Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 1.djvu/400

352 DRAVIDIAN STYLE. BOOK III. their works. No such lofty aims exercised the intellectual faculties of the Hindu. His altar and the statue of his god were placed in a dark cubical cell wholly without ornament, and the porch that preceded that was not necessarily either lofty or spacious. What the Hindu architect craved for, was a place to display his powers of ornamentation, and he thought he had accomplished all his art demanded when he covered every part of his building with the most elaborate and most difficult designs he could invent. Much of this ornamentation, it is true, is very elegant, and evidences of power and labour do impress the human imagination, often even in defiance of our better judgment, and nowhere is this more apparent than in these Dravidian temples. It is in vain, however, we look among them for any manifestation of those lofty aims and noble results which constitute the merit and the greatness of true architectural art, and which generally characterise the best works in the true styles of the western world. Turning from these generalities to the temples themselves, the first great difficulty hitherto experienced in attempting either to classify or describe them was that so very few plans of them had been published. There are probably upwards of thirty great Dravidian temples, or groups of temples, any one of which must have cost as much to build as an English cathedral, some a great deal more; but of all these there were few of which, till lately, trustworthy plans were available. This is, of course, irrespective of some early examples of village temples, and, it may be, of some groups which have been overlooked. If these temples had been built like those of the Greeks, or even as the Christian churches in the Middle Ages, on one uniform plan, changing only with the progress of time, one or two plans might have sufficed ; but the fact is that, in nine cases out of ten, the larger Dravidian temples are a fortuitous aggregation of parts, arranged without plan, as accident dictated at the time of their erection ; and, without plans, no adequate idea could be conveyed to those who have not seen them. In the south of the Bombay Presidency are some of the earlier examples of this style. Among these the great temple at Pattadakal, now known as Virupaksha, we learn from in- scriptions upon it, was built by Lokamahadevi, one of the queens of the Chalukya king Vikramaditya II., who ruled from 733 to 747. It belongs, therefore, to the date formerly assigned to it on archaeological grounds, as having been erected during the 8th century. 1 In plan it is almost exactly a duplicate 1 ' Archaeological Survey of Western India,' vol. i. ( 1874) pp. 31 et seqq., and plates 38-40; 'Cave Temples of India,' pp. 450, 451 ; 'Indian Antiquary,' vol. x. pp. 162-169.