The idea of a type is a fundamental one in Indian temple architecture. Forms of shrine long established in timber construction, each with a distinctive roof shape, were transformed and monumentalised in masonry. In both the Nāgara tradition of northern India and the Drāviḍa of the south, particular versions of these earlier shrines became the basic varieties of temple, defined by the exterior form or image of the walls surrounding the sanctum together with the superstructure above it. Aedicularity was a development from this typological thinking, as new temple forms were created by combining established ones. Aedicules, or representations of shrines, appeared as niches in walls; more radically, a shrine image would be placed at the top of a new, more developed form; or an image of one form would emerge from the centre of another form. Many developed compositions were conceived entirely as a multitude of aedicules embedded within the body of the temple and, in the more complex cases, interpenetrating. That, at least, is a way of seeing things for which I have long argued.1

The Kashmiri temple form has its own architectural ‘language’,2 as distinct from the Nāgara as from the Drāviḍa. This chapter will examine the characteristics of this form and show how the concepts of type and aedicule help to understand how temples of this form were designed. It will briefly discuss origins, and
consider the role that wooden temples must have played both in the genesis of the tradition and its continuing life. I shall argue that the chapters on temples in the Viṣṇudharmottara Purāṇa are substantially concerned with this form, and that they give clues to types of Kashmiri temple for which we have no surviving examples, and insight into an ambition of this tradition to build impressive, centralised, multi-shrine complexes. The chapter will end with a survey of how the image of this temple form lived on for some time in the carved woodwork of the western Himalayas, perhaps reflecting wooden temples of that region that themselves followed the Kashmiri tradition.

• 1. For example, see Hardy 2007: chapter 1, 10–17.
• 2. see Hardy 2012 for a proposed distinction between ‘language’ (kit of parts), ‘mode’ (general shape and way of combining the parts), and ‘type’ (specific composition).