In southern Karnataka, 4 small villages are world-famous for tourism: Belur, Halebid, Somanathapur and Shravan Belgola. The first three of them show Hoysala temples, richly carved Hindu temples dating from the 12th and 13th centuries. This tourist book is the first that aims to present the complete group of Hoysala temples to a large audience. Not only the three famous temples are discussed and illustrated, but also more than 10 others that are extremely worth visiting for tourists and that were, until now, only known to archaeologists.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Gerard Foekema
Gerard Foekema was born in 1943 and lives in Amsterdam. He graduated in physics and philosophy in 1969 and held several offices as a science administrator. He became interested in Indian architecture when visiting the sub-continent as a tourist in 1976. In 1979-80 he made his first study trip to Karnataka. After writing an article on Hoysala temples for a Dutch journal, it was the famous Mrs J.E. Van Lohuizen-De Leeuw who encouraged him to continue. She died prematurely in 1983, but further encouragement was given by fruitful contacts with several specialists on Indian temple architecture, notably with M.A. Dhaky, Adam Hardy and Ajay Sinha. As a result, a large monograph on the architectural aspects of Hoysala temples was published in 1994. Writing a monograph on Kalyana Calukya temples was a still more ambitious task. The majority of the extensive fieldwork, required to completely cover all important temples, took place in the 1995-96 season in close contact with several scholars from the Karnatak University in Dharwad. At the end of the year 2000 the manuscript and the photographs for the present volumes were ready for press. His books on Hoysala and Calukya temples predominantly have the character of the presentation of facts. The abundant material presented in them allows new conclusions about the temples. These are laid down in a Ph.D. thesis that he will defend in November 2003 at Leiden University.
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