| Summary: | "The Kailāsanātha temple complex in Kāñcipuram, in southeastern India, was constructed at the turn of the eighth century CE by the royal family of the Pallava dynasty, which claimed authority over the northern Tamil region from the sixth to the ninth century. The cluster of buildings, which enjoyed an accidental mix of intervention and neglect for fourteen centuries that left them little altered, provides a rare opportunity for visitors to look the ancient past in the face. This remarkable study, which emphasizes how Kailāsanātha is experienced, shows how the site reveals to the discerning observer a precisely coordinated set of complementary dyads between reincarnation and transcendence, royalty and divinity, word and image. Figures of Śiva, goddesses, and other deities that face north articulate renunciation and dominance in deep shadows. Southward-facing versions of those same deities are interactive, even flirtatious, gentled by fecund energies and bathed in warm light. Together they make visible complementary, intertwined flows of existence. Pairing the royal and the divine as well as the childless and the fecund, sculptures of Śiva Śomaskanda with his wife and chubby son permeate the east-west axis of the temple complex, nestled in its most intimate spaces, where they are side by side, face to face, or back to back with royal couples who have no son. The direction in which the visitor circumambulates through the space also affects how opposite-yet-identical features are revealed through architecture, inscriptions, and sculpture. Counterclockwise viewing, though now proscribed, proves especially rewarding around the compound's central shrine (vimāna), where verbal and visual narratives merge for those initiated into Tantric knowledge"--
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