INTRODUCTION ntering the Antal temple in Srivilliputtur after sunset is an eerie experience. Afte lights and noise of the bazaar, the corridors leading to the heart of the temple are Tall columns line the corridor and huge figures emerge out of the columns themselves are fierce sword-wielding gods killing diminutive demons, and lion-headed monsters ing their sharp claws, alongside more peaceful figures of dancing women and the m playing his flute. These large-scale sculptures are among the most striking features of ple complexes built in Nayaka-period Tamilnadu in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen ing as bold an effect on the twenty-first-century visitor as they must have done on those them four hundred years ago.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Tamilnadu, the growth of temple co large numbers of shrines, halls, gateways, and corridors led to the use of major sculp the temple, especially on the composite columns in the corridors and open detached (man. dapas) that are such a distinctive feature of the period. The composite column earliest form of column created in the Tamil country but is rectangular in section rat Each is a monolith up to five or six metres in height. The origin of the south Indian c lies in Tamilnadu but the figural composite column developed further north in t prominently at the capital of the Vijayanagara empire in the early sixteenth century. teenth century and on into the seventeenth huge architectural sculptures began to pr temples in Tamilnadu, with figures two to three metres high as part of composite colu a single piece of stone. The subjects depicted in these Nayaka-period architectural scu from images of deities familiar throughout India, to figures from local Tamil folk lit cavalrymen, mythical lion-headed animals, and life-size portraits of kings and devot Earlier studies of Hindu sculpture in Tamilnadu have focused on the fine portable the seventh to eleventh centuries cast in bronze and the stone images fitted into arc on the exterior of a temple's main shrine and its attached mandapa. This article descri the genre of the figural composite column as a distinctive feature of Nayaka-period a In section one, the development of the composite column within the Tamil Dravida tr tecture and the spread of the figural composite column as an architectural type thr India will be addressed. The artistic and technical developments which culminated in these dramatic architectural sculptures demonstrate the vitality of Nayaka-period ar The emergence of a deity from a column is also a conceptual development, an examp of'expanding form'evident in a range of Hindu sculpture and iconography. This dev