Srirangam's New Antiquity: Negotiating the Hindu Temple's Divine and Historic Pasts in a Global Present

Hindu temples have been predominantly framed in architectural histories within teleological narratives of successive political occupations and stylistic developments ending with the eighteenth century British colonial period in India. As representative examples of Indian 'traditional' architecture, Hindu temples are understood as relevant and "authentic" mainly in pre-colonial periods. The spatial and temporal circumscription of Indian sacred architecture within essentially indigenous and pre-colonial boundaries is challenged and revised in this dissertation. The Ranganatha temple in Srirangam, marked as a representative example of seventeenth-eighteenth-century architecture in Indian art history, is reframed as a contemporary site. In doing so, I move beyond a rigid interpretation of its age-old tradition replicated in its contemporary moment, with a focus on how present-day practitioners actively revive and reinterpret 'traditional' modes even while propagating them as being "authentic" and "unchanging". Tradition is thus not seen as a precursor to, or defined only in terms of its opposition to, modernity. Srirangam's contemporary significance combines both its religious prominence as a divinely originated site and its historic role given by the colonial authors. It is framed as a site constituting layers of built spaces and discursive practices, which are mediated by present temple groups tracing varied lineages to the past. The temple's 'past' is not presented as a linear and singular trajectory to be retrieved by the historian. Rather, the past is seen as continually mobilized, reconstructed and negotiated in contemporary architectural, ritual, spatial, visual and narrative practices towards multiple self-representations and contestations over authority. This dissertation will subvert the static and all encompassing aerial view of Srirangam, established in early colonial histories, to identify the complexity created by its dynamic uses and significations; this is done by critically inserting recent ethnographic data into its study. Furthermore, the implied rootedness in the category of 'traditional', within which Srirangam is identified as essentially indigenous architecture, is overturned by looking at its global presence through the example of the Ranganatha temple in Pomona, North America. The architectural history of Srirangam is thus written from a revised perspective in this dissertation, in which discontinuities, multiplicities and ambiguities are emphasized rather than masked.