The Great Plateorm at Vijayanagara. Architecture and Sculpture

摘要

This volume is concerned with the massive tiered platform, square in plan and with flights of stairs prominently located on the west side, that stands at the centre of the medieval city of Vijayanagara in the Bellary District of the modern Indian state of Karnataka. This structure is presented here by a scholar who in recent decades has made a renowned name for herself in the study of aspects of South Indian culture, especially of the Vijayanagara period. In this publication she places this stepped and decorated platform - known colloquially as the Mahanavami Dibba - into a scholarly context. All future work on this large and enigmatic structure will need to be aware of this work. Here, in an authoritative but non-speculative presentation, the author describes all of the relief sculpture that is such a striking feature of the various sequences of friezes running around the building. She describes them block by block, as well as according to themes and to chronology. This, the main part of the book, is accompanied by a chapter near the beginning by George Michell also well-known for his work at Vijayanagara (Chapter Three); he describes the architectural features of the structure which, given a long use and much 'conservation' during the last century, is complicated. In a prefatory note he also speaks of this monument as exceptional in Indian architecture and it is indeed difficult to imagine anything elsewhere that is at all similar. The volume is accompanied by black and white photographs and also by relevant examples of the architectural drawings which have become such a renowned feature of the Vijayanagara Research Project to which the author has long been a stalwart contributor.