The Mūrti speaks
There is a moment, familiar to anyone who has stood before the entrance hall of the Kopeshwar temple at Koppam (Khidrapur), when the figures carved into the stone stop being decoration and start being text. The temple was built in the twelfth century under Shilahara patronage, on a bend in the Krishna river where the boundaries of Maharashtra and Karnataka still blur into one another. Its walls carry hundreds of figures — gods, attendants, apsaras, dvarapalas, celestial musicians — arranged in a programme of such deliberate theological and political density that the temple functions less as a building than as an argument carved in basalt. To read that argument, one needs iconography. To understand what iconography was for, one needs history. This essay reflects on the relationship between Hindu iconography as a discipline and historical scholarship as a method — a relationship that has been insufficiently explored in the study of the Deccan temple tradition. My argument is simple:...
