Since its formative phase in the seventh century AD, the southern or Dravida tradition of Indian temple architecture has shown an extraordinary continuity up to the present day, reflecting the continuity of religious practices which it has framed. This tour traces the development of that tradition throughout its history, offering an experience of its whole range of expression, from sensuous intimacy to monumental grandeur.

Like the architectural tradition, the tour begins with the seventh-century temples of the Pallava dynasty at their seaport of Mamallapuram: rock-cut cave sanctuaries where mythological moments are presented in overwhelming relief carvings, and monolithic shrines conceived as palaces of the gods. The famous shore temple, a structural shrine at the same site, belongs to the eighth century. By this time the Pallava rulers could aspire to the status of universal monarch, and at Kanchipuram, his capital, Rajasimha built the great Kailasanatha (Lord of Mount Kailasa), a ‘temple mountain’ that represents the entire cosmos, linking the human world with the heavens.

Smaller temples were the rule, however, erected in villages and at sacred sites as agriculture and Hindu society expanded across the region. The tour will take in examples from the Chola period (ninth to thirteenth centuries) in the Cauvery basin, noted for their exquisite sculpture in granite. From this fertile heartland the cultural influence of the Chola realm spread across the seas to Southeast Asia. In complete contrast to the human scale of local shrines, the imperial Chola temples of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, of which three are on the itinerary, are India’s most colossal religious monuments. With its 60m-high tower, the Brihadishvara temple at Thanjavur (Tanjore), built by Rajaraja I, uses forty times as much stone as the average Chola temple. Assigned to this establishment were no fewer than four hundred dancing girls. Yet, far from being an expression of despotic power, it seems that this grandiosity reflects a need to assert tenuous, ritual authority in a decentralised state.

The later Chola temples initiated the trend towards ever larger temple complexes, with concentric enclosures entered through towering gopurams (gateways). These ‘temple-cities’ reached their apogee under the various Nayaka rulers (sixteenth-seventeenth centuries), often built around a small existing cult shrine. Successive enclosures and gopurams were added on an increasingly monumental scale, and the precincts included water tanks and great pillared halls. Temple complexes became powerful economic units, housing a multiplicity of functions – ritual, administrative, artistic, musical, educational and charitable. The tour will cover several of these later complexes, including the Meenakshi temple at Madurai, each of them still thronging with life as a thriving cult centre. To wander in the streets of temple towns such as Chidambaram and Srirangam will reveal how the temple determines the nature of the whole settlement, both in its formal layout and in the ritual and processional activities that punctuate the religious calendar.

As well as the dazzling range of sculpture that forms an inseparable part of South Indian temple architecture in all its phases, this visit has been planned to survey the parallel development of painting. Remnants of early Indian painting are rare, but participants in this tour will be able to examine traces of painting from the Pallava period, the unique eighth-century murals in the Jain cave temple at Sittanavasal, and the wonderful Chola murals in the Brihadishvara, Thanjavur, as well as works of the Nayaka period and the later Tanjore school.

Other aspects of the tour will complement the focus on temples. The courtyard houses of Chettinad were the homes of Chettiar merchants, a community whose patronage of temples in the colonial period helped to ensure the continuation of the Dravida tradition. The former French colony of Pondicherry contains interesting architectural examples of cross-cultural interaction, while the nearby Sri Aurobindo Ashram gives form to new manifestations of spirituality.

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