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REGIONS AND INDIAN ARCHITECTURE
Michael W. Meister As a planner, if one were making a conventional analysis of the effect of region on architecture, one first would look at questions of climate, available materials, technology, craftsmen, local traditions, relation of a region to "tradition," local economics, etc. In looking at Hindu stone temple architecture, however, surviving from ca. A. D. 400 to 1500, art historians rarely have made these the issues'. This is partly because these structures share a cultural system and its symbolism, partly because we have quite limited knowledge about the local circumstances leading to the appropriation of that symbolism through the building of architecture. What were the paths by which information was transmitted ? To what extent were there local traditions that had to be honoured or accommodated, in spite of broader patterns of royal or cultural patronage ? Though a limited number of texts survive, often not properly dated or located, we mostly have had to guess. It is not as if some of these issues cannot be raised. Because of local availability, for example, marble was used in the Abu region of Rajasthan at least from the seventh century A. D.2 The pent-roof type of structure assimilated to temple architecture may once have had its roots in regions with heavy rain or snows; early Cālukya monuments in Karnataka clearly accommodate the symbolic form of the temple to a local assemblyhall tradition"; Pallava use of granite rather than sandstone had some effect on the nature of Pallava ornament'; in some regions of India, stones were carved in place, in others, they were finished completely before being fitted together'; no one can look at centers such as Vijayanagar without recognition of the importance of local patrons and their ambitions? Yet faced with anonymous monuments expressing a shared symbolism, we as art historians have tended to turn the issue of "regionalism" in this tradition into one of "style." Orissa is different from Rajasthan, Kashmir from Kerala. Yet recognizing the plurality of the Indian subcontinent has not settled questions of how "region" functioned, even in the formation of style. Regions, in fact, should be ideal for the application of the mathematical theory of sets; each region always is in some way a sub-set or shared set with some other region. Hindu architecture primarily is South Asian, for example, not Latin American, in spite of a few attempts to trace architectural links to a "Hindu America." Within the set of Indian temples, the most significant regional sub-sets must certainly be South and North—Drāvida and Nāgara modes of architecture, which share a system of symbolic value for the monument but express that in morphologically quite different ways. The morphology of Northern and Southern temples cannot easily be confused-yet is their separate origin primarily formal, symbolic, political, "regional" in some ethnic sense (as
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