Prakara Expansion Under South Indian Patronage

Multiple concentric prakaras became an especially elaborate feature of temple planning under South Indian dynastic patronage from the medieval period onward, as successive ruling dynasties added new outer walls, gateways and halls around older temple cores rather than replacing them, so a major temple's plan today often preserves a physical record of centuries of accumulated royal and community investment layered outward from its original sanctum.

The temple complexes at Srirangam and Madurai are frequently cited as the type's most developed examples, each enclosing an entire town-like precinct of shrines, halls, tanks and streets within their outermost prakara wall, built up over many centuries under multiple dynasties including the Cholas, Pandyas, Vijayanagara rulers and Nayakas. This pattern of outward expansion through added prakaras and their associated gopuram gateways, rather than upward expansion of the sanctum tower itself, is part of why the tallest structures in many great South Indian temple complexes are the gateway gopurams on an outer prakara rather than the vimana over the actual garbhagriha, a reversal of emphasis, from the sanctum tower to the outer boundary, that distinguishes the later South Indian temple-building tradition from the more sanctum-centered emphasis typical of earlier Nagara temple planning in the north.