Rural Village Morphology and Temple Centrality: A Qualitative Study from Tamil Nadu

Temples acted as a cultural, social and spatial center of South Indian rural settlement. Studies have been conducted more on the study of the temple-based urban settlements. But the morphological features of the temple-focused rural villages have not been quite studied. This paper fills this gap by analysing the role of temples in shaping the rural village spatial structure and settlement morphology in Tamil Nadu. The study examines the connection between the location of the temple, configuration of the streets, and residential clustering in the ten Devara Paadal Petra Sthalam villages within a qualitative morphological framework. The analysis is a map-based qualitative approach to the study with the use of Google Maps-generated base maps digitized in AutoCAD to record the street networks, temple precincts and the built forms around them. According to the comparative spatial interpretation, the villages are grouped into four morphological typologies. The centralized nucleated villages are characterized by great ritual visibility, whereas the linear settlements combine sacred area with economic and movement tracks. Incremental historical expansion can be observed in enclosed organic forms, and peripheral anchor settlements indicate the presence of a boundary-focused expansion, which is attributed to agrarian landscapes. Despite the weaknesses of its qualitative focus and dependency on modern map data, the work provides a cultured typological approach to the analysis of rural sacred landscapes. In practice, the results uphold heritage-sensitive rural planning and preservation of temple precincts, whilst socially highlighting the persistence of temples in maintaining community identity.