Art Histories
2015/ 2016

Subhashini Kaligotla

A River Runs Through: Sacred Spaces in the Landscape of Early Medieval Deccan

Bhutanatha Temple Group and Environs, ca. 8th century, Badami, Karnataka. Photo: Caleb Smith.

received her PhD in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University in 2015. Her dissertation, Shiva’s Waterfront Temples: Reimagining the Sacred Architecture of India’s Deccan Region, questions the canonical binary conception of Indian sacred architecture and the fragmentary view it engenders of the Deccan’s earliest surviving stone constructions, dating from the sixth to the eighth centuries. By considering temples more broadly, in relation to one another and to the natural and engineered environments that sustain them, her work departs from monument-based paradigms and argues for the constitutive role played by water bodies such as rivers, natural springs, and masonry tanks in shaping the Deccan’s built spaces. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright program, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Getty Research Institute, and Dumbarton Oaks, where she co-organized a colloquium on the landscape histories of premodern South Asia in autumn 2014. She has taught courses on South Asian art and architecture at Barnard College, New York University, and in Columbia’s Core Curriculum. Kaligotla also holds advanced degrees in Engineering and Creative Writing, and has published poetry in literary journals and anthologies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and India.
 

A River Runs Through: Sacred Spaces in the Landscape of the Early Medieval Deccan

Kaligotla plans to revise her doctoral dissertation into a book manuscript, developing in particular the interrelationships between Deccan sacred spaces and their physical environments. The fundamental question animating the inquiry is how early medieval sacred places were imagined, produced, and experienced. Sanskrit texts, both pan-Indian and regional, provide cosmological and theological perspectives on place, while art and architectural treatises prescribe the spatial organization of built environments, even laying out the directional coordinates of water bodies and water amusements. The donative inscriptions of the Deccan’s Chalukya rulers (543-757 CE) reveal aspects of land and resource control that were salient for kingship, and also represent regional and supraregional spatial understandings. Sculptural embodiments of landscape themes and concerns, including nature and river deities, represent yet another viewpoint; and finally, the topography and distribution of sacred places, pilgrim networks, and trade and commercial routes provide insight into circulation within, and experience of, sacred places. Reading these sources together and against one another, the project aims to present not the biographies of disjointed monuments, but rather landscape histories in which sacred spaces are inextricably linked to one another and their wider natural and constructed worlds.