The Chalukyan Architecture of the Kanarese Districts c41.s1: The Temple of Koppēśvara
The Chālukyan Architecture of the Kanarese Districts c41.s1
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The Temple of Koppēśvara
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T HIS temple, which is situated at Khedrāpur, a village thirty miles to the east of Kolhāpur, is merely introduced to show one of the later developments of the style. It is a large temple with a great deal of pretentious work about it, but it is a comparatively late building of the style of the great temple of Ambabāī at Kolhāpur (Fig. 37). Moreover, it has never been finished, save with brick and plaster in the
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Fig. 37.—The temple of Koppēśvara at Khedrāpur.
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roughest manner. The workmanship of the older part, though elaborate and carefully wrought, lacks the finish, delicacy and richness of design which are found in the older work. There is a clumsiness and stiffness in all the figure sculpture never found in the latter. Before the temple stands an unfinished open hall which would have been an imposing and ornate building had it been completed. It was intended to have a very fine domical ceiling, as a few lower courses of the moulding shew; but this unfinished top has been crowned in later times by a very ugly, low, crenelated rough brick parapet in the very worst taste. The whole of the spire is of similar work. It is possible that this temple occupies the site of an older one, for fragments of pillars of an older Chālukyan shrine lie about and are built into the gateway of the temple enclosure and elsewhere. The photographs shew the top-heavy clumsy pillars of this hall (Plate CLXII). They have been designed by men who had lost all sense of good proportion, and who had not even taken the trouble to follow the lines of the older and better work.
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On the right of the entrance to the building is an inscription slab containing a record dated in A.D. 1213 which refers to repairs to the temple of Koppeśvaradēva at Khedrāpur by the Yādava king Siṃghaṇadēva and the rebuilding of the central part of the temple with the śikhara of the shrine. The words used in the inscription are "having repaired that temple which existed of old," but does not specify exactly what was done. It cannot refer to the brick and mortar work above the pillared hall, as that class of work was not introduced into this part of the country until after the Muḥammadans settled down in the Dakhan. It is probably comparatively recent work.