Reviews

An Analysis of Indian
Temple Architecture
Gerard Foekema

The Temple Architecture of India by Adam Hardy,

Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2007, 256 pp., 320
illus., £45.00

This book is not just an overview of Indian temples.

The author proposes a new and original idea about
the architectural design of Indian temples that takes
our knowledge of them an important step forward
and reveals order in chaos. Indian temples can be plain
and modest structures, but all the famous ones are
decorated in a way that looks overdone. Their elevations
are a riot of architectural details and look chaotic to
the casual visitor. Of course there are patterns in that
overload, and every serious visitor will soon discover a
rhythm in it. The many details and their rhythm show
variations over the centuries and over the different
regions of India but, though clearly recognizable, they
are very difficult to describe. The old Indian texts on
architecture hardly provide any help for this problem.
As a result, all the books comparing Indian temples
of different periods and regions are more or less
unsatisfactory on the aspect of architectural style.
But Hardy presents us with a key. The walls of the
temples have projections and recesses, and each
projection is always crowned with its own roof or
superstructure. Thus each projection is an image of a
building and the most important part of each temple,
the shrine, is a composition of many smaller images
of simple shrines. The jumble of architectural details
decorating a temple derives from the depiction of small
shrines in several ways. It is this new understanding
that Hardy adds to the scholarship on Indian temples,
and this view makes it possible for the different
architectural styles found over India and their mutual
relationships to be described in a satisfactory way for
the first time.
There are many publications on Indian temple
architecture, but mostly they confine themselves to
one period or one region. Monographs describing and
comparing all Indian temples are not numerous.The first
one was published in 1876 by James Fergusson, and a
second by Ernest Havell in 1913.1 Next was Percy Brown
with a two volume book first published around 1940

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Reviews

have two limitations and one shortcoming. I would like

to discuss these in detail, precisely because the book is
so strong in other respects.
The first limitation is the choice of the body
of monuments and structures discussed. This is
acknowledged in the book, the focus of which is on the
period 500–1300 AD and on the shrines of temples,
and is, in fact, a good choice as it enables Hardy to
tell the breathtaking and more or less continuous
story of the ingenious architectural articulation of
Indian shrines of that period. However, the book
lacks a characterization of this articulation as purely
ornamental. The aedicular design of shrines has no
constructional function and it is for this reason that
its presence in all styles of architecture and during all
periods is so remarkable.
Another limitation is the space devoted to the
overview of the surviving monuments. The book is
divided into twenty-seven chapters, five of which give
an overview of Nagara temples and four of Dravida
temples. The ideas explained in the other chapters
are applied here but it is done too briefly, in only
sixty pages. Sometimes the brevity leads to errors, for
instance on page 173, where the temple in Dhobini
1 The shrine of the Shiva temple in Ddobini, Chhatisgarh. Photo:
Gerard Foekema. is characterized as ‘losing the aedicular plot’. In fact,
this shrine is a strong example of elegant aedicular
and reprinted many times because it gives so complete articulation with the projections showing talas of two
an overview of all the monuments.2 Also in two volumes or three storeys and the recesses showing storeys only,
is Stella Kramrisch’s monograph, first published in something which is very instructive when considering
1946 and reprinted in 1986, which pays considerable aedicular construction (plate 1). Brevity and lack of
attention to the ideas expressed in the monuments.3 space is also an issue in the number and size of the
After a considerable hiatus George Michell, in 1977, and illustrations. In chapter twenty all the different types of
Satish Grover, in 1980, focussed their books on Indian Bhumija shrines are mentioned, but several of them are
temple architecture.4 The most recent overview was that not illustrated. In particular, an illustration of the temple
published by James Harle in 1986.5 in Nandikandi (plate 2) would be useful as it contains
How does Adam Hardy’s book compare with these a Dravida composition of entirely Nagara aedicules:
seven publications? As far as factual details about the because bhadras are missing, the Bhumija aedicular
monuments are concerned it beats all the others easily. composition becomes identical to the Dravida aedicular
The perceived aedicular composition enables the composition. Sometimes the small size of a photograph
author to describe and analyse the shrines of temples is detrimental: on page 197 the picture of the shrine of
very efficiently. Added to this are very illuminating the Chausari temple is so small that important details
illustrations. About half of them are specially prepared discussed in the text are not discernable.
drawings which are more useful than photographs for These limitations do not substantially affect
comparing and contrasting temple designs. the considerable value of the book, but one other
The remaining illustrations are instructive photographs, shortcoming does. This is a lack of clear definitions of
the majority of which were provided by the author the architectural terms used in describing the Dravida
of this review. Hardy’s book is, therefore, a serious aedicular articulation of shrines. In writing for a broad
candidate as the best introduction to the world of Indian audience Hardy may have wanted to avoid pedantic-
temple architecture for both the layman and the student, seeming statements on the meanings of terms.
superseding previous publications. However, it does Instead, he sometimes provides terms in quotation

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this review. Moreover Hardy not only tells us very

carefully what Indian shrines look like, he also makes a
serious effort to tell us why. In the first part of his book
he identifies several trends visible in the architectural
articulation of temples, and he points out that similar
trends are found in Indian thought and religions.
This does not prove that the craftsmen designing and
building the temples were guided by symbolism,
but seeing these analogies makes it easier for us to
experience as natural, the outcome of a very human
way of proceeding their stunning results.

Notes
1 James Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, London, 1876;
Ernest Havell, Indian architecture, its psychology, structure, and history from the first
Muhammadan invasion to the present day, London, 1913.
2 Percy Brown, Indian Architecture, Bombay, c. 1940.
3 Stella Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple, Calcutta, 1946; reprinted Delhi, 1986.
4 George Michell, The Hindu Temple, New York, 1977; Satish Grover, Buddhist
and Hindu Architecture in India, New Delhi, 1980.
5 James C. Harle, The Art and Architecture of the Indian Sub-continent,
Harmondsworth, 1986.

2 The shrine of the Ramesvara temple in Nandikani,Andhra

Pradesh. Photo: Gerard Foekema.

marks, assuming that the reader is capable of

interpreting them in the correct way. But the fact is
that a Dravida shrine contains two kinds of horizontal
tiers and even devoted students of Indian architecture
regularly confuse them. Defining the meaning of
terms that are already used by many others can often
be thankless, but this book would have been the right
place to try. At the least, Hardy could have clarified that
the Indian term ‘tala’ does not have the same meaning
as the English term ‘storey’. A tala is topped by roofs
and can contain several storeys in the same way as
any building can do; a storey is topped by a ceiling,
visible on the outside by a kapota, or by a roof. The term
‘pavilion’ is not useable at all without clear definition,
and ‘parapet’ for a row of pavilions is confusing. As
a consequence I doubt whether all readers will be
convinced by this book, as they should be, that Dravida
shrines are aedicular compositions in an even more
obvious way than Nagara ones.
These issues aside, this book, besides giving a good
overview of Indian architectural history, makes the
jungle of Indian architectural decoration surveyable
without ignoring significant detail. It is this which
gives it the advantage over the books listed earlier in

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