A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c21.43

c21.43

The beginnings of Hindu temple architecture in South India are best traced in the temple-complex at Aihole and its neighbourhood dating from A.D. 450 to 650. Aihole is a town of temples and contains no fewer than seventy structures. The work started there was continued in the neighbouring towns of Bādāmi and Pattadakal. The temple at Aihole known as Ladh Khān, usually assigned to about 450, is a low flat-roofed building 50 feet square, with a small square cella and a porch set on the roof at a later date and forming an independent shrine of the Sun. Of the main temple three sides are completely enclosed by walls, two of which carry stone windows perforated in a variety of beautiful designs. On the fourth side, which forms the eastern front, there is an open porch on the pillars of which are figures of the river-goddesses. The interior is a pillared hall containing ‘two square groups of columns one within the other’. A large *nandi* fills the central bay, and the cella at the farther end is not a separate chamber leading off from the main hall, as one would expect, but built within it against the back wall. The entire disposition is totally inadequate for the purposes of a temple, and Percy Brown suggests that it was just a mote-hall converted into a temple. In the pilasters at the exterior angles of the building may be traced the beginnings of the ‘Dravidian order’ with the tapering upper end of the column and its ‘cushion capital with an expanded floral abacus supporting the bracket’. The construction of the roof is also peculiar as it consists of large flat slabs held together by long narrow stones covering the entire length of the joints and fitting into grooves cut in the slabs.