Place · Chalukya temple complex · India
Pattadakal
The Chalukya royal temple complex at Pattadakal in Bagalkot district, Karnataka, built in the 7th-8th centuries by Vikramaditya II and Lokamahadevi — the stage on which the Nagara and Dravida architectural systems were deliberately juxtaposed under one royal patronage. The Virupaksha temple (745 CE, by Lokamahadevi to commemorate Vikramaditya II's defeat of the Pallavas) is pure Dravida; the Papanatha temple (680 CE) and the Galaganatha temple are Nagara. UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987. Pattadakal was the coronation ground of the Chalukya kings — the name means 'coronation stone' — and the temples read as architectural statements of imperial geography reaching north and south together.
- Function
- Archaeology & heritage
- Patron dynasty
- Chalukya
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 15.948, 75.816
Connections (5)
- Contemporary capital withBadami
Badami, Aihole and Pattadakal lie within about thirty kilometres of each other on the Malaprabha, and between them they contain the working-out of the south Indian temple: Aihole the experimental village of a hundred and twenty temples, Badami the cave-cut capital, Pattadakal the mature ensemble where Nagara and Dravida forms were built side by side under royal patronage. It is the densest architectural laboratory in India.
- Architectural modelThanjavur Brihadishvara
Pattadakal is where the Dravida form was codified, with northern and southern temple types set deliberately side by side, and Thanjavur is where the Cholas took that form to sixty-six metres three centuries later. The Chalukyas and the Pallavas fought for two hundred years and copied each other's masons throughout — the Virupaksha at Pattadakal was built after a victory over Kanchipuram by sculptors brought back from it.
- Architectural modelEllorā
Kailasa at Ellora is modelled on the Dravida temple form codified at Pattadakal: the same pyramidal vimana, the same plan and subsidiary shrines, worked in the negative. The Rashtrakutas had taken the Deccan from the Chalukyas, and one reading of the monolith is that they cut their predecessors' temple type out of a hill to prove they could — the inscription's claim is that even its builder wondered how he had done it.
- PrecursorAihole
Aihole, on the tentative list since 2004, is where the Chalukyas tried out every temple plan they could think of; Pattadakal, inscribed in 1987, is where they built the successful ones side by side in the northern and southern manners. The experiment is ten kilometres from the result, and only the result is inscribed.
- Architectural modelKukkanur
The Kukkanur Navalinga temple (c.1050 CE) extends the Western Chalukya temple-architecture tradition that had been codified at Pattadakal (7-8 century) and continued through the Hungund-Koppal-Gadag temple corridor of 10-12 century northern Karnataka. Kukkanur's distinctive nine-linga arrangement in one shrine complex is architecturally unique among the Western Chalukya temples. UNESCO tentative list since 2014.
On these journeys
Sources
Group of Monuments at Pattadakal — UNESCO
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