Badami, Aihole & Pattadakal

These three villages on the Malaprabha river are where South Indian temple architecture was worked out. The Chalukyas of Vatapi, from Pulakeshin I in 543 CE, made Badami their capital, Aihole their workshop and Pattadakal their coronation ground, and the experiments they ran fed both the northern nagara and southern dravida traditions. Badami's four cave temples are cut into a red sandstone cliff above the Agastya lake and reached by a stair: Cave 1 for Shiva, with an eighteen-armed Nataraja whose arms combine into eighty-one dance poses, Caves 2 and 3 for Vishnu, the third dated by inscription to 578 CE, and a small Jain cave above.

Across the water the Bhutanatha temples stand with their feet in the tank, and the cliffs are now one of India's finest sport-climbing crags. Aihole, thirty-four kilometres on, scatters more than a hundred temples through fields and courtyards, including the apsidal Durga temple with its colonnaded ambulatory and the Meguti hill temple, whose 634 CE inscription by the poet Ravikirti records Pulakeshin II's victory over Harsha. Pattadakal, a UNESCO site since 1987, gathers ten temples in a single enclosure; the Virupaksha, built around 740 by Queen Lokamahadevi to mark her husband's defeat of the Pallavas, borrowed its plan from the Kailasanatha at Kanchipuram and became in turn the model for the Kailasa temple at Ellora.