Page:South-Indian Images of Gods and Goddesses.djvu/21



Almost every village of any importance in Southern India has its temple, round which centres in a very large measure the corporate civic life of the community which lives in it. The casual visitor is at once attracted by the temple and when he goes there he sees various images in all sorts of incongruous postures and is generally puzzled to know what they mean or what they represent, and how they serve to evoke the religious feelings of the people worshipping them. An attempt will be made in the succeeding pages to describe and classify them in various groups so as to make them more intelligible to the ordinary visitor.

Elaborate rules have been laid down in the ancient Agamas and Silpa-Sāstras as to the place where temples are to be built, the kinds of images to be installed there, the materials with which such images are to be fashioned, and even the dimensions and proportions of various kinds of images, to vary which will result in untold calamity to the maker and the worshipper alike. The curious reader may, for example, refer to Sukranitisāra (Chapter IV, Section IV, verses 130 et seq.).

Temples must have existed in this part of the country from time immemorial. But the earliest inscriptional evidence of the existence of temples takes us back only to the age of the Pallava kings, which is supposed to be between the fourth {[smallrefs}}