A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c21.110

c21.110

Under Vijayanagar, South Indian art attained a certain fullness and freedom of rich expression in keeping with the general consciousness of the great task of the empire, namely the preservation and development of all that remained of Hinduism against the onslaughts of Islam. In this period, temples became very elaborate both in structure and organization; even old temples were amplified by the addition of pillared halls, pavilions and other subordinate structures. The most characteristic of such additions is the kalyāṇa-maṇḍapa, generally put on the left in the courtyard of the temple as we enter it from the east. This is a very ornate pillared pavilion with a raised platform in the centre ‘for the reception of the deity and his consort at the annual celebration of their marriage ceremony’. The goddesses invariably came to have separate shrines of their own, a development of which the beginnings go back to the late Chola period. Another feature was the so-called ‘thousand-pillared maṇḍapa’, a huge hall with many rows of pillars. In fact the varied and complicated treatment of the pillar was perhaps the most striking feature of the Vijayanagar style. The shaft becomes just a core round which is grouped a vast amount of statuary of great size and sculptured in the round, ‘having as its most conspicuous element a furiously rearing horse, rampant hippogryph or upraised animal of a supernatural kind’—the whole of it, pillar and sculptures, being carved out of a single block of stone (Pl. XVI). Another type shows a cluster of miniature pillars encircling the central column, and so carved sometimes as to give out, when struck, the seven separate notes of Indian music. There were also other modes of treatment, but all pillars had ornamental brackets as part of their capitals, and below the bracket a pendant which was elaborated in this period into an inverted lotus-bud. The tall entrance towers or gōpuras, evolved under the Pāṇdyas, continued in this period also.