perspectives.

As a result, I am able to present hitherto unexamined aspects of the cluster’s spatial arrangement: the interrelationships between structures and the ways those relationships influence ritual and processional movements, as well as the symbolic, locative, and organizing role played by water bodies. The project therefore reimagines the Deccan’s sacred centers not as conglomerations of disjointed monuments but as integrated environments in which built structures interact with, and engage, natural elements, and vice versa.
Notes: Department: Art History and Archaeology.

Thesis advisor: Vidya J. Dehejia.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Columbia University, 2015.