Ramappa Temple

The Ramappa temple at Palampet is a temple of Shiva as Rudreshvara.¹ Recherla Rudra, a general of the Kakatiya king Ganapatideva, founded it.¹ It is best known for the bracket figures on its outer pillars.² In 2021 the World Heritage Committee inscribed it as a World Heritage Site.³

Founding

The great temple at Palampet is dedicated to Shiva as Rudreshvara.¹ It was founded by Recherla Rudra, a general of the Kakatiya king Ganapatideva.¹ Its inscribed pillar records that in Saka 1135 (Saka is an Indian way of counting years) Rudra gave the villages of Upparlapalli and Borlapalli to Rudreshvara.⁴ L. D. Barnett calculated the day as Sunday, 31 March 1213.⁴ The same verses describe a city he built, with a pond beside it, and a temple of Rudreshvara crowned with a golden cupola.⁵

The temple stands beside the large Kakatiya reservoir called Ramappa Cheruvu.⁶⁷ P. V. Parabrahma Sastry also gives this reservoir to Recherla Rudra.⁶⁷ A 2021 evaluation prepared for UNESCO reports that the building is said to have taken about forty years to complete.⁸

The temple is widely known as the Ramappa temple.⁸ India’s 2017 nomination dossier for World Heritage status explains the name as that of its chief sculptor, Ramappa.⁹ None of the older sources consulted here gives that explanation, so it should be treated as tradition.

The enclosure

G. Yazdani, superintendent of archaeology in Hyderabad State,¹⁰ published a detailed description in 1922.¹¹ The main temple stands inside a low, massive wall about 9 feet high.¹¹¹² The wall runs 272 feet east to west and 259 feet north to south.¹¹¹² Its huge, closely fitted facing stones are laid without mortar around an earth core.¹¹¹²

The enclosure has entrances on the east and west.¹² Inside the eastern entrance are the ruins of the Nandi pavilion, decorated with friezes of elephants and musicians.¹² Its great Nandi bull had been moved into the temple’s eastern porch.¹² Three smaller shrines stand in the same enclosure.¹³

The department made the temple group at Ghanpur, eight miles away, known in 1932–33.¹⁴ It has a main temple on the same plan and a similar enclosure wall.¹⁴ Its black-stone bracket figures were found “quite identical” with those of Palampet.¹⁴ See Ghanpur Temples.

The temple

The temple is cruciform (cross-shaped) in plan and rests on a platform about 6 feet high.¹²⁶ The platform leaves a walkway about ten feet wide around the building.¹²⁶ From it pilgrims could see the carved panels on its outer walls.¹²⁶ Porches open to the east, north and south, and the sanctum lies on the west.¹²

The main hall is 41 feet square.² At its centre four richly carved pillars enclose a square space, which Yazdani took to be the place for singers and musicians.² Eight small cells for images line the hall.² The square sanctum holds a linga (stone emblem of Shiva) on a high pedestal of black basalt.²

Stone and brick

The walls are of pinkish sandstone, while the pillars, door frames and figure sculpture are of a much harder black stone, polished to a high finish.¹⁵ The 2021 evaluation by ICOMOS, UNESCO’s advisory body on monuments, identifies the hard stones as granite and dolerite.⁸

The tower (shikhara) over the sanctum is built of light, spongy bricks.² Yazdani thought the builders avoided stone there on purpose, to reduce the weight on the building.² Henry Cousens noted in 1900 that the bricks were moulded to suit the design.¹⁶

ICOMOS calls them “floating bricks” and also describes a foundation laid on a firmly packed bed of sand.¹⁷ The nomination presented this as a Kakatiya technique against earthquakes.¹⁷ Parabrahma Sastry describes the tower as having four storeys, while ICOMOS gives five.⁶¹⁷

Sculpture

The temple is best known for its bracket figures, which spring from the shoulders of the outer pillars and seem to hold up the projecting eaves.² Yazdani counted twelve life-size female figures in polished black stone, and the rest are vyalis (mythical lions) standing on elephant heads.¹²² He thought the women’s faces stiff but admired their hands and their floral and animal carving.¹²² ICOMOS counts 38 bracket figures, including twelve madanikas (maidens).¹⁸

Inside, the ceilings, architraves (beams over the pillars) and the four central pillars are densely carved.¹⁹ Yazdani applied to them Meadows Taylor’s remark on another Deccan temple: “No chased work in gold or silver could possibly be finer”.¹⁹ Scenes of Krishna with the gopis (cowherd women) recur throughout the temple, and Ganesha appears dancing on an architrave.¹⁹

Parabrahma Sastry notes a view of dance scholars about the dancers carved on Kakatiya temples.²⁰ In their view these dancers show the regional styles described in the Nrittaratnavali, a treatise on dance by Ganapatideva’s general Jaya.²⁰

The style

Yazdani regarded the temple as “the full development of the Medieval Deccan style”.¹⁹ James Fergusson had called this style “Chalukyan”, and Yazdani suggested “Dekhani” as a more neutral name.¹⁹

Henry Cousens surveyed Chalukyan architecture in 1926.²¹ He chose a pillar from a temple at Ramappa lake to illustrate “extreme decoration”.²¹ He remarked that in such work it was “the workmanship and beautiful patterns used rather than the scheme of distribution that pleases most”.²¹

Cousens also wrote of the figure brackets that once adorned the outer pillars of many Chalukyan porches.²² He noted that they were usually dancing women, but were “sometimes in the form of rampant lions as on the temples at Ramappa lake”.²²

Conservation and World Heritage

The temple was long hard to reach and little studied.¹¹ Yazdani noted that Cousens had given it only about twenty lines.¹¹ In 1927–28 the Archaeological Department of Hyderabad State carried out special repairs because seeping water was damaging it.²³

The work continued in 1928–29.²⁴ G. Yazdani explained that the temple had been built without proper foundations on soft alluvial soil (soil laid down by rivers).²⁴ It had sunk unevenly, and this threw its walls out of plumb, broke lintels and brackets, and disturbed the floor and the ceiling panels.²⁴

Rainwater soaking into the foundations was the main cause.²⁴ So the department did these works:²⁴

• a band of cement concrete was laid along the plinth on all sides²⁴
• a drain was built on the walkway round the temple²⁴
• broken lintels were propped with steel beams and masonry²⁴
• a hidden steel frame was proposed to support the leaning walls of the tower²⁴

The department reported in 1932–33 that the repairs to the Palampet group were still going on.²⁵ ICOMOS records that the temple has been maintained since 1914.²⁶ A campaign in 1931 put fallen ornaments back in their original positions.²⁶ ICOMOS also notes that slow loss of sand from the foundation was the main threat to the structure.²⁶

The World Heritage Committee inscribed the property in 2021, as the Kakatiya Rudreshwara (Ramappa) Temple, Telangana, under criteria (i) and (iii).³ It described the temple as a masterpiece of the Kakatiya style of temple architecture and an exceptional testimony to the dynasty.³

Footnotes

1. L. D. Barnett (ed.), Inscriptions at Palampet and Uparpalli (1919), p. v (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

2. Yazdani, The Temples at Palampet (1922), p. 176. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

3. UNESCO World Heritage Committee, Decision 44 COM 8B.12 (2021) (whc.unesco.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Barnett, Inscriptions at Palampet and Uparpalli (1919), p. 2 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩²

5. Barnett, Inscriptions at Palampet and Uparpalli (1919), pp. 10–11 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩

6. P. V. Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 301. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

7. Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 205. ↩ ↩²

8. ICOMOS, Rudreshwara (Ramappa) Temple (India), No 1570: Evaluation (2021), p. 40 (whc.unesco.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³

9. Archaeological Survey of India, Nomination Dossier: Rudreshwara (Ramappa) Temple, Palampet (2017), p. 19 (whc.unesco.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩

10. Annual Report of the Archaeological Department of His Highness the Nizam’s Dominions, 1915-16 (1917), Government review, PDF p. 6 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩

11. G. Yazdani, The Temples at Palampet, Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India 6 (1922), p. 174. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

12. Yazdani, The Temples at Palampet (1922), p. 175. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²

13. Yazdani, The Temples at Palampet (1922), pp. 178–179. ↩

14. Annual Report … 1932–33 (1935), pp. 53–54 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³

15. Yazdani, The Temples at Palampet (1922), p. 179. ↩

16. Henry Cousens, Lists of Antiquarian Remains in His Highness the Nizam’s Territories (1900), p. 49. ↩

17. ICOMOS, Evaluation (2021), p. 41 (whc.unesco.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³

18. ICOMOS, Evaluation (2021), p. 41. ↩

19. Yazdani, The Temples at Palampet (1922), p. 177. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

20. Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 303. ↩ ↩²

21. Henry Cousens, The Chalukyan Architecture of the Kanarese Districts (1926), pp. 22–23 and fig. 2 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³

22. Cousens, Chalukyan Architecture of the Kanarese Districts (1926), p. 102 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩²

23. Annual Report of the Archaeological Department of H.E.H. the Nizam’s Dominions, 1927-28 (1929), p. 13 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩

24. G. Yazdani (Director), Annual Report of the Archaeological Department of H.E.H. the Nizam’s Dominions, 1928–29 (1931), pp. 12–13 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

25. Annual Report of the Archaeological Department of H.E.H. the Nizam’s Dominions, 1931–32 and 1932–33 (1935), government review of the report for 1932–33 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩

26. ICOMOS, Evaluation (2021), p. 42 (whc.unesco.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³