Journey
Deccan dynasties — Rashtrakuta, Chalukya, Hoysala, Kakatiya
Four dynasties over six centuries on the same plateau, each answering the last. The Rashtrakutas cut a temple out of a hill; the Western Chalukyas developed a lathe-turned pillar and a soapstone finish; the Hoysalas took that to its limit in star-shaped plans; the Kakatiyas built in granite and then lost everything to Delhi.
Stops (14)
- Ellorā · Ellora's Kailāsa — carved downward, eighth century
Krishna I's temple, cut from the top of the hill down as a single piece with its own gateway, courtyard and subsidiary shrines, removing something like two hundred thousand tonnes of rock. There is no possibility of correcting a mistake once made, and none is visible. It took several generations.
- Manyakheta · Mānyakheta — the Rashtrakuta capital
The seat from which the Rashtrakutas dominated the Deccan for two centuries and raided as far as Kannauj, described by the Arab geographer al-Masudi as one of the four great empires of the world. Almost nothing of the city survives, which is the usual fate of Deccan capitals.
- Kāśivisveśvara, Lakkundi · Lakkundi — the Chalukya laboratory
The Kāśivisveśvara temple, with a lathe-turned pillar profile and a stepped-diamond plan that the Western Chalukyas worked out in a cluster of small temples around the Tungabhadra. Lakkundi also has a stepwell and a Jain basadi of the same period, so the whole vocabulary is visible in one village.
- Mahādeva Temple, Itagi · Itagi — the Chalukya answer completed
The Mahādeva temple of 1112, called in its own inscription the emperor among temples, with a porch of intricately turned pillars and a ceiling of concentric carved bands. It is the Western Chalukya style at its most resolved and the bridge between the Chalukya manner and what the Hoysalas did with it.
- Siddheśvara Temple, Haveri · Haveri — the Siddheśvara
An eleventh-century Chalukya temple with an unusual plan and finely carved figures on the outer wall, in a small town on the Pune–Bangalore road. The Deccan's greatest medieval architecture is distributed across villages rather than concentrated in capitals, which is why so little of it is visited.
- Belur Chennakeshava · Belur — the Hoysala begins, 1117
Vishnuvardhana's Chennakeshava, built to mark a victory, with bracket figures of dancers under the eaves and a soapstone surface worked like ivory — jewellery and fingernails cut in stone. Several sculptors signed their work on it, which Indian temple carvers almost never did.
- Halebidu Hoysaleswara · Halebīdu — the Hoysala unfinished
The Hoysaleswara, worked on for eighty years and never completed, with friezes running the whole base — elephants, then lions, then horses, then epic scenes — and a surface that has almost no plain stone left on it. The city was sacked twice by Delhi's armies in the fourteenth century.
- Somnathpur Keshava · Somanāthapura — the Hoysala finished, 1268
The one complete Hoysala temple, on a star-shaped plan with three shrines around a single hall, built by a general rather than a king and signed by its sculptors. Its images were mutilated in later raids and it is no longer in worship, which is why the Survey can maintain it as a monument.
- Warangal Fort · Warangal Fort — the Kakatiya capital
A fort of three concentric walls with four free-standing carved gateways, the kīrti toranas, still standing where the temple they belonged to has gone. Delhi took the city in 1323, and the Koh-i-Noor is said to have left the Kakatiya treasury at that point.
- Thousand Pillar Temple, Hanamkonda · The Thousand Pillar Temple, Hanamkonda
Rudradeva's temple of 1163 with a star-shaped plan, three shrines and a detached Nandi mandapa, in the black granite the Kakatiyas used rather than the Hoysalas' soapstone — which is why the carving is bolder and less fine. It was dismantled and rebuilt by the Survey in the 2000s.
- Kākatiya Rudreśwara (Ramappa) Temple · Rāmappa — the temple named for its sculptor
The Rudreśwara temple of 1213 at Palampet, the only major Indian temple named after the man who carved it rather than the king who paid, built with bricks light enough to float and on a sandbox foundation that has carried it through earthquakes for eight centuries.
- Rudrama Devī · Rudrama Devī, r. 1262–1289
Ganapatideva's daughter, made heir and crowned under the male name Rudradeva, who held the Kakatiya state for twenty-seven years against a baronial revolt and pressure from the Yadavas and the eastern Gangas. Marco Polo, coasting past her ports, thought it worth recording that the kingdom was ruled by a woman and that she was well liked.
- Motupalli · Motupalli — the Kakatiya port
The state's outlet to the sea, and the site of Ganapatideva's Abhaya Sasana, a charter cut in stone promising foreign merchants that a wrecked ship would not be plundered and that duties would be fixed and published. It is among the earliest explicit guarantees of merchant property in the Indian Ocean, and it worked: Polo found the port busy.
- Mallikārjuna Temple, Kuruvatti · Mallikārjuna, Kuruvatti — the bracket figures
An eleventh-century Chalukya temple on the Tungabhadra whose madanika bracket figures of dancers and drummers under the eaves are the finest of their kind in the Deccan, and the direct model for what the Hoysalas did at Belur a century later. Soapstone on a sandstone base, which is the transition that makes Hoysala carving possible.