The temple with no tower: eight centuries of damage and repair at Belur

The first thing people notice about the Chennakeshava temple at Belur is that it has no spire. The gopura at the gate has one, and it is tall and brick and unmistakable — but the temple itself, in the middle of the courtyard, is flat on top. Visitors assume ruin. It is not ruin. It is a decision, taken in the late nineteenth century, at the end of a very long argument between this building and history.

118 inscriptions

Historians have counted 118 inscriptions inside the complex, dated from 1117 CE to the eighteenth century. They are not decorative. They record the foundation, the grants made for upkeep, and — repeatedly — the repairs. Every time somebody put this temple back together they cut a record of it in stone, in the same way the people before them had. The result is a building that documents its own damage.

It began open

The original temple had no boundary wall. The hall stood open on all sides but the west, so that anyone on the terrace could see the carved pillars inside, and the terrace ran round the shrine as a path for circumambulation. Ballala II added a kitchen and a grain store in the south-east corner in 1175, and the stepped tank in the north-east corner in the same works.

Then, under Veera Ballala III (1292–1343), an officer called Somayya Danayaka built a high wall around the temple, added a wood-and-brick gateway with doors, and closed the open hall with perforated stone screens. That is a security programme, not an aesthetic one, and it tells you what the fourteenth century felt like from inside Belur. The screens darkened the interior enough that the carving inside became hard to see — a cost the builders accepted, because they let through enough light for darshan of the sanctum and kept people out.

The raids

The Hoysala capital was invaded and plundered in the early fourteenth century by Malik Kafur, commanding for Alauddin Khalji of the Delhi Sultanate. In 1326 a second Delhi army made Belur and Halebidu its target. In a raid under Muhammad bin Tughlaq (1324–1351) a general named Salar burned the gateway down.

Vijayanagara puts it back

The territory passed to the Vijayanagara Empire, and under Harihara II (1377–1404) the repairs came in a sequence you can date. Four granite pillars in 1381 — the four hand-cut ones inside the hall, holding up a damaged structure among forty-four lathe-turned ones. A gold-plated kalasa on a new tower above the sanctum in 1387. And in 1397, the seven-storey brick gopura that replaced the burned gateway and that you still walk under.

Vijayanagara also added shrines: Andal, Soumyanayaki, the lamp pillar at the entrance, the Rama and Narasimha shrines, and the Naganayakana mandapa. Some of them were built out of the salvaged stone of other temples destroyed nearby — which is to say the complex you walk round contains the wreckage of buildings that did not survive.

And then again

Vijayanagara itself fell to a coalition of the Deccan sultanates, and the premises were damaged again. Repairs are recorded in 1709, in 1717 and in 1736. In 1774 an officer of Hyder Ali, then the effective ruler on behalf of the Wadiyars, repaired it once more.

The decision

By the late nineteenth century the tower over the sanctum was collapsing again. The judgement made then was that it was better to take it down and save the levels beneath it than to leave it standing and risk the lot. It came down and was never replaced. According to Gerard Foekema, whose 1996 guide is the standard reference, the tower would have been a Bhumija form — a curvilinear north Indian type, uncommon in the south — rather than a star-plan spire following the shape of the shrine below it. The nearest thing to a picture of it is the tower over the small Soumyanayaki shrine in the same courtyard, which local tradition says is a miniature of it.

One more repair is worth naming. In 1935 the Mysore government and the Wadiyar dynasty funded a cleaning and restoration; the Chennigaraya shrine was rebuilt and new images of Ramanuja and Garuda installed. And, exactly as in 1175 and 1381 and 1397, they cut the record of it into the stone.

What it means when you are standing there

That a temple which has been sacked twice, walled once, screened over, gold-plated, burned, patched in three different centuries and finally decapitated is still in daily worship, more than nine hundred years after its first consecration, and was put on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2023. The missing tower is not the damage. It is the evidence of the care.