La creation d'une iconographie sivaite narrative: Incarnations du dieu dans les temples pallava construits.

• Author: Kaimal, Padma
• Position: Book review

La creation d'une iconographie Sivaite narrative: Incarnations du dieu dans les temples pallava construits. By VALERIE GILLET. Collection Indologie, vol. 113. Pondicherry: INSTITUT FRAKAIS DE PONDICHERY; ECOLE FRAKAISE D'EXTREME-ORIENT, 2010. Pp. 402, illus.

This useful, beautiful book is a clearly organized and impressive synthesis of every visual, literary, religious, and political source the author could find--and her search was prodigious--that might have informed the grand reliefs on temples built around the eighth century in what is now northern Tamilnadu in southern India. That was the most vigorous period of temple construction during the reign of the Pallava dynasty and it set architectural paradigms that would dominate Tamil temple design for over a millennium. The monuments at the heart of Valerie Gillet's study are concentrated in Kanchi-puram and Mahabalipuram (or Mamallapuram), the Pallavas' capital city and seaport respectively.

Gillet appropriately gives most of her attention to the Kailasanatha temple in Kanchipuram, the oldest, grandest, and most lavishly ornamented of them all, a nested cluster of four structures sponsored by at least three members of the royal family at the beginning of the eighth century. Gillet also gives unprecedented attention to Pallava cities' eight other "temples construits," that is, structures assembled from separate blocks of stone. (Earlier monuments from the Pallava period were hollowed out of granite monoliths.) She compares all these structures closely to each other, rendering hers the first study to embed the Kailasanatha temple so thoroughly in this visual lineage.

This important move reveals the powerful impress of the Kailasanatha temple's sculptural paradigms on later monuments, and the significant shifts over the course of the eighth century that become defining characteristics of temples of the Cola period a century later in the central Tamil region. I have long been a skeptic of the concept of a "Pallava-Cola Transition" but Gillet uses her thick web of material to demonstrate such missing links. There is Ganda's gradual emergence, for example, from a dark corner at the Kailasanatha to his starring role a century later on the south-facing exteriors of temple porches (ardhamatujapa) (p. 59). During the same years, Siva in his mendicant form rotates out of a complex double twist into the relaxed stroll he adopts in the tenth century, displaying his beautiful nudity to the figure...