Badami, Aihole & Pattadakal

The town of Badami, the nearby villages of Aihole and Pattadakal in Malaprabha valley of central Karnataka, are celebrated for their magnificent rock-cut shrines and structural temples. These Hindu and Jain monuments are associated with the Early Chalukyas who reigned over this part of Deccan during 6th – 8th Centuries. Together these temples and shrines may be considered among the earliest, best preserved remnants of temple art in India.

On this day tour, we will get a glimpse of magnificent group of monuments in the Malaprabha valley, which stretches some 25 Kilometers along the Malaprabha river flowing in a northeasterly direction. Temple architecture in Badami, Aihole and Pattadakal is characterized by a remarkable variety of styles and construction techniques. This high concentration of multiple styles within confines of a limited zone like Malaprabha valley is to be found nowhere else in India. The Early Chalukya monuments bridge the transition from rock-cut excavation to free standing construction. Construction began with cave temples at Badami and Aihole built in mid 6th Century CE with large scale sculptural compositions on the walls and monolithic columns. Then moved to dravidian style structural temples in first half of 7th Century. The earliest example of dravidian style structural temple in all of South India is found in Aihole built in 634 CE. Though the dravidian style was a Early Chalukya invention it eventually spread across all of South India and since then got influenced by Cholas, Pallavas, Hoysalas, Gangas and Vijayanagara styles. Pattadakal is a unique meeting place of distinctive Dravida and Nagara building traditions of Southern and Northern India respectively. Not only are these discrete styles represented in temples built side by side, attributes of both these styles even came to be incorporated within individual monuments, resulting in a unique hybrid style.