Virupaksha Temple, Pattadakal
ವಿರೂಪಾಕ್ಷ ದೇವಾಲಯ, ಪಟ್ಟದಕಲ್ಲು
Why this temple matters
Raised beside the Malaprabha to crown a king's victory, the Virupaksha temple of Pattadakal is the high point of early Chalukyan art — a place where, in the 8th century, the temple-builders of the north and south met on one riverbank and worked out the grammar of the Indian temple.
History
Pattadakal was a coronation town of the early Chalukyas of Badami, and its cluster of temples on the Malaprabha river is one of the great laboratories of Indian architecture. The Virupaksha temple, the largest and most complete of them, was built about 740 CE by Queen Lokamahadevi to commemorate the victory of her husband, the Chalukya emperor Vikramaditya II, over the Pallavas of Kanchipuram. Having taken the Pallava capital, Vikramaditya is said to have been so struck by its great Kailasanatha temple that he brought its builders home; his queen's temple at Pattadakal was modelled directly on that southern masterpiece, so that a Pallava victory is written into Chalukyan stone. An inscription in the temple even names the architect, Gunda, honoured with the title 'Tribhuvanacharya', master of the three worlds — a rare medieval record of the man who designed it. Together with its neighbours, Virupaksha was inscribed by UNESCO in 1987 as part of the Group of Monuments at Pattadakal.
Architecture
Pattadakal is famous as the meeting-ground of the two great streams of Indian temple design — the northern nagara, with its curving tower, and the southern dravida, with its stepped pyramid — and the Virupaksha temple is the fullest statement of the dravida manner here. It is a complete Dravidian temple in miniature empire: a pillared hall, the sanctum with its lingam, a circumambulatory passage, and a separate shrine for Shiva's bull Nandi facing the door, all crowned by a square, tiered vimana. Its walls carry a superb sculptural programme — panels of Shiva, of Vishnu, and long narrative friezes drawn from the Ramayana and Mahabharata — and its pillars are covered with scenes carved with Chalukyan finesse. Because it was built as a considered whole rather than added to over centuries, Virupaksha has a unity and completeness that its more experimental neighbours lack, and it stands as the model the Chalukyas had been reaching toward.
Legends
The temple's founding story is itself its chief legend: a queen's monument to a king's triumph, and to a rivalry between the Chalukyas and the Pallavas that shaped the art of the whole peninsula. Tradition holds that Vikramaditya II, entering the conquered Pallava capital, spared its temples and instead carried its craftsmen north in admiration — so that the Virupaksha is at once a trophy of war and an act of homage to the enemy's genius. The temple is dedicated to Shiva as Lokeshwara, 'lord of the world', and its very completeness was later to echo forward: scholars hold that this Chalukyan temple, descended from the Pallava Kailasanatha, in turn helped inspire the astonishing rock-cut Kailasa temple carved at Ellora under the Rashtrakutas who succeeded the Chalukyas. Pattadakal thus stands at the centre of a chain of influence running the length of the Deccan.
Festivals
Pattadakal is today a protected monument-complex rather than a busy pilgrimage centre, and the temples are experienced above all as art and history. The site is best known in the cultural calendar for the annual Pattadakal Dance Festival, held against the floodlit temples, when classical dancers perform before the very sculptures that record the poses of their art. Ceremonial and occasional worship is still offered at Virupaksha, but the daily throng of a living temple has long since passed; visitors come instead for the extraordinary concentration of 7th- and 8th-century architecture gathered on a single riverbank, a stillness that lets the stone itself speak.
The Experience
Pattadakal rewards an unhurried eye. The temples stand close together on level ground by the Malaprabha, so a visitor can walk in an afternoon from the northern-towered shrines to the southern-towered Virupaksha and read, building by building, how the Indian temple took shape. Begin at Virupaksha and its Nandi pavilion, then trace the Ramayana friezes along its walls; the light of late afternoon rakes the carving and brings the narrative to life. The site is small enough to see thoroughly and is best combined with the cave-temples of nearby Badami and the temples of Aihole a short drive away — the three towns together forming the cradle where Chalukyan, and much of Indian, temple architecture was born.