Indian Architecture (Buddhist and Hindu Periods) c27.8

c27.8

Undoubtedly this was the intention of the Egyptian design, because each of the great temples of the Pharaohs was a unity definitely established from the first, being begun and ended with the one object in view. Not so the Dravidian temple, which, although it eventually attained much the same form and aimed at the same ideal, achieved these by a different and even inverted process. There was no conscious plan in its arrangement, no decisive preliminary conception, it gradually evolved from a small nucleus in the form of a shrine, until in the course of time it spread out into the indeterminate and, in some respects, unsystematic complex it now presents. It was fashioned not by thought or imagination but by means of a gradual aggregation of parts, many of them added without any particular attempt at a co-ordinated whole. Developed according to need very much in the manner of a mediaeval town, the temple plan resolves itself into a moderately harmonious agglomeration but lacking that quality of inseparability between form and content, the observance of which is the basis of all great works of architecture. While one cannot fail to be impressed by the profoundly religious atmosphere, emotional and often intellectual in which many of the southern Indian temples are steeped, making them as in the temple of Madura, a vast composite symbol of essential Hinduism, as an architectural entity they do not hold a high place.