The southern Hindu temple: a pyramidal tower (vimana) of receding storeys fringed with miniature shrines and crowned by a single dome, set in walled enclosures entered through ever taller gateways (gopurams).
The southern tradition takes shape under the Pallavas of Kanchipuram in the seventh century. At Mahabalipuram on the Tamil coast their sculptors carved the Pancha Rathas, five monolithic shrines cut from boulders, which are a catalogue of the forms to come: square and oblong shrines, pyramidal roofs, barrel-vaulted crowns. The structural Shore Temple (c. 700) and the Kailasanatha at Kanchipuram show the type complete: a square sanctum under a tower of storeys, each edged with a parapet of miniature pavilions, the whole capped by a domed crown (shikhara) and a finial (stupi).
The southern tower, the vimana, is conceived as a building of many storeys (talas), each a smaller version of the one below, not as a single curved spire. The treatises such as the Mayamata give its parts from bottom to top (base, wall, entablature, neck, crown, finial) and name its ornaments: square domed pavilions (kutas) at the corners of each storey, oblong barrel-roofed ones (shalas) in the middle, and the horseshoe gable windows (kudus) that decorate them. They classify vimanas by the shape of the crown: octagonal is dravida, square nagara, round vesara.
Under the Cholas the vimana reached its greatest scale. The Brihadeeswarar at Thanjavur, completed by Rajaraja I in 1010, rises in thirteen straight-sided storeys from a two-storeyed base about 30 metres square to an octagonal crown some 66 metres above the ground. In the Deccan the Chalukyas at Pattadakal and the Rashtrakutas at Ellora (where the Kailasa temple of the 8th century is a complete temple complex carved downward out of a hillside) built in both northern and southern modes; the later Hoysalas of Karnataka developed a star-shaped plan and intensely carved soapstone surfaces in the mixed style now called Vesara.
From the twelfth century the southern temple grew outward. Enclosure walls (prakaras) were added around the old shrine, each with a gateway tower (gopuram) on its axes, and under the Vijayanagara kings and the Nayakas of Madurai these gateways became colossal: tapering towers of brick and stucco, many storeys high, crowded with painted figures and crowned by a barrel vault with a row of finials. The Meenakshi temple at Madurai and the Ranganatha temple at Srirangam are temple-cities of concentric courts, pillared halls with hundreds or a thousand columns, and sacred tanks, still in daily use.