In the mature Dravidian tradition the temple-town was organised as a series of concentric rectangular enclosures (prakaram) around a central shrine, each wall pierced by a towering gateway (gopuram). Streets, tanks, markets and residential quarters were arranged in nested rings, so the town plan radiated outward from sacred to secular space. Cities such as Madurai and Srirangam embody this enclosure-and-gateway logic at urban scale.
It gave South India a distinctive urban model in which the entire town is structured as an extension of the temple's ritual geometry.
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