Tamil Heritage: Chalukyas of Badami, Aravind Venkatraman, 6th Sep 2014

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• published: 25 Feb 2015
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Chalukyas of Badami (Vatapi) are the pioneers of temple building with non-perishable materials in South India. Their contribution to our heritage is immense. Their work took inspiration from the Guptas initially, but they continued to define their own identity and also infuse the art from Pallavas and others, as the time progressed. Their cave temples in Badami predate the Pallava cave temples of Tamil Nadu. They also built the earliest structural temples in South India. Badami, Mahakuta, Pattadakkal and Aihole are close to one another and clustered together, making the most dense concentration of heritage sites in India. In this presentation, I would like to take you through a pictorial journey of these sites, also listing a bit of information that I have gathered and what I appreciate in them. This could be considered as a preview or trailer, and if it sparks an interest, we can plan a site seminar with necessary preparatory lectures and field visit. Aravind Venkatraman is a software professional and a serious culture enthusiast. Out of his passion we have an encyclopaedic documentation of hundreds of temples and thousands of sculptures indexed from across the country. He shares his photographs in Picasa at http://picasaweb.google.co.in/arvind.venkatraman, which has close to 100 albums. He likes to read both fiction and non-fiction, spends a lot of his time on the internet and has traveled widely, both within India and abroad.