Gods and Temples in South India

Millions of foreign and Indian tourists and pilgirms visit the thousands of shrines that testify to India’s great cultural and religious heritage. For many of them the local priest or their own childhood reading of the Indrajal comics are the only aids to understand and interiorize the message of the ‘stones’. For them and for others this book has been written as an introduction to the mythological and religious background of the gods worshipped in temples and carved in beautiful statues. It also gives a detailed description of the numerous episodes depicted on the walls and inside the shrines.

A journey through south India is definitely an aesthetic experience. It becomes a religious experience if the visitor can enter into the mind of the sculptors and devotees who gave the best of their lives to construct and decorate the temples. Their effort were inspired mainly by devotion, even if some of them belonged to travelling guilds who were responsible for the great similarity in the immense variety of sculpture. With this in mind, the visitor knows he walks on sarcred ground, centuries old, when he enters a temples or climbs the Shravana Belgola hill to have darshan of Shree Gomateshvara.