Karnataka

Karnataka is the southwestern Indian state whose religious history is best described as a long argument about the relation between the individual soul and God, conducted in the same region by people who knew one another's positions.

Sringeri, in the Western Ghats, is one of the monastic seats traditionally attributed to Adi Shankara, whose Advaita Vedanta holds that the soul and the ultimate reality are not two things. At Udupi on the coast, Madhvacharya in the thirteenth century taught the opposite: a Dvaita or dualist Vedanta in which the difference between God, souls and the world is real and permanent, with a devotional practice centred on Krishna. The Udupi temple's system of rotating administration between eight monasteries founded by his disciples has run continuously since.

Alongside the Vedanta schools, the twelfth-century movement associated with Basava rejected the entire apparatus: temple, priesthood, caste and pilgrimage. Its followers, called Virashaiva or Lingayat, wear a small linga on the body as the only image required, bury rather than cremate their dead, and produced a body of short Kannada prose poems, the vachanas, written by men and women of many occupations. Whether Lingayats are a Hindu community or a separate religion has been argued politically as well as theologically, and remains open.

Karnataka also holds three of the most complete architectural records of Indian religion, and each preserves a different thing.

Badami, Aihole and Pattadakal, in the north of the state, carry Chalukya work of the sixth to eighth centuries in which northern and southern temple styles stand side by side in the same complexes, sometimes on adjacent plinths. That makes the site a reference point for how the two great regional traditions of Hindu temple architecture separated, and it holds Jain and Shaiva shrines cut into the same cliffs.

Belur and Halebidu carry Hoysala temples of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, worked in a soft stone that hardens on exposure and allowed carving of extraordinary density, with figures, narrative friezes and lathe-turned pillars covering almost every surface.

Hampi is the ruined capital of the Vijayanagara empire, sacked in 1565 and largely abandoned, which is why so much survives unmodified. Temples, markets, water systems, palace platforms and elephant stables stand across several square kilometres of boulder-strewn landscape, and the Virupaksha temple at its centre is still in worship, so the site is simultaneously an archaeological zone and a working pilgrimage destination.

At Shravanabelagola stands the Jain colossus of Bahubali, a single monolithic figure some seventeen metres high carved around 981, which is anointed in a ceremony held roughly once every twelve years.