ABSTRACT
The present chapter explores the traditions and ideas associated with temples, rituals and religious endowments with reference to a few select 11th−12th century CE epigraphic records from the modern-day district of Gadag, Karnataka. Located centrally in the northern part of Karnataka, flanked by the two mineral-rich sub-regions of Dharwar and Bellary, the district housed numerous administrative units and sites of temples during the time of the Western Chalukya rule, followed by those of the Seuna Yadavas and Hoysalas. Records from three different nodal settlements within this zone illustrate how local initiative of important administrative, civic and mercantile agency often led to the creation of certain designative cultural traditions with the temples and religious institutions as sites of cultural creativity and socio- religious negotiations.
The main focus is on teasing out the threads of the crystallising religious and cultural practices around the temple in the given time frame. We note especially the various shades of philosophical and intellectual developments, absorptions of ideas and imaginings of the religious, both from the classical traditions and the transformed or recreated regional and local idioms.
