Pika Ghosh’s Temple to Love: Architecture and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Bengal breaks new ground in its exploration of Hindu temple architecture. This deeply researched, well-argued work considers a radically new form of temple design that was first consolidated in mid-seventeenth century Vishnupur, capital of the Malla dynasty of western Bengal. Ghosh weaves together histories of architecture, religion, culture, and sacred poetic literature to explore the genesis and early development of the temple form proclaimed by its patrons navaratna ratnam—in her translation, “new bejeweled temple”—in an inscription on the mid-seventeenth-century Shyam Ray Temple at Vishnupur. Ghosh concentrates on the formative period spanning the late sixteenth century through the middle decades of the eighteenth when Vishnupur, the Malla royal and sacred center, and the Mallabhumi, the territories under that dynasty’s control, were embellished with numerous new, experimental Ratna-style temples.

These brick-built structures, with their curved roofs and tower and dome-like pavilions, were unprecedented within the history of Hindu sacred building and unique to the region of Bengal. So too, the Ratna temple’s distinctive cladding of (once painted) terra cotta tiles carved with decorative motifs, sacred narratives, and scenes of contemporary material culture was in contrast to the stone-carved surfaces of traditional Bengali temple architecture.

Early in the book, Ghosh investigates how this innovative style has been framed within narratives of South Asian architectural history. She reckons with the presuppositions of an architectural history inherited from colonial antecedents that was based on communal categorizations of style (i.e., Hindu- or Muslim-style structures) and relatively inattentive to the stylistic nuances of regional vernacular architecture. It is by challenging this inheritance and its categories at the outset that she can then position the Ratna temple in its proper context as a hybrid, regional production created in a period of vibrant cultural exchange.

For Ghosh, the Gaudiya ethos of devotional, congregational worship provides the framework for the Ratna temple’s innovative plan and design. The Gaudiya sect, a form of Vaishnava bhakti (devotion) centered on Krishna and Radha, was initiated by the charismatic Bengali religious leader Chaitanya (1486–1533) and propagated by his disciples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among Chaitanya’s third-generation followers was Srinivas Acharya, who brought Gaudiya teachings back to Bengal from the Krishnaite pilgrimage center of the Vraj just north of Agra. The most significant of Srinivas Acharya’s converts to the new sect was Vir Hambir, the earliest recorded of the Malla kings. With this royal conversion the Malla court and much of the local population followed suit, and the dynasty became the leading Bengali patron of temples built for the Gaudiya sect.

Gaudiya practices featured group devotional singing (or kirtan), musical accompaniment, the chanting of Krishna’s names, and expansive arati, the traditional offerings to the deity at dusk. Such devotions were congregational in contrast to the more exclusive brahmanical ritual that had been enacted for centuries by priests within the sanctums of Hindu temples. As such, Gaudiya temples were designed to accommodate large numbers of congregants.

The Gaudiya contribution to the Ratna temple form can therefore be seen in the exterior walled compounds surrounding the temples, which were designed to accommodate crowds of worshippers before the temple. It is also evinced in the temple’s crowning pavilions, which Ghosh argues once functioned as open, upper shrines that could be viewed from the temple compound below. These upper shrines, reached by internal stairways, allowed congregants to take darshan (auspicious viewing) of the sacred images of Krishna and Radha, which had been brought up from lower enclosed sanctums to be temporarily displayed during festivals.

However, Gaudiya Vaishnavism was not the sole determinant of the Ratna-style temple’s design. Also critical to its fruition, according to Ghosh, was the Malla court’s search for an architectural identity in an environment where Indic and Islamic cultures had mingled for well over two centuries. In this context Ghosh points to the “shared forms,” as she terms them, of Hindu visual cultures and the Bengali Islamic architecture patronized by the Husain Shahi Dynasty (r. 1494–1539). This sharing was accomplished as Malla designers appropriated formal and symbolic aspects of brick-built Bengali Sultanate period mosques and mausolea and blended them with features culled from the region’s traditional Hindu temple architecture. The most significant of those appropriated features were the gently curved roofs, fronted by prominent curving cornices, that covered Sultanate communal structures. Ghosh points to such roofs as a Sultanate strategy to forge a regionally appropriate architecture by adapting the vernacular curved thatch-roof huts (chala) of the Bengali village, but in the more permanent materials and larger scale required for mosques and tombs. The Malla designers, in turn, adapted the Sultanate curved roof and cornice for the Ratna temple’s lower story, which was typically squared in plan, and often gave the roof even greater expressive power through a more sculpted, extreme curvature. For Ghosh, the use of these Sultanate forms is indicative of the Malla dynasty’s political pragmatism, its strategies for invoking the power and cultural reach of those influential, albeit departed, regional Sultanates through their architectural styles. Moreover, architectural references to regional Sultanate precedents allowed the Mallas the symbolic visual gesture of distancing themselves from the Mughals, the major contemporary Islamic power in north India, whose authority over Bengal was still tenuous at the inception of Malla rule. While Mughal architectural styles had been adapted for Rajput Hindu temples such as the magisterial, late sixteenth-century Govind Dev in Vrindaban, near the Mughal capital of Agra, the Mallas rejected such stylistic nods to imperial political affiliation in favor of more regional, localized references.

In concert with their adaptations from Bengali Sultanate building, Malla designers also drew upon traditional Bengali Nagara-style temple architecture (regionally known as Rekha Deul) for the Ratna-style temple’s hybrid design. The Nagara-style temple, the prevalent Hindu (and Jain) temple form in north and central India prior to the sixteenth century, was established almost a millennium before the advent of Malla rule. Single-storied and largely stone-built, the Nagara temple’s most prominent physical feature was the shikara, a curving, tapered, tower-like superstructure rising above the sanctum. For Malla patrons, the venerable Nagara style possessed its own sacral authority and sectarian associations. As such, it was important for the court’s designers to assimilate aspects of it into their new temple style. The most apparent Nagara contribution to Ratna design is seen in the treatment of its tower-like upper shrines, which at temples like the Shayam Ray Madan Gopal in Vishnupur and the Gokul Chand in Gokulnagar mimic the curved, tapering form of the regional Nagara shikara, replete with stepped horizontal setbacks leading up to a crowning amalaka.

The book benefits from Ghosh’s considerable field research in the Mallabhumi region of Ratna-style temple sites, some preserved as national landmarks, others still under worship, and yet others ruined and abandoned. An architectural historian, Ghosh closely examines each building’s plan, key features, and decorative schemes in order to discern use and stylistic evolution. She provides clear, well-designed plans and numerous photographic illustrations, mostly her own, which help to flesh out the temples’ use and formal development.

With its concurrent references to the role of Gaudiya practice, the Malla’s political and cultural positioning, and the Ratna temple’s stylistic development, Temple to Love deepens our understanding of this innovative style even as it compels reconsideration of its assessment by previous scholarship. This text, one of the few studies exclusively devoted to the Ratna temple style, follows upon David McCutchion’s seminal, decades-earlier work, which was edited and augmented by George Michell after that scholar’s untimely death in 1972 (David McCutchion, Brick Temples of Bengal: From the Archives of David McCutchion, ed., George Michell, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). Ghosh brings further depth and detailed analysis to this topic through her original perceptions—which diverge from McCutchion’s—of the temple’s form, usage, and debt to Sultanate prototypes. Her work also broadens the discussion about these temples and anchors it within more contemporary art-historical discourse by problematizing the Ratna style’s reception within the primary narratives of South Asian architectural history. Ghosh’s work joins that of other contemporary scholars working on Bengali architecture of the Sultanate period and beyond, notably that of Perween Hasan. It should also be considered along with works such as Margaret Case’s edited volume on the Govind Dev temple in Vrindaban, which broadly considers the artistic, social, and economic histories of that prominent late sixteenth-century Gaudiya structure (Margaret H. Case, ed., Govindadeva: A Dialogue in Stone, New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts, 1996). Similar processes of cultural adaptation from Islamic courts—Mughal in the case of the Govind Dev—and visual hybridity mark the designs of this structure and the later Ratna-style temples; as such, these books pair well together.

Ghosh’s work on Vishnupur as a new Vrindavan, the topic of her text’s final chapter, is an important complement to studies of the Braj itself, from Charlotte Vaudeville’s “Braj, Lost and Found” to Alan W. Entwistle’s Braj: Centre of Krishna Pilgrimage (Charlotte Vaudeville, “Braj, Lost and Found,” Indo-Iranian Journal 18 (1976): 195–213; Alan W. Entwistle, Braj: Centre of Krishna Pilgrimage, Groningen: E. Forsten, 1987). Finally, Ghosh’s goal in this volume of questioning, nay exploding, problematic colonial communal constructs of South Asian visual culture joins that of Philip Wagoner on “Islamicization” at Vijayanagara, Thomas R. Metcalf on architecture of the Raj, and the works of Tapati Guha-Thakurta, among others (Philip B. Wagoner, “’Sultan Among Hindu Kings’: Dress, Titles and the Islamicization of Hindu Culture at Vijayanagara,” Journal of Asian Studies 55, no. 5 [November 1996]: 851–80; Thomas R. Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989; Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India, Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004).

Ghosh’s text is well-suited to a number of audiences, especially students and scholars of South Asian architecture, for whom it provides a rich, carefully considered exploration of a relatively overlooked period and style. Of interest for this audience will be Ghosh’s timely assessment of the Ratna-style temple’s reception within histories of South Asian building. More broadly, her focus on the processes of cultural exchange and stylistic hybridity will engage those researching similar such topics in South Asian visual culture, particularly in the period of Sultanate and Mughal rule. Students of Bengali history will profit from the light this study sheds on the formation of the Malla kingdom, the patronage of its court, and the embellishment of its seat at Vishnupur. Finally, this book will be of value for students of Bengali Vaishnavism, particularly those interested in the Gaudiya sect’s development in that region during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

At the same time, Temple to Love could have benefited from a more attractive design to match the quality of Ghosh’s writing and images. Most jarring is the rendering of Ghosh’s black-and-white photographs. While her images are clear and strong, their printed quality, on the same matte paper stock as the text, is somewhat muddy, which does a disservice to them. One can compare these illustrations to those in the McCutchion/Michell text, which were printed on glossier stock and therefore have more clarity and presence. One final note: The McCutchion /Michell text, with its extensive listing of temples toward the end of the volume, serves as a pre-existing, exhaustive reference for the Ratna-style temple. Still, it would have been helpful as a handy reference for the reader if Ghosh had also included a listing or even short catalogue raisonné of the temples upon which her text focuses.

Ghosh’s research moves the study of Hindu temple architecture into new areas. These brick-built, terra cotta temples are chronologically “late” in the context of Hindu temple history’s primary narratives. They are centuries removed from the canonical authenticity of the “medieval” Nagara and Dravida traditions. Hybrid in style, their design appropriates aspects of Sultanate communal architecture, which has largely placed them outside of the discourse on Hindu temple architecture. Ghosh’s significant work serves to open up that discourse toward embracing formerly marginal, regional, and chronologically “awkward” productions as key documents in the continuing development of South Asian temple architecture.