Hoysaleswara Temple, Halebidu ಹೊಯ್ಸಳೇಶ್ವರ ದೇವಾಲಯ

Documented history

Halebidu, “the old capital”, is the site of Dorasamudra, the Hoysala capital. Delhi Sultanate armies sacked it in the early fourteenth century, Rice gives 1310 under Malik Kafur, and in 1326 another army carried off what remained.³¹

The encyclopedia attributes the temple to Ketamalla, an officer of Vishnuvardhana, about 1121–1160. Rice wrote that the great temple was never completed, and that it is hard to say whether it was always unfinished or lost its towers.¹³⁴

UNESCO notes that religious activity at the Hoysaleswara temple has ceased, unlike Belur, while inscribing it in 2023 among the Sacred Ensembles of the Hoysalas.²

Architecture

Two linga sanctums, Hoysaleswara for the king and Shantaleswara for the queen, stand side by side in soapstone on a star-shaped platform, with about 340 large reliefs of the Ramayana, Mahabharata and Bhagavata Purana.¹⁵