Temple Architecture
How a Hindu temple is built and read: the Nagara, Dravida and Vesara styles, the cosmic grid of the plan, and the dynasties that raised them in stone.
A Hindu temple is built to a diagram before it is built to a design. The vastu-purusha-mandala, a grid with a cosmic figure laid into it, fixes the proportions, and the architectural manuals specify them to a degree that leaves the builder little room for taste.
Two great regional styles developed. Nagara in the north, with its curved spire. Dravida in the south, with its stepped pyramid and its enormous gateway towers, which grew until the gateway dwarfed the sanctum it guarded. Vesara, in the Deccan, borrows from both.
What does not vary is the centre. The garbhagriha, the womb-chamber, is small, dark, and usually undecorated, and everything else is arranged around it. The scale increases as you move outward from the thing that matters.
These pages cover the plan, the styles, the anatomy, and the orientation.