“Do not live in a town without a temple,” says the Tamil epigraph with which Gods on the Move begins. In the Tamil region of South India, large temple complexes can be recognized today in almost every small and big city by their red-and-white striped walls; tall, gaudily painted gateways (gopuras); and a bustle of pilgrims, beggars, and flower-sellers. Branfoot’s interest in the subject was piqued by marketplaces in Cairo, as he states in the acknowledgments. The book explains how and why temples became similarly pervasive spaces for public gathering in the Tamil region; it does so by weaving an art-historical narrative that extends from the original use of temples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the current traffic of devotees who throng these sites for religious services and festivals.

The guiding metaphor for Branfoot’s narrative is a journey through architecture undertaken by a devotee as well as an art historian. Maps and color reproductions direct the reader to the subject before the text begins, and the book’s first chapter, “Approaching the Tamil Temple,” encourages imaginatively entering these religious places as worshippers. The remaining seven chapters move deftly from a tourist’s view to scholarly interpretations, based on the author’s training in architectural-design history and museum experience in England, a sophisticated Sanskrit vocabulary for identifying formal features of Indian temples, ease with the Tamil language, and extensive travels in Tamilnadu.

According to Branfoot, “the South Indian temple is a processional space not only for devotees going in to greet the deity, but also for the deities themselves to come out during festivals” (163). The observation is not new, drawing from extensive literature on South Indian temple cities mentioned in the bibliography. But Branfoot’s sharp design sense brings architecture to life, and his ability to combine fieldwork with detailed visual and formal analysis of buildings distinguishes his story. Readers learn that the visual language of stone temples provides the basic vocabulary for various permanent and ephemeral structures. Thus, during festival processions, when wooden carts modeled on stone shrines are pulled through temple-shaped gopuras, devotees get a telescoped vision of heavenly mansions unfolding before their eyes.

Whereas existing literature focuses on individual temple cities, Branfoot attends to the whole region, showing the creation of a deliberate regional awareness in Tamilnadu through temple patronage. The argument begins, in chapter 2, with a broad, geopolitical perspective of South India, describing the rise of the Vijayanagara empire in the northerly, Deccan plateau region in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the formation of a loose network of Nayakas (warrior leaders) in Tamilnadu, and the independence of the Tamil Nayakas from their Vijayanagara overlords in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The power shift is marked by the creation of an architectural, linguistic, and mythic past of the “Tamil country” through expansion of old and construction of new temple complexes. While such complexes originated in the eleventh century under the Chola dynasty and reached a high point in the Vijayanagara empire, the book’s contention is that their particular, urban shape belongs only to Tamilnadu of the Nayaka period. A detailed description of architecture is aimed at distinguishing the Nayaka typology. Unlike Vijayanagara’s linear, processional spaces, Nayaka complexes were planned as a city within a city, containing a principal shrine at the center of a nested series of rectangular compounds with streets encircling them, and spaces filled with secondary shrines, detached pavilions, and hallways (mandapas), as well as tanks and a marketplace, that staged a confluence of the human and the divine worlds. As gods residing in one complex appeared in another, their journey created a divine network that mimicked the Nayaka confederacy and mapped a sacred geography for pilgrims in the Tamil region.

Chapter 3 elaborates on regional integration at these sites through the figure of a worshipper, from whose position Branfoot walks the reader through various complexes. The orchestration of the worshipper’s journey from the outside toward the shrine is important for Branfoot, since it counters a pervasive bias in architectural history whereby temples serve as an architectural representation of cosmic creation in the shrine’s core, which is conveyed on the temple’s exterior through a radiating projection of walls, figural sculpture, and multiplying stories of the superstructure. While Branfoot does not completely reject the cosmogonic view (see chapter 4), he criticizes it here as being esoteric and technical, relating to a “non-dualistic cosmology” of India’s ancient texts, the Vedas and the Upanishads, long before temples. He favors instead a more contemporary description of temples as cities and palaces of gods in Hindu mythological (Purana) texts, which conforms them to the image of a lay worshipper.

If the narrative has so far guided readers as worshippers into the complex, chapter 4 reverses the traffic and examines the temple form as a radiating architectural expression of the manifestation of the enshrined divinity. Branfoot explains that the Nayaka temples continue the formal and conceptual framework of all South Indian temples, basing his analysis on a long scholarly lineage ranging from James Fergusson’s foundational study, The Rock-cut Temples of India (1845), to Adam Hardy’s more recent systematization of the South Indian temple form (Adam Hardy, The Temple Architecture of India, Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons, 2007). Key to Branfoot’s understanding is what Hardy calls the “aedicular character of Indian temple architecture,” which Branfoot ultimately relates to Fergusson’s insight that “everywhere . . . in India, architectural decoration is made up of small models of large buildings” (88). Fergusson’s oft-quoted line, as well as the Latin term “aedicule” for the primary unit of Indian temple architecture, derive from John Summerson’s 1950 discussion of the “little shelter” in Roman and medieval architecture (John Summerson, Heavenly Mansions and Other Essays on Architecture, New York: Scribner, 1950), which Hardy acknowledges but Branfoot does not. Michael Meister points out in a review of Hardy’s book that the Sanskrit term, kuta (hut), partly comparable to Summerson’s aedicule, offers scholars a rich understanding of the basic decorative units as well as a grasp of the formal, “Kutina,” logic of Indian temple architecture (Michael W. Meister review of Adam Hardy, The Temple Architecture of India, 2007, caa.reviews, 23 April 2008 [click here for review]). The avoidance of these key terms and their conceptual resonance in favor of the Latin idea is unfortunate in a chapter that insists on approaching the temple form systematically from the point of view of their Indian makers and users.

The remaining chapters describe the urban complex as the sacred domain of the presiding deity. Chapter 5 attends to festival processions, when gods move out of shrines and “actively see” their human subjects. Processions originated during the Chola period, but the Nayaka idea required a spread-out urban design, often including an enlarged complex, more gopuras, elaborately carved mandapas, as well as the construction of lakes and tanks some distance away from the complex. While Branfoot limits himself to Tamilnadu, it is worth recalling that Tamil festivals closely compare with contemporary Krishna worship in north and east India, in which gods were equally treated as living, breathing, and desiring figures for whom performance spaces were created, including water tanks to “cool” them after journey and lakes for sailing pleasure boats (see Amit Ambalal, Krishna as Shrinathji: Rajasthani Paintings from Nathadwara, Ahmedabad and New York: Mapin, 1987; and Pika Ghosh, Temple of Love: Architecture and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Bengal, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).

Chapter 6 examines a unique genre of composite columns that evolved to decorate mandapas during the Nayaka period. These columns originated as granite monoliths in the Vijayanagara period but were given an unusually dramatic appearance only by the Nayakas. Large equestrian warriors and rearing, composite animals (vyalas) along with mythological narratives and royal portraits spring forth into three-dimensional sculpture, which Branfoot poetically calls “expanding forms.” The phrase overstates his case by explaining sculpture through cosmological views on columns in ancient India and myths of an expanding and splitting universe (178–180). More useful is Branfoot’s reading of motifs in relation to contemporary history. Equestrian warriors connect to militarism in the Vijayanagara and Nayaka periods, as well as maritime trade for Middle Eastern horses through the ports of Kanara in western India. Virabhadra, a fierce form of Shiva popular in the northern boundary of Tamilnadu, reflects the migration of Telugu-speaking warriors from that area into the Nayaka region. Kuravanci, a dance-drama relating to bird-catchers, indicates the inclusion of marginalized people within the Nayaka polity. It is unfortunate that this rich material mostly suggests “great sculptural skill and confidence in the stone medium” (205). In the myriad details of individual sculpture, readers lose the overall sense of the architectural space in which these visual representations were interrelated. In part, this may be the function of a conventional view that treats a mandapa as if it were a museum display of individualized objects, and in part it may be the effect of imprecise terminology employed for visual analysis. The discussion of dance-dramas and mythology as “literature” surely promotes the practice of iconography, but it precludes analysis of these Nayaka columns as part of a new theater for staging myth, folklore, and ritual and social performance during seasonal festivals, demanding a design and use of sculpture that differs from their Vijayanagara prototypes as well as frontal icons built into wall niches in earlier temples.

Chapter 7 augments the limited view of sculpture by focusing on the typology of “royal portraits” that greet visitors and address deities from their position on composite columns. Relating their iconography to earlier dikpalas (guardians of quarters) and donors playing gods in mythological scenes, Branfoot convincingly argues that portrait ceases to stand simply as a sculptural reminder of living kings, serving instead as a semi-divine “royal presence” between gods and devotees. The visual rhetoric makes the Nayaka kings increasingly acquire a divine status, while deities are made dependent on kings. As temples and royal courts merge, deities hold courts like Nayaka rulers, and affirm their physical presence by moving about in royal processions.

The conclusion returns to the richness and vibrancy of Nayaka inventions by describing the ongoing life of South Indian temples in the modern world. Renovation continued in South India after the eighteenth century under the Maratha kings of Tanjavur, the Setupatis of Ramnad, and when the Nattukkottai Chettiars merchant-traders gain prominence during the British colonial rule. Today, temples not only continue to attract worshippers to them, providing rich material for the ethnographer, but their architectural vocabulary also continues in secular buildings in Tamil cities. Also, unlike any other region of India, the continuing patronage of temples in Tamilnadu promotes training of architects and sculptors who offer their traditional craft for the construction of new Hindu temples for an affluent community of South Asian immigrants all over the world. Branfoot’s discussion explains why diaspora temples tend to have a “South Indian” look about them.

While colored plates in the beginning, along with black-and-white reproductions and line drawings coordinated with the text, make the book accessible to a general reader as well as a scholar of sacred architecture, the imagined audience for the book is an undergraduate student of architectural design. Lucid explanation of technical terms is intended “as a way to make sense of these complicated structures . . . for any period of the Tamil Dravida tradition, and not just the 16th and 17th centuries” (90). In creating teachable moments, Branfoot sometimes slips from the heuristic trope of a Hindu worshipper into the subject-position of a Western art historian, as when he compares a Hindu temple to an Islamic mosque (45). Sentences, such as the gopuras are “almost redundantly large in many cases” (55), also indicate a modern architect’s problem with ancient Indian temples rather than a pilgrim’s sense of wonder at the heavenly abodes of gods. Nevertheless, such inconsistencies also convey Branfoot’s enthusiasm to teach and communicate his fascination with the Tamil region and passion for temple architecture, providing foils for debates on interpretative and rhetorical strategies in upper-level art-history seminars.