This three-volume book gives a complete survey of the surviving Hindu and Jaina temples in the northern half of Karnataka from the period AD 1000-1300. These temples from a homogenous body of monuments that is one of the most interesting in India. From an architectural point of view it is the most interesting of all, because an important characteristic of Indian temples – their decoration with architecture – it taken to its limits. Nowhere else in India, or for that matter in the entire world, the decoration of architecture with architecture is so abundant and so detailed. The ambition to be complete required a lot of fieldwork, because about 50 of the 220 monuments included have not been published before. But not only ‘new’ temples were visited; without exception all temples presented in this book, were seen at least once. During each visit many photographs were made. All of the approximately 1400 photographs published in the second and third volumes were made by the author. I
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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