Our Oriental Heritage

by Will Durant

  It would be dull to list, without specific description and photographic representation, the other masterpieces of Hindu building in the north. And yet no record of Indian civilization could leave unnoticed the temples of Surya at Kanarak and Mudhera, the tower of Jagannath Puri, the lovely gateway at Vadnagar,85 the massive temples of Sas-Bahu and Teli-ka-Mandir at Gwalior,86 the palace of Rajah Man Sing, also at Gwalior,87 and the Tower of Victory at Chitor.88 Standing out from the mass are the Shivaite temples at Khajuraho, while in the same city the dome of the porch of the Khanwar Math Temple shows again the masculine strength of Indian architecture, and the richness and patience of Indian carving.89 Even in its ruins the Temple of Shiva at Elephanta, with its massive fluted columns, its “mushroom” capitals, its unsurpassed reliefs, and its powerful statuary,90 suggests to us an age of national vigor and artistic skill of which hardly the memory lives today.

  We shall never be able to do justice to Indian art, for ignorance and fanaticism have destroyed its greatest achievements, and have half ruined the rest. At Elephanta the Portuguese certified their piety by smashing statuary and bas-reliefs in unrestrained barbarity; and almost everywhere in the north the Moslems brought to the ground those triumphs of Indian architecture, of the fifth and sixth centuries, which tradition ranks as far superior to the later works that arouse our wonder and admiration today. The Moslems decapitated statues, and tore them limb from limb; they appropriated for their mosques, and in great measure imitated, the graceful pillars of the Jain temples.91 Time and fanaticism joined in the destruction, for the orthodox Hindus abandoned and neglected temples that had been profaned by the touch of alien hands.92

  We may guess at the lost grandeur of north Indian architecture by the powerful edifices that still survive in the south, where Moslem rule entered only in minor degree, and after some habituation to India had softened Mohammedan hatred of Hindu ways. Further, the great age of temple architecture in the south came in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, after Akbar had tamed the Moslems and taught them some appreciation of Indian art. Consequently the south is rich in temples, usually superior to those that remain standing in the north, and more massive and impressive; Fergusson counted some thirty “Dravidian” or southern temples any one of which, in his estimate, must have cost as much as an English cathedral.93 The south adapted the styles of the north by prefacing the mandapam or porch with a gopuram or gate, and supporting the porch with a lavish multiplicity of pillars. It played fondly with a hundred symbols, from the swastika,* emblem of the sun and the wheel of life, through a very menagerie of sacred animals. The snake, through its moulting, symbolized reincarnation; the bull was the enviable paragon of procreative power; the linga, or phallus, represented the generative excellence of Shiva, and often determined the form of the temple itself.

  Three elements composed the structural plan of these southern temples: the gateway, the pillared porch, and the tower (vimana), which contained the main assembly hall or cell. With occasional exceptions like the palace of Tirumala Nayyak at Madura, all this south Indian architecture was ecclesiastical. Men did not bother to build magnificently for themselves, but gave their art to the priests and the gods; no circumstance could better show how spontaneously theocratic was the real government of India. Of the many buildings raised by the Chalukyan kings and their people, nothing remains but temples. Only a Hindu pietist rich in words could describe the lovely symmetry of the shrine at Ittagi, in Hyderabad;94* or the temple at Somnathpur in Mysore,96 in which gigantic masses of stone are carved with the delicacy of lace; or the Hoyshaleshwara Temple at Halebid,97 also in Mysore—“one of the buildings,” says Fergusson, “on which the advocate of Hindu architecture would desire to take his stand.” Here, he adds, “the artistic combination of horizontal with vertical lines, and the play of outline and of light and shade, far surpass anything in Gothic art. The effects are just what the medieval architects were often aiming at, but which they never attained so perfectly as was done at Halebid.”98

  If we marvel at the laborious piety that could carve eighteen hundred feet of frieze in the Halebid temple, and could portray in them two thousand elephants each different from all the rest,99 what shall we say of the patience and courage that could undertake to cut a complete temple out of the solid rock? But this was a common achievement of the Hindu artisans. At Mamallapuram, on the east coast near Madras, they carved several rathas or pagodas, of which the fairest is the Dharma-raja-ratha, or monastery for the highest discipline. At Elura, a place of religious pilgrimage in Hyderabad, Buddhists, Jains and orthodox Hindus vied in excavating out of the mountain rock great monolithic temples of which the supreme example is the Hindu shrine of Kailasha100—named after Shiva’s mythological paradise in the Himalayas. Here the tireless builders cut a hundred feet down into the stone to isolate the block—250 by 160 feet—that was to be the temple; then they carved the walls into powerful pillars, statues and bas-reliefs; then they chiseled out the interior, and lavished there the most amazing art: let the bold fresco of “The Lovers”101 serve as a specimen. Finally, their architectural passion still unspent, they carved a series of chapels and monasteries deep into the rock on three sides of the quarry.102 Some Hindus103 consider the Kailasha Temple equal to any achievement in the history of art.

  Such a structure, however, was a tour de force, like the Pyramids, and must have cost the sweat and blood of many men. Either the guilds or the masters never tired, for they scattered through every province of southern India gigantic shrines so numerous that the bewildered student or traveler loses their individual quality in the sum of their number and their power. At Pattadakal Queen Lokamahadevi, one of the wives of the Chalukyan King Vikramaditya II, dedicated to Shiva the Virupaksha Temple, which ranks high among the great fanes of India.104 At Tanjore, south of Madras, the Chola King Rajaraja the Great, after conquering all southern India and Ceylon, shared his spoils with Shiva by raising to him a stately temple designed to represent the generative symbol of the god.*105 Near Trichinopoly, west of Tanjore, the devotees of Vishnu erected on a lofty hill the Shri Rangam Temple, whose distinctive feature was a many-pillared mandapam in the form of a “Hall of a Thousand Columns,” each column a single block of granite, elaborately carved; the Hindu artisans were yet at work completing the temple when they were scattered, and their labors ended, by the bullets of Frenchmen and Englishmen fighting for the possession of India.106 Nearby, at Madura, the brothers Muttu and Tirumala Nayyak erected to Shiva a spacious shrine with another Hall of a Thousand Columns, a Sacred Tank, and ten gopurams or gateways, of which four rise to a great height and are carved into a wilderness of statuary. These structures form together one of the most impressive sights in India; we may judge from such fragmentary survivals the rich and spacious architecture of the Vijayanagar kings. Finally, at Rameshvaram, amid the archipelago of isles that pave “Adam’s Bridge” from India to Ceylon, the Brahmans of the south reared through five centuries (1200-1769 A.D.) a temple whose perimeter was graced with the most imposing of all corridors or porticoes—four thousand feet of double colonnades, exquisitely carved, and designed to give cool shade, and inspiring vistas of sun and sea, to the millions of pilgrims who to this day find their way from distant cities to lay their hopes and griefs upon the knees of the careless gods.

  2. “Colonial” Architecture

  Ceylon—Java—Cambodia—The Khmers—Their religion—Angkor—Fall of the Khmers—Siam—Burma

  Meanwhile Indian art had accompanied Indian religion across straits and frontiers into Ceylon, Java, Cambodia, Siam, Burma, Tibet, Khotan, Turkestan, Mongolia, China, Korea and Japan; “in Asia all roads lead from India.”107 Hindus from the Ganges valley settled Ceylon in the fifth century before Christ; Ashoka, two hundred years later, sent a son and a daughter to convert the population to Buddhism; and though the teeming island had to fight for fifteen centuries against Tamil invasions, it maintained a rich culture until it was taken over by the British in 1815.

  Singha
lese art began with dagobas—domed relic shrines like the stupas of the Buddhist north; it passed to great temples like that whose ruins mark the ancient capital, Anuradhapura; it produced some of the finest of the Buddha statues,108 and a great variety of objets d’art; and it came to an end, for the time being, when the last great king of Ceylon, Kirti Shri Raja Singha, built the “Temple of the Tooth” at Kandy. The loss of independence has brought decadence to the upper classes, and the patronage and taste that provide a necessary stimulus and restraint for the artist have disappeared from Ceylon.109

  Strange to say, the greatest of Buddhist temples—some students would call it the greatest of all temples anywhere110—is not in India but in Java. In the eighth century the Shailendra dynasty of Sumatra conquered Java, established Buddhism as the official religion, and financed the building of the massive fane of Borobudur (i.e., “Many Buddhas”).111 The temple proper is of moderate size, and of peculiar design—a small domical stupa surrounded by seventy-two smaller topes arranged about it in concentric circles. If this were all, Borobudur would be nothing; what constitutes the grandeur of the structure is the pedestal, four hundred feet square, an immense mastaba in seven receding stages. At every turn there are niches for statuary; 436 times the sculptors of Borobudur thought fit to carve the figure of Buddha. Still discontent, they cut into the walls of the stages three miles of bas-reliefs, depicting the legendary birth, youth and enlightenment of the Master, and with such skill that these reliefs are among the finest in Asia.112 With this powerful Buddhist shrine, and the Brahmanical temples nearby at Prambanam, Javanese architecture reached its zenith, and quickly decayed. The island became for a time a maritime power, rose to wealth and luxury, and supported many poets. But in 1479 the Moslems began to people this tropical Paradise, and from that time it produced no art of consequence. The Dutch pounced upon it in 1595, and consumed it, province by province during the following century, until their control was complete.

  Only one Hindu temple surpasses that of Borobudur, and it, too, is far from India—lost, indeed, in a distant jungle that covered it for centuries. In 1858 a French explorer, picking his way through the upper valley of the Mekong River, caught a glimpse, through trees and brush, of a sight that seemed to him miraculous: an enormous temple, incredibly majestic in design, stood amid the forest, intertwined and almost covered with shrubbery and foliage. That day he saw many temples, some of them already overgrown or split apart by trees; it seemed that he had arrived just in time to forestall the triumph of the wilderness over these works of men. Other Europeans had to come and corroborate his tale before Henri Mouhot was believed; then scientific expeditions descended upon the once silent retreat, and a whole school at Paris (L’École de l’Extrème Orient) devoted itself to charting and studying the find. Today Angkor Wat is one of the wonders of the world.*

  At the beginning of the Christian era Indo-China, or Cambodia, was inhabited by a people essentially Chinese, partly Tibetan, called Khambujas or Khmers. When Kublai Khan’s ambassador, Tcheou-ta-Kouan, visited the Khmer capital, Angkor Thom, he found a strong government ruling a nation that had drawn wealth out of its rice-paddies and its sweat. The king, Tcheou reported, had five wives: “one special, and four others for the cardinal points of the compass,” with some four thousand concubines for more precise readings.114 Gold and jewelry abounded; pleasure-boats dotted the lake; the streets of the capital were filled with chariots, curtained palanquins, elephants in rich caparison, and a population of almost a million souls. Hospitals were attached to the temples, and each had its corps of nurses and physicians.115

  Though the people were Chinese, their culture was Hindu. Their religion was based upon a primitive worship of the serpent, Naga, whose fanlike head appears everywhere in Cambodian art; then the great gods of the Hindu triad—Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva—entered through Burma; almost at the same time Buddha came, and was joined with Vishnu and Shiva as a favorite divinity of the Khmers. Inscriptions tell of the enormous quantity of rice, butter and rare oils contributed daily by the people to the ministrants of the gods.116

  To Shiva the Khmers, toward the end of the ninth century, dedicated the oldest of their surviving temples—the Bayon, now a forbidding ruin half overgrown with tenacious vegetation. The stones, laid without cement, have drawn apart in the course of a thousand years, stretching into ungodly grins the great faces of Brahma and Shiva which almost constitute the towers. Three centuries later the slaves and war-captives of the kings built Angkor Wat,117 a masterpiece equal to the finest architectural achievements of the Egyptians, the Greeks, or the cathedral-builders of Europe. An enormous moat, twelve miles in length, surrounds the temple; over the moat runs a paved bridge guarded by dissuasive Nagas in stone; then an ornate enclosing wall; then spacious galleries, whose reliefs tell again the tales of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana; then the stately edifice itself, rising upon a broad base, by level after level of a terraced pyramid, to the sanctuary of the god, two hundred feet high. Here magnitude does not detract from beauty, but helps it to an imposing magnificence that startles the Western mind into some weak realization of the ancient grandeur once possessed by Oriental civilization. One sees in imagination the crowded population of the capital: the regimented slaves cutting, pulling and raising the heavy stones; the artisans carving reliefs and statuary as if time would never fail them; the priests deceiving and consoling the people; the devadasis (still pictured on the granite) deceiving the people and consoling the priests; the lordly aristocracy building palaces like the Phinean-Akas, with its spacious Terrace of Honor; and, raised above all by the labor of all, the powerful and ruthless kings.

  The kings, needing many slaves, waged many wars. Often they won; but near the close of the thirteenth century—“in the middle of the way” of Dante’s life—the armies of Siam defeated the Khmers, sacked their cities, and left their resplendent temples and palaces in ruins. Today a few tourists prowl among the loosened stones, and observe how patiently the trees have sunk their roots or insinuated their branches into the crevices of the rocks, slowly tearing them apart because stones cannot desire and grow. Tcheou-ta-Kouan speaks of the many books that were written by the people of Angkor, but not a page of this literature remains; like ourselves they wrote perishable thoughts upon perishable tissue, and all their immortals are dead. The marvelous reliefs show men and women wearing veils and nets to guard against mosquitoes and slimy, crawling things. The men and women are gone, surviving only on the stones. The mosquitoes and the lizards remain.

  Nearby, in Siam, a people half Tibetan and half Chinese had gradually expelled the conquering Khmers, and had developed a civilization based upon Hindu religion and art. After overcoming Cambodia the Siamese built a new capital, Ayuthia, on the site of an ancient city of the Khmers. From this seat they extended their sway until, about 1600, their empire included southern Burma, Cambodia, and the Malay Peninsula. Their trade reached to China on the east and to Europe on the west. Their artists made illuminated manuscripts, painted with lacquer on wood, fired porcelain in the Chinese style, embroidered beautiful silks, and occasionally carved statues of unique excellence.* Then, in the impartial rhythm of history, the Burmese captured Ayuthia, and destroyed it with all its art. In their new capital at Bangkok the Siamese built a great pagoda, whose excess of ornament cannot quite conceal the beauty of its design.

  The Burmese were among the greatest builders in Asia. Coming down into these fertile fields from Mongolia and Tibet, they fell under Hindu influences, and from the fifth century onward produced an abundance of Buddhist, Vaishnavite and Shivaite statuary, and great stupas that culminated in the majestic temple of Ananda—one of the five thousand pagodas of their ancient capital, Pagan. Pagan was sacked by Kublai Khan, and for five hundred years the Burmese government vacillated from capital to capital. For a time Mandalay flourished as the center of Burma’s life, and the home of artists who achieved beauty in many fields from embroidery and jewelry to the royal palace—which showed what they cou
ld do in the frail medium of wood.118 The English, displeased with the treatment of their missionaries and their merchants, adopted Burma in 1886, and moved the capital to Rangoon, a city amenable to the disciplinary influence of the Imperial Navy. There the Burmese had built one of their finest shrines, the famous Shwe Dagon, that Golden Pagoda which draws to its spire millions upon millions of Burmese Buddhist pilgrims every year. For does not this temple contain the very hairs of Shakya-muni’s head?

  3. Moslem Architecture in India

  The Afghan style—The Mogul style—Delhi—Agra—The Taj Mahal

  The final triumph of Indian architecture came under the Moguls. The followers of Mohammed had proved themselves master builders wherever they had carried their arms—at Granada, at Cairo, at Jerusalem, at Baghdad; it was to be expected that this vigorous stock, after establishing itself securely in India, would raise upon the conquered soil mosques as resplendent as Omar’s at Jerusalem, as massive as Hassan’s at Cairo, and as delicate as the Alhambra. It is true that the “Afghan” dynasty used Hindu artisans, copied Hindu themes, and even appropriated the pillars of Hindu temples, for their architectural purposes, and that many mosques were merely Hindu temples rebuilt for Moslem prayer;119 but this natural imitation passed quickly into a style so typically Moorish that one is surprised to find the Taj Mahal in India rather than in Persia, North Africa or Spain.

  The beautiful Kutb-Minar* exemplifies the transition. It was part of a mosque begun at Old Delhi by Kutbu-d Din Aibak; it commemorated the victories of that bloody Sultan over the Hindus, and twenty-seven Hindu temples were dismembered to provide material for the mosque and the tower.120 After withstanding the elements for seven centuries the great minaret—250 feet high, built of fine red sandstone, perfectly proportioned, and crowned on its topmost stages with white marble—is still one of the masterpieces of Indian technology and art. In general the Sultans of Delhi were too busy with killing to have much time for architecture, and such buildings as they have left us are mostly the tombs that they raised during their own lifetime as reminders that even they would die. The best example of these is the mausoleum of Sher Shah at Sasseram, in Bihar;121 gigantic, solid, masculine, it was the last stage of the more virile Moorish manner before it softened into the architectural jewelry of the Mogul kings.