Soft when they cut it: the soapstone that made Hoysala carving possible

The first question people ask at Belur is how anyone carved a fly on a fruit, forty feet up, in the twelfth century. Part of the answer is skill and part of it is patience, and a large part of it is the rock.

The material

Hoysala temples are built of chloritic schist, better known as soapstone or steatite. Its useful property is unusual: it is soft when it comes out of the ground, soft enough to be worked with fine tools at a scale that granite makes impossible, and it hardens over time as it is exposed to the atmosphere. A carver could cut detail into it that would take years in harder stone, and the finished work would then toughen where it stood.

The temple’s own department states that the stone for the Belur temples was quarried near Tumkur, about 200 km away, and that the shine is maintained by treating the stone with a chemical wash and wax polishing it roughly once every ten years. Two hundred kilometres of soapstone, moved by road that did not exist, to build a temple that took a century.

What it let them do

Everything the style is known for. The lathe-turned pillars in the hall at Belur — forty-eight of them, all but four turned rather than cut, and no two alike — are a soapstone trick; nobody has satisfactorily explained the lathe. The bracket figures with jewellery cut free of the stone, so that a necklace can be moved with a finger, are a soapstone trick. The horizontal wall bands, with hundreds of elephants each carved with a different expression, are only economically possible in a stone this workable.

It is also why the carving is shallow. Soapstone rewards fine incised detail rather than deep relief, and that is why the light matters so much at Belur: a low sun rakes across the surface and brings the bands out, and flat midday light erases them. It is the same reason photographs of these temples taken at noon look so disappointing.

And what it costs

Softness cuts both ways. Soapstone wears where hands touch it, which is why the lower bands within reach are smoother than the ones above them, and why the request not to touch the carvings is a conservation instruction rather than a formality. It also weathers, and it burns badly — the raids that damaged Belur and Halebidu did lasting harm partly because of what the material is.

The dynasty knew what it had. Wikipedia records, following the art historian S. Settar, that the Hoysalas deployed Western Chalukyan artists working in a tradition developed at Aihole, Badami and Pattadakal — people who already knew this stone. What changed at Belur was the ambition, not the material.