THT Indology Festival. Day #4. Dec 3, 2020.
Theme: Temple Architecture.

Topic: The Unfolding Universe of Nagara Temple Architecture

Prof Hardy's talk is about the tradition of temple architecture that predominated across the whole of northern India between the 6th and 12th centuries, continuing with periodical revivals until today. Rather than dwell on particular monuments, I shall try to put across an understanding of the architecture and its principles, in particular a sense of how it was created.

These are the main areas and themes of the talk:
-The importance of typology, as an architectural principle, not merely for classification. Timber origins of early types. Aedicularity: temple composed of temples.
-Nagara and Dravida (northern and southern temple traditions) as architectural languages, underlying different temple forms (general ‘modes’, and specific ‘types’).
-The architectural expression of downward an outward movement (emergence, expansion, proliferation); how this is paralleled by an emanatory pattern of development within the tradition, as the architects draw out one form from another; and how this pattern reflects perennial concepts of cosmogony and manifestation.
- Theory and practice: the canonical Sanskrit texts (Vastushastras, Shilpashastras), and how temple designs ‘unfold’ in these texts. I shall focus on an important chapter of the 12th-century Aparjitaprccha, and show a worked example of how to proceed from the text to a temple design.

The Speaker: Prof Adam Hardy

Prof Adam Hardy is Emeritus Professor of Asian Architecture at Cardiff University, UK. He trained as an architect at Cambridge University, and later did his PhD on how temples developed in Karnataka between the 7th and 13th centuries, published as Indian Temple Architecture: Form and Transformation (1995).

Subsequent work on temples throughout India has led to numerous publications, including two further books, The Temple Architecture of India (2007), and Theory and Practice of Temple Architecture in Medieval India: Bhoja’s Samaranganasutradhara and the Bhojpur Line Drawings (2015).

His most recent research projects have been ‘The Nagara Tradition of Temple Architecture: Continuity, Transformation, Renewal’ (Leverhulme Trust), and ‘Tamil Temple Towns: Conservation and Contestation’ (funded by AHRC and ICHR).

As an architect, he has been involved in the design of several new temples, most recently for a temple near Bangalore re-creating the long-dormant tradition of the Hoysalas.

Adam’s involvement with organisations concerned with South Asian cultures has included editorship of the journal South Asian Studies (1999-2016), and committee membership of the European Association of South Asian Archaeology and Art (President 2015-17).

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