Art & Culture · Temple Architecture
Timeless TemplesA Journey Through Temple Architecture
From rock-cut shrine to Angkor Wat
Fifteen sessions tracing the Indian temple from its cosmological origins through the Nagara, Dravida and Kalinga styles, and across the sea to the sacred landscape of Cambodia. Temples read not as monuments but as living systems of knowledge, ritual and cultural memory.
About This Course
The temple as a living heritage
The Indian temple is among the most enduring cultural markers in the world. Far beyond a place of worship, it gathered worship, education, governance, community life and artistic expression into a single ordered space. Its design, scale and intricacy fuse engineering precision with cosmological symbolism.
This course traces that evolution across millennia, beginning with the rock-cut shrines of the Mauryan and Gupta periods and moving through the grandeur of the Dravida, Nagara and Kalinga styles. It approaches each temple through its sacred texts and ritual logic, reading the building as a deliberate diagram of the cosmos rather than through colonial or purely stylistic categories.
The journey then follows Indian temple architecture across the sea into Southeast Asia, where the same cosmological principles took root in the sacred landscape of Cambodia and rose to their culmination at Angkor Wat. Konark, Kanchipuram, Khajuraho and the Khmer capitals are studied as responses to climate, geography and the making of sacred landscapes.
By the close, the temple emerges as a centre of community, art and knowledge, and as a heritage whose conservation matters for generations to come.
The Curriculum
Fifteen sessions, two civilisations
The temple was never only a building. It was a diagram of the cosmos, raised in stone, that a community could walk into.
Reading temples as living knowledge systems
Your Faculty
Taught by a conservation architect
A conservation architect and architectural historian whose work focuses on Indian temple architecture and its civilisational spread across Southeast Asia, particularly Cambodia. She holds a PhD in Architecture and an M.Arch in Architectural Conservation from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, and is trained in Indology.
Founder of Samrchana Heritage Research Studio and Honorary Director of Indian Heritage Awareness and Research (Maharashtra Chapter). Her book Cambodia: India Outside India — Decoding Khmer Architecture is catalogued in the US Library of Congress.
A recipient of multiple national awards, she has curated international conferences, exhibitions and site seminars in India and Cambodia, working to re-centre temples as living systems of knowledge, cosmology, ritual and cultural memory.
Questions, Answered
Do I need a background in architecture or history? +
No. The course is built for curious learners. It introduces sacred texts, geometry and regional styles from first principles, so an engineer, a doctor or a traveller can follow it as readily as a specialist.
How is the course delivered? +
Fifteen self-paced video sessions you can watch in any order, at any time, with lifetime access. There are no live-class timings to attend.
Why does the course cover Cambodia? +
Indian temple architecture travelled across the sea and shaped the sacred landscape of the Khmer world, culminating at Angkor Wat. The Cambodian sessions show how a single cosmological grammar took root in another civilisation, which is central to understanding the Indian temple itself.
Will I receive a certificate? +
Yes. On completion you receive a certificate issued jointly by BharatVidya and the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute.
Who teaches the course? +
Dr. Ujjwala Khot-Palsuley, a conservation architect and architectural historian who has spent her career studying Indian and Khmer temple traditions, and whose book on Khmer architecture is catalogued in the US Library of Congress.
Walk into the diagram of the cosmos
Fifteen sessions, from the first rock-cut shrine to the towers of Angkor Wat. Begin whenever you like, and keep the course for life.
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