Changing architecture of Jaffna’s temples
View(s):“The Building of a ‘New’ Identity: Mandapams of Jaffna Temples” is the theme of the National Trust lecture for August by Prof. T. Sanathanan. The lecture will be on Thursday, August 29 at 6 p.m. at the Auditorium of the College of Surgeons of Sri Lanka, No. 6, Independence Avenue, Colombo 7. (For those who join online: https://youtube.com/live/JrXlC-GzWCU?feature=share)
Although the existing popular discourses on Hindu temple architecture in Sri Lanka link temple styles with the South Indian or Dravidian, the Jaffna examples from the colonial era exemplify a rupture. In the last 30 years, villu mandapams or curvature ceiling halls have become the desired popular form.
The emergence of this local style coincides with the sweeping changes in the social fabric ignited by civil war, displacement, formation of Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora, Sanskritation of temple rituals, and availability of new building materials and technologies. The villu mandapams produced through fragmentation, collage, copy and fusion of different styles and elements, questions the popular belief associating the Dravidian style with Tamil identity in architecture.
This lecture maps the cultural history and visual idiom of contemporary popular temple architecture with special reference to villu mandapams, and portrays Jaffna temple architecture as an eclectic mix integrating colonial, vernacular and South Indian architectural elements, architectural imaginations and memories from popular theatre and cinema.
Prof. Thamotharampillai Sanathanan is a visual artist and Professor of Art History, Department of Fine Arts, University of Jaffna. He is also a co-founder of Sri Lankan Archive of Contemporary Art, Architecture and Design and the founder of the Kolam craft initiative.
For more information, contact the Trust Office Tel.0112682730/ 0719566929
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