The Prakara As Temple Enclosure Wall

A prakara is an enclosure wall surrounding a Hindu temple, marking the boundary of the temple's sacred precinct and controlling access into the increasingly restricted zones that lead toward the garbhagriha at the center. A modest temple may have only a single prakara wall with one gateway, but larger South Indian temple complexes are frequently built with several concentric prakaras, one nested inside another, each ringed by its own wall and pierced by its own gateway, so a visitor moving toward the sanctum passes through a sequence of walls and thresholds rather than crossing a single boundary.

The space between successive prakara walls is not left empty; it typically holds subsidiary shrines dedicated to other deities associated with the main temple, pillared halls, ritual bathing tanks, administrative buildings and, in the largest complexes, market streets and residential quarters for temple staff, so the outermost prakara can enclose what functions as an entire small township built around and dependent on the temple at its center. Because each successive prakara marks a further degree of ritual restriction, the number and arrangement of a temple's prakara walls is one of the clearest physical indicators of both its historical scale and its importance within its regional tradition.