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The vibrant red sandstone temples of India's Deccan Plateau, such as the Pattadakal temple cluster, have attracted visitors since the eighth century or earlier. A UNESCO World Heritage Site and the coronation place of the Chalukya dynasty, Pattadakal and its neighboring sites are of major historical importance. In Shiva's Waterfront Temples, Subhashini Kaligotla situates these buildings in the cosmopolitan milieu of Deccan India and considers how their makers and awestruck visitors would have seen them in their day. Kaligotla reconstructs how architects and builders approached the sites, including their use of ornamentation, responsiveness to courtly values such as pleasure and play, and ingenious juxtaposition of the first millennium's Nagara and Dravida aesthetics, a blend largely unique to Deccan plateau architecture. With over 130 color illustrations, this original book elucidates the Deccan's special place in the lexicon of medieval South Asian architecture.

Summary: The contributions by archaeologists, art historians, historians and scholars of religion trace the cultural and religious phenomena associated with the development of Buddhist, Hindu and Jain cave sites in the Western Deccan. Some investigative models proposed in this book suggest new relationships between literary and visual evidence; others follow threads connecting cave centers to religious and artistic contexts located outside the Western Deccan in an attempt to place the rock-cut monuments in a wider cultural landscape. Living Rock offers new perspectives into this fascinating world of cave temples. From the 2nd century BCE to the 10th century CE, rock-cut temples and monasteries appeared at various sites in the subcontinent - most notably across the Western Deccan. Carved on the edge of the basaltic plateau, the cave sites were strategically placed near ancient trade routes and fertile land, and they showcased a variety of architectural spaces for different worship practices and monastic uses