For a country with a rich and extensive built heritage, we have precious few serious publications documenting and presenting it in a manner that is engaging and insightful. Coffee-table books about the famous tourist centres abound, but a large body of buildings and spaces still remains under-represented in print even in the simplest formats. No significant visual survey that does justice to Kerala's extremely sophisticated tradition of building in wood, for instance, has been published to my knowledge. Some mainstream academic scholarship like Ashalatha Thampuran's study Traditional Architectural Forms of Malabar Coast is available. But such work is largely addressed to those already converted. The book under review, a collaborative project involving two architects, Ramu Katakam and Joginder Singh, has evolved out of their shared passion for Kerala's architectural tradition and it shows. Katakam's writing and Singh's photography reflect their personal engagements with the architecture of temples and palaces in Kerala. The book owes much of its infectious charm to this simple fact, though it is not yet the book on the subject.
The survey of twenty temples and two palaces works like a suite of visual essays that are simultaneously descriptive and evocative of experience beyond description. The strangely under-photographed architecture of Kerala is an architecture of space that blooms in the shadow of deep, steep roofs. It is not an architecture of the sculpted object like, say, at Khajuraho. Photographing emptiness is not easy, and when darkness lies at its heart, the task is even more challenging. Joginder Singh revels in these challenges, and produces an absorbing documentation of the spirit of Kerala's temple and palace architecture. His images do the nearly unthinkable - they deepen our understanding of Kerala's temples and palaces even if we have experienced them often.
Singh takes in landscape, roof, space, people, ritual, and detail across the collection of images with a quiet grace and a personal angle, one that befits every place and occasion. Most importantly, he captures the essence of many spatial experiences. A stunning example - the doublespread of Sri Ramaswami Temple at Thriprayar from across the river, opens as a fold-out to reveal a longer shot from the same angle with the river stretching on to the right, thickly walled-in by coconut plantations on either side. A picture like this tells us more about the relationship between special buildings and special sites than any amount of writing can. Another picture - an aerial view of a small waterside temple and compound (p. 101) - is similarly eloquent about the almost Japanese geometries of seclusion that shine through Kerala's spatial tradition. At the other end of the scale, Singh captures the essential beauty of many architectural details with deft framing, as in a small photograph of a flower form in stone (p. 156). At places, the arrangement of photographs also tries to extend the viewer's architectural understanding. The twin photographs of a wooden screen (pp. 92 and 93), one from inside and the other from outside, give the reader-viewer a sense of how the same element works differently from each perspective. Similarly, photographs of a temple wall by day and by night when it is covered with little oil lamps on the attached wooden screen, give a sense of how architectural experience is transformed by the rituals of inhabitation. Singh and Katakam also earn our gratitude by seeking out and recording spaces, fragments, murals, and details that are usually out of bounds for photography.
The excellence of the photography does render the shortcomings of the text less troublesome. Let it he said - the book belongs more to the image than to the word. In fact, the writing disappoints, by and large. It is true that with a little help from the photographs we do begin to share in Katakam's enthusiasm. Katakam tells us (in different ways) that the experience of Kerala's temples and palaces affects him powerfully. However, he never really gets down to investigating the architectural reasons for that impact, beyond some elementary observations. Which is a pity, because there is need for an approach to our built heritage that attends with rigour to the emotional effect, the rasa of our experience of specific buildings or entire traditions. Such an approach is, in some ways, also less demanding on the writer than that of academic scholarship (which, in turn, is not always riveting or architecturally insightful). It is also compatible with the task of producing a lavishly illustrated book. Writing precise, evocative descriptions and analysis is not easy, of course. But it should be possible to avoid clichés and loose syntax. Katakam tells us, for instance, that on entering the temple at Ettumanoor, "one is seized with a world of pure space and a sense of freedom" (p. 22). What could "a world of pure space" really mean outside of all-forgiving architectural discourse, and could one be seized with such a world?
The impact of this book would increase significantly if the structure of the content and scholarship were to be tightened up in later editions, even if one doesn't expect it to be the definitive analytical or historical work. For instance, the sudden insertion of a section on wooden houses and the digression on Vishnu's ten avatars deserve to be reconsidered. Similarly, more detail could be communicated in context, like the fact that the beautiful Koothambalams - theatres in the compounds of many Kerala temples - are dedicated to performances of Koodiyattam and Koothu (never mentioned by name in the book), two very ancient but, happily, extant theatre forms. But, even as it stands, this visual homage to one of the finest traditions of building deserves to be on the shelves of all those seriously interested in architecture.
