RECENTLY UPDATED FOR 2022! With nearly 120 high-resolution images, detailed site profiles and an architectural style guide, this is the definitive travel guide to South India’s temples.
South India is the premier area in which to experience the architectural tradition of the Hindu temple. Given that the Hindu empires of the South were able to hold off the imperial expansion of Islamic forces, Hindu architecture in South India did not suffer the same destruction as that in the North. As a result, the South’s religious complexes remain largely intact, offering an abundance of temples from all time periods and empires.
★ Background. This guidebook begins with an introduction to Hindu architecture, exploring its history and defining characteristics. With the fundamentals in place, we then go one level deeper, distinguishing between the two prevailing styles of Hindu temples: North Indian and South Indian.
★ Tours that go deeper on the most important sites. Following our tradition of being the most valuable resource for culture-focused travelers, we then turn our attention to the South specifically, looking at temples built by eight of the most powerful Hindu empires in Tamil Nadu (Pallava, Pandyan, Chola, and Nayak) and Karnataka (Chalukya, Rashtrakuta, Hoysala, and Vijayanagar). For each empire, we review the defining features of its architectural style, with a focus on innovations and trademark elements. The goal is to provide travelers with an appreciation of both what makes each empire’s architecture unique, as well as what connects it to that of those empires that came before and those that would come after.
★ Advice for getting the best cultural experience. To help you plan your visit, this guidebook supplies logistical advice, maps and links to online resources. Plus, we give our personal tips for getting the most from your experience while on location.
★ Information the way you like it. As with all of our guides, this book is optimized for intuitive, quick navigation; information is organized into bullet points to make absorption easy; and images are marked up with text that explains important features.
★ NEW! Customers can now print this guidebook with our new PDF-on-Demand service. See the final chapter in the book for details.
Itinerary
In total, this guidebook profiles 24 Hindu temples in South India, walking step-by-step through their distinctive architectural and artistic elements. Each temple’s detailed profile includes high-resolution images and floorplans that reveal salient features with color highlights to ease identification. This tour includes the following locations:
* Aihole (near Goa)
* Belur (near Mysore and Bangalore)
* Ellora (near Mumbai)
* Halebid (near Mysore and Bangalore)
* Hampi (near Goa)
* Kanchipuram (near Chennai)
* Mahabalipuram (near Chennai)
* Madurai
* Pattadakal (near Goa)
* Somnathpur (near Mysore and Bangalore)
* Thanjavur
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