by local craft conditions or by the inventive fancy of the builder.
Though this form of a temple shrine probably originated with the Vaishnava movement in the Dekhan, it did not, once it was established in the canons of the master-builder, retain a strictly sectarian character. Like the other two types, it was used by different sects—a characteristic of Indian temple-building which has often led to disputes regarding ownership. And though Rāmanūja's name may be associated with it, just as Sankarāchārya's name is connected with the Saiva movement, the "Chalukyan style" began to evolve several centuries before Rāmanūja's appearance in the eleventh century, for the Vaishnava doctrine of qualified monism, preached by Rāmanūja in opposition to the Advāita doctrine of the Vedanta, had its exponents centuries before his birth.
The Saiva temple of Ittagi (Pl. XXIX), about twenty-one miles E.N.E. from Gadag in Hyderabad, built about the time of Rāmanūja, and typical of the style, is one of the most beautiful examples of mediæval architecture in the Dekhan. The decorative work is superbly rich and finished in execution, but it is not over-elaborated with the wild profusion of the later decadent architecture of Halebīd. Like many other temples of the period, it is remarkable for the absence of figure sculpture, the niches designed for images being mostly empty or filled with aniconic symbols. In this respect also the temples tell the religious history of the times, for many Hindu teachers—Jain, Saiva, and Vaishnava—taught the vanity of idolatry, and refused it the place in religious ritual which popular superstition gave to it.
The crowning member of the tower, the stūpa symbol, and the roofs of the mandapams in the Ittagi
