Pattadakal

A coronation town

Pattadakal lies a few kilometres from the Chalukya capital at Badami and from Aihole, the dynasty's earlier temple-building ground. Its name is usually explained as "the stone of the coronation", and inscriptions confirm that Chalukya kings were consecrated here. It was a royal and ceremonial centre rather than a city, and its temples were built by kings and queens to mark accessions and victories.

Two styles in one place

The temples are the clearest place in India to see the two great temple traditions together. Some, such as the Galaganatha, the Kashivishvanatha and the Jambulinga, carry the curved northern tower, the rekha-nagara shikhara. Others, above all the Virupaksha and the Mallikarjuna, carry the stepped, storeyed southern tower, the dravida vimana. The Papanatha temple mixes the two. Historians have often described Pattadakal as a workshop where Chalukya builders tried both systems, sitting as they did between the north and the Tamil south.

The oldest of the southern-style temples is the Sangameshvara, begun under Vijayaditya (r. 696–733) and first named Vijayeshvara after him. It was never fully finished, and its plain walls show the dravida form at an early stage, before the more elaborate work of the next generation.

The Virupaksha and the victory at Kanchi

The largest temple, the Virupaksha, was built by Queen Lokamahadevi to commemorate her husband Vikramaditya II's victory over the Pallavas and his capture of their capital, Kanchipuram, in about 740 CE. It was first named Lokeshvara after her. Her sister, Queen Trailokyamahadevi, also married to Vikramaditya, built the Mallikarjuna beside it. Inscriptions name the architect of the Virupaksha as Gunda, honoured with the title of the king's foremost builder.

The link with Kanchi shows in the stone. The Virupaksha closely follows the plan and composition of the Kailasanatha temple that the Pallava king Rajasimha had built at Kanchi a generation earlier: an enclosed court, a gateway, a pillared hall and a storeyed vimana. Vikramaditya is recorded, in a Kannada inscription at the Kailasanatha itself, as having spared that temple and returned its wealth to it rather than plundering it. Pattadakal's great temple is in that sense a southern form brought north as the spoil of a campaign. A few decades later the Rashtrakutas, who displaced the Chalukyas in 753, drew on it in their own masterpiece, the Kailasa temple at Ellora.

Sculpture and later history

The walls and pillars carry narrative reliefs from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Bhagavata stories, alongside panels of Shiva in his many forms; the Virupaksha's pillars are especially rich. A Jain temple on the edge of the site belongs to the ninth century, under the Rashtrakutas. After the Chalukyas the site lost its royal role, and it survived largely because it was never rebuilt.