Sovereignty’s Traces in a South Indian Temple

The Pudu Maṇḍapam (Tamil, “new hall”) is a Hindu temple structure in Madurai, a major pilgrimage town in southeastern India—a region that is today Tamil Nadu. From various stages in south Indian history, the sacred site has symbolically encoded the power of several regimes as far back as Nayaka rule in the seventeenth century. This paper “reads” these layers of political power as embodied in aesthetic forms in and around the Pudu Maṇḍapam. Various sources such as sculpture, bronze models, paintings, drawings, and photographs illustrate how religious, economic, domestic, and foreign influences converge in shaping and conceptualizing the Pudu Maṇḍapam as a place, and India as an object and problem of government. In so doing, this paper demonstrates how the art and architecture of the Pudu Maṇḍapam have been put to different uses towards diverse ends by ruling groups from early modern times to British colonialism to the post-independence period.