Architecture

Indians have been building in stone for two thousand years, and they rarely built anything simple. This section covers it all: the shadowless vimanas of Dravidian temples, the carvings of Khajuraho, the sun chariot of Konark, the stepwells that go down instead of up, and the Mughal domes that came later. Some of it is engineering — how a 60-metre gopuram stands without cement, how a fort survived a hundred sieges. Some of it is mystery — why a temple was aligned to a solstice, what a carving was really meant to say. Read for the buildings, or for the minds that imagined them.