Montag
11
JUN

16.00 Uhr

Building Temples in the Tamil Renaissance

Colonial Architecture and Chettiar Patronage in Madras Presidency 1880s-1920s

Prof. Crispin Branfoot, School of Oriental and African Studies, London (Großbritannien)

In 1912 a young teacher named Gabriel Jouveau-Dubreuil from French colonial Pondicherry visited nearby Cuddalore in order to interrogate the sthapatis working on the construction of a new Hindu temple. The architectural terminology that he learnt from the craftsmen and his observations of architectural design contributed towards the first study of the Tamil temple from the very earliest monuments of the seventh century through to those currently under construction. The first of his two-volume "Archéologie du sud de l'Inde" published in 1914 on architecture was republished in 1917 as "Dravidian Architecture". The modern temple that he visited in Cuddalore was not in fact new but a wholesale renovation of a thousand-year old shrine on a site sacred to Tamil Shaivas. This was just one of the many temples substantially rebuilt in Madras Presidency from the 1880s to the 1920s under the patronage of a wealthy merchant community, the Nattukkotai Chettiars, at a time of religious revival and growing Tamil cultural nationalism. In this paper, I wish to explore this architectural 'renaissance' in colonial Madras Presidency under Chettiar patronage and evaluate modern temple design through the pioneering scholarship of Jouveau-Dubreuil and his contemporaries.

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