TALAMANA · THE AI LITERACY MAP FOR ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN · Foundations · AGE 13—16 · FACTUAL · DURABLE
Talamana: proportion as a rule system
A proportion rule is somebody's judgment written down so it can be repeated.
The idea
Tālamāna is the name for the Indian systems of proportion for sculpted figures, set out in the śilpa texts and the Āgamas; there are several, not one. Tāla means the palm of the hand, fingertip to wrist, taken as equal to the face. Māna means measure. A system divides that unit into aṅgulas (finger-breadths) and states every part of the figure as a count of them. Give a sculptor the tāla and the class of figure, and the whole body follows at any size. This map is named for that idea: a rule carrying proportion inside it.
Why it matters
A proportion rule is somebody's judgment written down so it can be repeated. Once you see that, you can ask of any rule — a byelaw, a grid, a model's defaults — whose judgment it carries.
See it in the studio
A column order, a door-to-room ratio, a brick module. Architects also work from a unit and a set of ratios. Change the unit and the building scales; the relationships hold. Talamana does the same for the human figure.
Watch for this
Treating the system as one neat formula. The texts give some thirty sets of proportions in ten classes, and the highest deities, the goddesses, Ganapati and children each get a different set. The scholar who compiled the system in English in 1920, T. A. Gopinatha Rao, also noted that the class names do not match a simple count of tālas. A real rule system has rough edges.
Try it
Measure your own face from hairline to chin. Call that one tāla. Measure your height in tālas. Now draw a figure at twice your size using the same count. The proportions hold; only the unit changed.
Prove it
Explain what tāla means, what aṅgula means, and how a sculptor could carve a figure at two different sizes from the same set of numbers.
How it works
The sets of proportions are grouped in ten classes, each in three grades: uttama (superior), madhyama (middling) and adhama (inferior). The classes are named as if by a count of tālas — daśa (ten), nava (nine), ashṭa (eight) and so on down to children and dwarfs — but Rao shows the names do not match the arithmetic: the uttama-daśa-tāla figure, 124 aṅgulas in total height, does not work out to ten of its own tālas. Different texts — the Agamas, the Shukranīti, the Shilparatna — give slightly different tables. The standard English account is Rao's Tālamāna or Iconometry, Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India No. 3 (1920), free to read online.
What this idea builds on
What this idea opens up
Sources
Open this idea on the map · The complete map · Logika · RBDS AI Lab, India · revised every edition.