This fascinating study of the Kailasanatha temple complex in Kanchi (capital of the south Indian Pallava kingdom from the sixth through the ninth centuries) offers a new set of analytical approaches to both this individual Shiva temple and Hindu religious architecture more broadly. Kaimal focuses on a set of buildings that were commissioned in the early eighth century by Pallava King Narasimhavarman II Rajasimha (Rajasimha hereafter) and several of his immediate family members. These structures include the main shrine to Shiva that was commissioned by Rajasimha himself; a secondary Shiva shrine and its connected open-air pavilion that were commissioned by his son, Mahendravarman; and a row of eight smaller, linked shrines, commissioned by the Pallava queens, that together form the eastern façade of the complex. As Kaimal notes, the Kailasanatha temple is one of India's earliest freestanding, as opposed to rock-cut, temples and marks a transitional moment in Hindu religious architecture. It borrows features from Buddhist monasteries while using new motifs to articulate themes that are related to an emerging system of Hindu thought called Shaiva Siddhanta, which had recently been embraced by the Pallava kings (more about Shaiva Siddhanta below). Designed as a royal chapel but with attention clearly paid to the multiple faith communities that were present in Rajasimha's realm, the artistic programme of the temple is highly ornate, departing from earlier, more austere Pallava religious architecture. Almost every inch of the surfaces of the temple is covered with sculptures and frescoes that depict an array of divine and human forms. As Kaimal shows, these forms work together to elaborate a variety of thematic connections between royal and divine activity that subsequently became standard temple vocabulary for Pallava rulers who were seeking to establish their authority.
The most striking feature of the book is the way in which Kaimal centres modes of interaction in her analysis of the many attributes of the temple. In addition to illuminating the intricate ways in which the buildings, sculptures, paintings, and inscriptions of the complex work together to shape the visitor's experience, Kaimal also clarifies how the design encourages certain forms of movement that actively enlist visitors in the articulation of the various meanings of the temple. According to Kaimal, the sheer ubiquity of decoration at the complex ensures that there is always something of interest, not only directly facing the visitors, but also in their peripheral vision, and this stimulates them to keep moving. This exploration, encouraged by the design of the temple, is not entirely haphazard; Kaimal demonstrates how certain images are intentionally positioned at specific junctures or angled in certain directions to encourage visitors to trace particular routes. This emphasis on interactive movement through the temple is central to the organising structure of the book and is visually conveyed in the table of contents, which, rather than presenting the five chapters in list form, lays them out as if on a clock face. The chapter titles also highlight Kaimal's emphasis on movement and interaction.
After describing the core structures of the temple as well as their historical importance in chapter one, Kaimal's second chapter, ‘Looking north and south: celibacy and intimacy, struggle and grace’, enumerates two sets of complementary themes that are articulated by the sculptures located along the north-facing and south-facing walls of the temple, respectively. Kaimal argues that male and female deities who face north are typically presented in celibate poses with angular, unyielding bodies that convey themes of self-discipline, privation, mastery, and transcendence; these same deities, when facing south, strike intimate, sensual, intertwined poses with soft, yielding bodies. Such imagery calls to mind prosperity, worldly engagement, and productivity. Here, Kaimal argues that the directional confrontation of these themes of celibacy and sensuality should be read in terms of the paired concepts of mangalam and amangalam, which are central to the worldview of Pallava-era agrarian life and, by extension, to modes of royal power. Often translated as ‘auspicious’ and ‘inauspicious’, Kaimal argues against applying value judgements to these two terms and maintains instead that both modes were understood as equally necessary and interdependent. Mangalam and amangalam are also important aspects of Shiva's complex nature: his ascetic practice constitutes the basis of his fortitude, physical stamina, and divine insight, while his sensuality underscores the auspicious power of sexuality and procreation. Successful kings, Kaimal argues, must also possess these linked forms of prowess in order for their reigns to be prosperous. Depictions of Shiva and other deities in celibate and sensual modes therefore serve as reminders of royal obligations and goals.
Chapter three, ‘Looking east and west, with and without sons’, discusses how the layout and imagery of the temple connect acts of divine procreation and maintenance of the sacred order to royal concerns about legacy and continuity. Kaimal shows how the placement of both Mahendravarman's shrine and the queens’ shrines vis-à-vis the shrine of the head of the family, Rajasimha, mimic the layout of the Shiva Somaskanda motif. This motif, which is prevalent along the east–west axis of the temple, presents Shiva and his consort Uma with their child Skanda positioned between them as a divine royal family (Shiva wears a crown in this motif). Furthermore, images of this family are interspersed with and sometimes confront images of childless human couples, whom Kaimal thinks were intended to represent a generic royal couple as potential rather than actual parents. The fact that these images of potential human procreation both confront and flank images of the divine family is taken by Kaimal to allude to the cyclic nature of existence and the transformations that establish continuities and legacies. Pallava-era visitors to the temple who were walking among these east- and west-facing images would have contemplated such messages.
Chapters four and five continue this emphasis on movement and interaction, bringing increased attention to the role of the visitor to the shrine and to what ‘seeing like a Pallava’ (pp. 12ff.) might have felt like. In chapter four, which focuses on routes of circumambulation at the temple, Kaimal highlights the ways in which the orientation of divine and human sculptural bodies and the directionality of the various texts that are carved at the base of the shrines encourage certain forms of movement. Acts of circumambulation in both clockwise and counterclockwise directions evoke different experiences in the visitor, but also enable the visitor to work with the temple to produce various meanings. For instance, as Kaimal argues in chapter five, entitled ‘Word-image tango’, the main shrine links idyllic, divine time to the eighth-century era of the construction of the temple through a careful juxtaposition of inscriptions and images. A poem that praises Rajasimha for all his worldly qualities and actions is inscribed around the external base of Shiva's main shrine, which also presents sculptures above that convey narratives about Shiva and the exploits of other deities. Kaimal demonstrates that reading the inscriptions and images together does not reveal a simple one-to-one correspondence between the two, nor do the inscriptions serve as captions for the sculptures; instead, Kaimal argues, the alignment of the specific sections of Rajasimha's praise-poem, which is written in an eye-catching script, with the mythic narrative images above actually encourages the viewer to anticipate themes that will be conveyed by sculptures that are situated at a later point. For Kaimal, this evokes a kind of metaphorical thinking in the viewer about the nature of divine/human relations and the connections between ideal and real time. In this way, the visitor's act of circumambulation knits together these realms and eras, enabling the temple to perform one of its key functions: bringing the divine presence into the structure. The visitor's engaged interaction with word and image at the temple generates a whole new realm of meaning above and beyond the meaning that is produced by text and imagery separately. This engaged interaction also underscores the central role that human activity plays in sustaining the cosmic order.
Kaimal's productive emphasis on movement and interaction to analyze the welter of imagery at the Kailasanatha temple is a brilliant reminder of what art and architecture can teach us about religion that is not accessible via the mere study of religious texts. As Kaimal aptly puts it, ‘[p]eople build temples to do things that books cannot do. Temples communicate in three dimensions, generating somatic experience, shaping space for bodies to move through, and requiring movement of anyone who would know them. This temple performs all these tasks at a grand scale’ (p. 16). However, despite this important insight, the one failing of the book is Kaimal's lack of attention to the Shaiva Siddhanta religious tradition that she repeatedly asserts is a key thematic feature of the Kailasanatha complex. Indeed, by Kaimal's own account, an inscription at the temple that refers to Rajasimha as an early supporter of Shaiva Siddhanta is ‘the oldest surviving physical record to contain the phrase “Shaiva Siddhanta”’ (pp. 176–177). Kaimal's explanation for why she offers so few details about this tradition in her analysis is found in the conclusion of the book, in which she maintains that the written sources of the tradition date to a later period, making it impossible to say anything definitive about this belief system that existed in the early eighth century. This seems to contradict Kaimal's own excellent example of how much we can learn about a religious tradition by studying its artistic monuments. Yet, even with this significant lacuna, this book is a wealth of new insights and information about a historically important temple; it merits the attention of any scholar of South Asian art, architecture, religion, or history.
