Queen Lokamahadevi Builds the Virupaksha Temple at Pattadakal

Around 740 CE, Lokamahadevi, queen of the Chalukya king Vikramaditya II, commissioned the Virupaksha Temple at Pattadakal in Karnataka to commemorate her husband's victory over the Pallava dynasty of Kanchipuram, more than three centuries after King Bhadravarman founded the My Son Sanctuary in Champa in 380, already recorded here. Known from its own inscriptions as the Shri Lokeshvara Maha Shila Prasada, the temple closely follows the plan of the Pallavas' own Kailasanatha temple at Kanchipuram, an act of architectural tribute to the very tradition her husband had just defeated, and stands as the largest and most fully realized of the nine Hindu temples raised at Pattadakal alongside a Jain sanctuary during the Chalukya dynasty's rule of the seventh and eighth centuries. Its tall tower, axial halls and walled courtyard, originally ringed by thirty two subsidiary shrines to attendant deities, mark the earliest complete temple complex built in what became the mature Dravidian architectural style, a synthesis of northern and southern Indian temple forms that later Chalukya and Rashtrakuta builders carried across the Deccan. Pattadakal's group of monuments was inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1987, more than a century before Rakai Pikatan dedicated the Prambanan temple to Shiva in Java in 850, already recorded here.