The Hindu Temple

The Hindu temple took centuries to reach its classic form. Early Vedic religion centred on fire sacrifices performed in the open, on altars built for the occasion, and needed no permanent sanctuary. Over the last centuries BCE devotion to particular deities grew, and with it the custom of honouring their images. The first shrines were probably built of wood, brick and thatch, and almost none survive. What remains from the early centuries CE are a few foundations and the rock-cut sanctuaries carved into cliffs.

The earliest surviving free-standing stone temples date from the Gupta period, around the fifth century CE. Temple 17 at Sanchi, built in the early fifth century, is little more than a flat-roofed cell with a pillared porch, yet it already has the essential pair of sanctum and entrance hall. At Deogarh, the Dashavatara temple of about 500 CE shows an early tower rising over the shrine and walls carved with scenes from the myths of Vishnu. From these beginnings builders developed ever more elaborate temples between the seventh and thirteenth centuries.

Architects followed rules later written down in treatises known as the Shilpa Shastras and Vastu texts. They describe a temple plan laid out on a grid of squares, the vastu-purusha-mandala, over which a cosmic being is imagined lying, with the god Brahma at the centre. The sanctum sits on that central point, and the tower above it rises like the world mountain Meru. Scholars such as Stella Kramrisch read the whole building as a model of the cosmos, through which the worshipper moves from the outer world towards the source of being.

By the tenth and eleventh centuries the two great regional families had matured. In the north the Nagara style produced temples like those at Khajuraho, where the towers of halls and sanctum rise in a sequence of peaks. In the south the Dravida style culminated in Chola masterpieces such as the Brihadishvara temple at Thanjavur.

In Hindu belief a consecrated temple is the dwelling place of a god or goddess, who is present in the image installed in the sanctum. The image is brought to life in a consecration rite, prana pratishtha, and from then on is treated as a royal guest. Priests wake the deity at dawn, bathe and dress the image, offer food, flowers and incense, and close the shrine at night. The pattern follows the hospitality offered to an honoured visitor or king.

For most devotees the heart of a visit is darshan, the act of seeing the deity and being seen in return. Worshippers pass through the halls, stand before the sanctum and gaze at the image, often at the moment when a priest waves a flame before it in the aratiarati A rite in which a lamp is waved before an image of a god, then offered to the worshippers. Glossary rite. They hand over offerings of flowers, fruit, coconuts or sweets, which are presented to the deity and returned as prasad, food now carrying a blessing. Many then walk clockwise around the shrine before leaving.

Temple worship is largely individual and family-based rather than congregational. There is no weekly service everyone must attend; people come when they wish, on days sacred to their deity or at moments of need. Hymns, devotional singing and sermons may fill the halls, especially in the evening.

The temple year is marked by festivals. During the great processions images or their festival doubles leave the sanctum to tour the town, carried in palanquins or pulled in huge wooden chariots, as in the Rath Yatra at Puri. Many temples also hold weddings, the first feeding of solid food to a baby and other family rites, and keep the ritual calendar of the region. Large temples also served historically as centres of learning, music and dance, as landowners and as places where kings displayed their piety.

The Nagara temples of northern India have a curving tower, the shikhara, crowned by a ribbed disc and a pot-shaped finial. At Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh, where some twenty-five temples survive from the Chandela period, the towers over the halls rise step by step to the main peak, so that the whole temple resembles a mountain range. Odisha developed its own variant, seen at the Lingaraja temple in Bhubaneswar, the Jagannath temple at Puri and the thirteenth-century Sun Temple at Konark, carved as a giant chariot.

The Dravida temples of the south differ in almost every visible feature. The tower over the sanctum, the vimana, is a pyramid of storeys capped by a dome-shaped stone. From about the twelfth century southern temples were enclosed by concentric walls, and the gateways in these walls, the gopurams, grew into the tallest parts of the complex. The Meenakshi temple at Madurai has fourteen gopurams covered with brightly painted figures, and the main gateway at Srirangam, completed in the 1980s, stands about 70 metres high. Between north and south, the Deccan produced mixed styles, sometimes called Vesara, in the temples of the Chalukya and Hoysala kings.

The temple form travelled with Hindu culture across Asia. Prambanan in Java, of the ninth century, and Angkor Wat in Cambodia, built in the twelfth century and first dedicated to Vishnu, adapted Indian models on a monumental scale. In modern times the Hindu diaspora has built temples on every continent, from the carved marble BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in Neasden, London, opened in 1995, to countless converted halls and houses where communities install their deities and keep the daily round of worship.