Typologies are a dominant feature of the diverse Sanskrit treatises surviving from ancient and medieval India. Canonical texts on architecture, called Vastuśāstras, are no exception. They put forward elaborate schemes naming and classifying all kinds of settlements and buildings – palaces, houses, stables for horses or elephants, altars, and not least temples, the palaces of gods. That distinctive varieties and categories are central to the way in which Indian temple architecture was traditionally conceived is as evident in the architecture itself as in the texts that deal with it. Formal types are the very basis of temple design, both through variations and per- mutations of a given type, and through combinations of types in composite arrangements. This essay surveys the typologies presented in the texts as well those inherent in the temples, and in the process discusses the uses and limitations of the former for understanding the latter.

Both the texts and actual temples make clear that the formal types in question are types of shrine. While the overall planning of temples and temple groups or complexes does largely reflect typological ways of thinking, it is the vīmāna or prāsāda, the sanctum and its enclosing envelope, the dwelling and embodiment of the divinity, which is the central idea of a temple.

Surveying the shrine types in classical temple architecture across the landscape of India, one broad distinction is immediately apparent: the division that had crystallized by the seventh century AD between northern and southern traditions, the former typified by curved spires (śikharas), the latter by stepped, pyramidal towers. James Fergusson, a nineteenth-century pioneer of architectural history in India, labelled these respectively the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian styles (Fergusson 1876). Modern scholarship favours the terms Nāgara (literally ‘of the city’) and Drāviḍa (relating to the southern country).