Basics of Hindu Temple Architecture

A Hindu temple is not planned as one room with a roof on top. It is set out from a single point on the ground, and everything else is arranged around that point. By the end there will be three parts to point at: a small room at the centre, a hall in front of it, and a tower over the top. All three are set out from this square. The plan begins as a square, divided into a grid of equal cells. This one is nine cells each way, which makes eighty one. The grid is squared to the compass. On this drawing east is the side nearest us, and the doorway goes in that side. Now the middle cell. It is the most important square on the plan, because the heart of the temple is built exactly there. That centre has a name: the brahmasthana. The grid stands for an ordered world, and the sacred is placed at the middle of it. One more line matters as much. Run it through the middle and out through the doorway. That is the line you walk in along, and the whole building is arranged on it.

The square is marked out and the centre is settled. The first room built is the one that stands on that centre, and it is smaller than you would expect. This is the garbhagriha, the womb chamber. A plain cube of a room, usually with no windows, thick walls, and one door. The image of the god stands inside it. And it is dark on purpose. You come in out of bright sunlight, and the room you are walking toward is the darkest in the building. The outer wall is set back from it, which leaves a passage all the way round. Walking that circuit is part of a visit, and you keep the shrine on your right as you go. In front of it, on the same line, comes the hall. This is the mandapa, and it is the opposite kind of space: wide, open, and carried on pillars. The hall is where people gather. It is where you wait, where music is played, where a crowd can stand. Larger temples have two or three of them. And this is the line they are all arranged on. It runs from the outer door, through the hall, to the door of the sanctum. So a visit is a walk from the outside in. Through the entrance, along the hall, past the pillars, and up to the threshold of the small dark room. Most visitors stop about here. The plan narrows as you go in: wide and open at the front, small and shut at the heart. Three names, then. Garbhagriha for the sanctum at the centre. Mandapa for the hall in front of it. And pradakshina patha for the path that goes round it. So the plan is read from the middle outward. Find the sanctum, and the rest of the building tells you where it is.

Now turn the same temple and look at it from the side. One thing dominates it, and it sits over one room only. The whole building stands on a raised platform, which lifts it clear of the ground you walk on. Here is the sanctum block again, the small closed room at the centre of the plan. And this is what is built directly on top of it. This is the shikhara, the tower over the sanctum. It rises straight from the walls of the small room, narrows as it goes, and curves inward near the top. Two more pieces finish it: a ribbed stone disc, and a pot above that. They stand exactly over the centre of the room below. The hall in front is kept low, under a modest roof. So the height is not spread across the building. It is given to one room. That is the idea worth keeping. The tower is read as a mountain, with the sanctum as the cave at its heart. The plan pointed inward. This points up. This tower is the northern kind, called nagara. Southern temples, called dravida, build the same thing another way, and they give it another name. It is built as a stack of storeys, each one smaller than the storey below, so the outline steps in instead of curving. A small domed cap sits on top, with a finial above it. Tower and sanctum together, this is called the vimana. Two ways of building one idea. The tower says which room matters, and it says so by height. So, the whole of it. A square plan, set out from its centre. A small dark sanctum standing on that centre. Open pillared halls in front of it. And a tower over the sanctum alone. A real temple has far more: gateways, smaller shrines, carving everywhere. But find the sanctum, the hall and the tower, and you can read almost any of them.