Shikhara

A shikhara is the tower rising directly above the garbhagriha in North Indian, or Nagara, Hindu temple architecture, built up in receding horizontal tiers that curve inward toward the top rather than stepping in flat stages, giving the finished tower a distinctive convex silhouette. The tower is not hollow in the way a Gothic spire is; in most cases its interior mass is largely a solid brick or stone core faced with elaborately carved sculpture, so its height is achieved by genuine mass rather than an engineered empty shell, part of why shikharas could be built to significant heights using pre-modern construction methods.

Vertical projecting ribs called latas run up the tower's face, dividing its surface into repeating vertical bands often covered in relief carving of deities, mythological narrative and decorative motifs, and the tower is crowned by a ribbed disc, the amalaka, itself topped by a pot-shaped kalasha finial. Because the shikhara sits directly over the garbhagriha and nowhere else in the temple complex, its height and prominence on the skyline function as a permanent external marker of exactly where, within the wider temple compound, the deity's image is actually housed.

The shikhara developed gradually from simpler stepped temple roofs of the Gupta period into the tall curvilinear towers characteristic of mature medieval Nagara temples from roughly the seventh century onward, reaching some of its most refined expressions in temples such as the Kandariya Mahadeva at Khajuraho and the Lingaraja Temple at Bhubaneswar, where clusters of smaller subsidiary towers are grouped around the main shikhara to build up an increasingly complex silhouette.

In South Indian, or Dravida, temple architecture, the equivalent tower over the sanctum is called a vimana rather than a shikhara, a difference of regional terminology and form rather than of underlying function: the Dravida vimana is built in distinct flat, stepped, pyramidal stages rather than the Nagara tower's continuous curving profile, and it is often, though not always, shorter relative to the gateway towers, or gopurams, that dominate the outer walls of major South Indian temple complexes. The distinction between shikhara and vimana is one of the clearest diagnostic markers used to classify an unfamiliar Hindu temple by regional school at a glance, and the Vesara style of the Deccan region deliberately blends elements of both traditions, producing towers that combine Nagara curvature with Dravida stepped massing in a single hybrid form.