Krishnamal cultural region: rediscovery, interpretation and conservation of temples and associated infrastructure in Satara, Maharashtra

Abstract

In the Indian subcontinent, the relationship between rivers and humans are a dialectic phenomenon that has mystified scholars from various times throughout history. The sixteenth towards the mid-seventeenth century of late-medieval India, a group bounded by ethnic, language and customs bounded together to form a largely Hindu empire, after almost seven hundred years of Central Asian and Islamic invasions into the Indian subcontinent, who were the Marathas. One of the most important developments in architecture during this time was to revive the older, now dilapidated structures of the Yadava dynasty, chiefly of which were temples, found across the landscapes of the seventeenth century Maharashtra. With the idea of reviving the older temples, and with the knowledge systems that the Marathas had learned and developed through their cultural diffusion of four hundred years with the Deccan Sultanates, the new architectural language that began developing in the region started to gain a new idiom, that is now coined as ‘Maratha’, in expression. Reviving existing ritualistic norms of a new Hindu heartland, and the renovation processes during this time, gave rise to a form of spatial interaction of landscapes and temples in the Krishna River Valley, which itself was venerated as a religious and cultural apparatus, since the Maratha times till today.