Simple pillared halls attached to a shrine predate the fully developed Hindu temple, but the mandapa as a formalized, often multiplied element of temple planning matured alongside the garbhagriha and shikhara or vimana during the same medieval building boom, from roughly the seventh century onward, that produced the great regional schools of Nagara, Dravida and Vesara temple architecture.
In North Indian temples the mandapa is typically a single hall or a modest sequence of two or three, proportioned to complement rather than overwhelm the height of the shikhara behind it. South Indian temple complexes, by contrast, often expanded the mandapa into an entire architectural program in its own right: the thousand-pillared halls built under later Vijayanagara and Nayaka patronage, such as those at Madurai and Srirangam, are vast independent mandapas whose scale rivals or exceeds that of the sanctum tower itself, reflecting the temple's growing role as a civic and economic center as much as a place of individual worship. This same hall form, adapted and renamed, also appears widely beyond formal temple architecture, in wedding mandapas built for a single ceremony, extending the same term to a bounded, purposeful ritual enclosure far beyond the permanent temple building.