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The Chalukyan Architecture of the Kanarese Districts c25: Ittagi

The Chālukyan Architecture of the Kanarese Districts c25

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English

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Ittagi

The Temple of Mahādēva

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THIS is one of the most complete and highly finished of existing Chālukyan temples. It stands in the small village of Ittagi, in the Nizām's territory, about twenty-two miles due east of Gadag. It consists of a shrine, with its antechamber, a closed and an open hall, in this order from west to east, the temple facing the rising sun. The principal damage that has befallen the building has been the loss of its kalaśa or finial, together with the crowning member of the tower immediately below it, and the cornice and parapet along the outer edge of the roof of the open pillared hall. It measures, over all, 120 feet by 66 feet (Plates CI—CVII).

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The tower, as it now stands, rises in three tiers or storeys, with a few of the lower courses of the masonry of the fourth which carried the finial. These stages are quite distinct, and are not so cut up and masked by decorative detail as in the temple of Sōmēśvara at Gadag. The little cusped niches, which decorate the centre of each storey, rising one above the other, are exceedingly handsome; and the deep cusping of the roll moulding, which is pointed with little hanging buds, is designed in very graceful curves. Their delicate lace-like workmanship is further enhanced by the background of rich dark shadows of the niche. These beautiful wreaths of filigree are repeated as ornament in the recessed panels of the walls below and, in two cases, one on either side of the shrine, serve as window frames, the spaces between the rolls forming the lights. The sculptor has amused himself by introducing small groups of monkeys among the mouldings of the tower. The three principal niches on the shrine walls, boldly accentuated by their deep projecting cornices, are now empty, their images having disappeared. Some eighteen inches or two feet of the basement mouldings of the walls are embedded beneath the accumulated earth around the building.

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The closed hall has a doorway on each of its four sides, that on the east communicating with the large open hall, and that on the west leading into the shrine (see plan, Plate CV). In the latter is a *linga*. The cross beams of the porches have cracked in many places, and extra pillars have been inserted beneath them as supports. The doorways have been very richly wrought, and the ceilings of the porches are curiously ribbed (Plate CVII). The outer walls of this hall are decorated in the same manner as those of the shrine.

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The great open hall at the east end was originally supported upon sixty-eight pillars. Twenty-six of these are large ones, standing upon the floor and forming the main support of the roof; the rest, which were dwarf pillars, stood upon the surrounding bench and carried the sloping eaves. The larger columns are of different patterns, but are arranged symmetrically with regard to their designs. The four central ones are of the most complicated design, and are similar to those in the porch of the temple of Doḍḍa Basappā at Ḍambaḷ (Fig. 34). There are also round and square-shafted pillars as in Kāśiviśvēśvara at Lakkuṇḍi, the round sections, as usual, having been turned on the lathe.

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The four triangular corner slabs of the central ceiling of this hall are marvels of fretted stonework (CIV). Upon the square formed by the four large beams over the four central pillars, is set a smaller square diagonally to the first, leaving great triangular spaces between the two. These are closed in with slabs, whose under surfaces have been worked into a rich and heavy mass of hanging arabesque foliage and makaras which flow from the jaws of a kīrtimukha masque. The convolutions of the design, with their circling excrescences and bewildering whorls, form, altogether, as rich a bit of work as will be found anywhere. And what enhances its effect more than anything else is its remarkably deep undercutting, so that the whole fretted surface hangs in masses from the ceiling, a forest of little struts, behind it, connecting it with the body of the slab.

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A small portion remaining, upon the north side of the pillared hall, shows that the eave slabs around it were flat and straight like those of the Jaina temple at Lakkuṇḍi and Sarasvatī at Gadag (Plate CIII), and not as we find it at the temple in the fort at Baṅkāpur where it is a double curve.

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The interior of the closed hall is comparatively plain, and there is nothing in it calling for particular notice. Within the shrine is the ubiquitous liṅga.

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Upon the south side of the main temple is a smaller and plainer one, built in granite, in the verandah of which is a large inscribed slab bearing a record of the time of the Western Chalukya king Vikramāditya VI., which is dated in the Śaka year 1034 (A.D. 1112). It tells us that the temple was founded, as a temple of Śiva, under the name Mahādēvēśvara, by the Daṇḍanāyaka, or ‘Leader of the Forces’, Mahādēva, a high officer of the king, who was born at Ittagi, and that he made a grant of land and other gifts to it on the above date.

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One of the verses styles the temple dēvālaya-chakravarti, “a very emperor among temples,” and this title it fully deserves, for it is probably the finest temple in the Kanarēse districts, after Haḷebid.

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The record further tells us that the same person, the Daṇḍanāyaka Mahādēva, founded a temple of the god Viṣṇu as Nārāyaṇa, in memory of his father Nārāyaṇa.¹ Although the temple, in which this inscription slab is placed, looks like later work than the great temple, it is possible that it is the temple of Nārāyaṇa referred to. Being constructed in the harder and less easily-worked granite, it is severely plain and devoid of sculpture, and this, in itself, tends to give it a later appearance. It faces the north, the usual direction for Vaiṣṇava shrines. The central shrine cell at the back may have contained the image of Nārāyaṇa, while the ten others possibly held those of the ten avatāras. It occupies very much the same position with regard to the main temple as the Vaishṇava shrine of Narasimha does to the temple of Siddhēśvara at Haveri.

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¹ This information was kindly supplied by Dr. Fleet, C.I.E.

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One feature missing from most of these temples, now, is the elegant figure bracket that adorned all the outside pillars of the porches. Resting upon small blocks on the shafts of the pillars, and leaning forward, they were held at their upper ends in a slot in the under side of the cornice. They were usually female figures in the act of dancing or adorning themselves. A few still remain upon the temple at Kuruvaṭṭi (Plate CIX). They are sometimes in the form of rampant lions as on the temples at Rāmappā lake, thirty miles to the north-east of Warangal (Fig. 2).

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The empty niche on the front of the tower shows that it was customary, sometimes at least, to have the group of sculpture on a separate slab, and therefore removable, at will, in favour of any other that those in occupation of the temple at the time may have felt disposed to place there.