by John Keay
The Dravidian temples of the extreme south posed the most difficult problem, because they were neither integral buildings nor had much in the way of history. Most had been built within the last 400 years, some within living memory. They were the largest and most imposing temples in India. Yet, ‘the fact is that, in nine cases out of ten, Dravidian temples are a fortuitous aggregation of parts, arranged without plan, as accident dictated at the time of their erection’. They were not single buildings, but sprawling congeries in which the main shrine was lost amidst a warren of passages, pillared halls, courtyards, bazaars and bathing pools. Cities within cities, their distinctive architectural feature was not in the temple itself but in the walls that surrounded it and, above all, in the gigantic gopurams or gateways.
If the gopurams of Madurai, Tanjore, Kanchipuram – Fergusson knew of more than thirty examples – had been a few centuries older they would have ranked with the pyramids as architectural curiosities. Towering hundreds of feet above the flat coastal plains, like the sacrificial towers of some Rider Haggard kingdom, they had attracted the attention of all the early travellers and surveyors, and had been much painted by artists like the Daniells. But Fergusson was one of the first to suggest that, across a gap of perhaps 800 years, they were a development of a style first seen in the raths or boulder temples of Mahabalipuram. The rectangular pyramidal shape, the multi-storeyed construction, now adorned with tier upon tier of sculpture, and the barrel-shaped roof, were all anticipated in the little Ganesa rath and the larger Arjuna.
Where such structures stood in the architectural hierarchy Fergusson was not sure. The French in the eighteenth century had used the temple walls as fortifications and, later, British surveyors had found the gopurams convenient eminences on which to mount their theodolites. But whether their original purpose amounted to any more than a labour-intensive endowment programme seemed doubtful. Fergusson considered that the people of south India, the Dravidians, were devoid of noble feelings: ‘their intellectual status is, and always has been, mediocre’.
All that millions of hands working through centuries could do, has been done, but with hardly any higher motive than to employ labour and to conquer difficulties, so as to astonish & and astonished we are; but without some higher motive, true architecture cannot exist—Much of the ornamentation, it is true, is very elegant, and evidences of power and labour do impress the human imagination, often even in defiance of our better judgement, and nowhere is this more apparent than in these Dravidian temples. It is in vain, however, that we look among them for any manifestation of those lofty aims and noble results which constitute the greatness of true architectural art, and which generally characterize the best works of the true styles of the Western World.
Similar criticisms applied to what Fergusson dubbed the Chalukyan style, although in this case the ornamentation was used to far greater architectural effect. The three classic examples of the style were at Belur, Somnathpur and Halebid. All these places were tucked away in a remote tract of the native state of Mysore, which explained why the style was little known compared with the others. Fergusson did not discover this style, of course, but he deserves much credit for bringing these magnificent buildings to public attention.
As opposed to the rectangular ground plan of both Dravidian and Indo-Aryan temples, the Chalukyan was invariably star-shaped. But a still more distinctive feature of the style was its layered horizontality. Deep cornices line the several façades with strong bands of light and shade; innumerable friezes, steps and ledges continue this effect down to ground level; the whole structure is stretched upon a dead flat expanse of stone terrace, itself lined with more friezes and cornices. The effect is further emphasized by the fact that the Halebid and Belur temples have flat roofs. Fergusson thought that they should have had low pyramidal towers, like those at Somnathpur, but that for some reason the temples had never been finished.
Maybe, but there was nothing unfinished about the ornamentation. If the ancient Buddhists were inclined to treat sandstone like wood, the Chalukyans (Fergusson considered them a race rather than just a dynasty) treated their distinctive black schist, or potstone, like lace.
The amount of labour, indeed, which each face of this porch [at Belur] displays is such as, I believe, never was bestowed on any surface of equal extent in any building in the world; and though the design is not of the highest order of art, it is elegant and appropriate, and never offends against good taste.
From the brackets hidden beneath the great roof cornices to the toe-level elephant frieze, and including the elaborately fretted windows, every surface was alive with carving ‘of marvellous elaboration and detail’. Every deity in the Hindu pantheon is supposed to be represented at Belur – and most of them many times over. There must be more than 500 elephants in the bottom frieze alone.
Moving to the double temple at Halebid, Fergusson’s dismissive attitude began to crumble. Here the elephant frieze was 710 feet in length and ‘containing not less than 2000 elephants, most of them with riders and trappings sculptured as only an oriental can represent the wisest of brutes’. Above this was a frieze of lions, then a scroll ‘of infinite beauty and variety of design’, then a frieze of horsemen, another scroll, and a colossal relief, 700 feet long, of scenes from the Ramayana. Above this were beasts and birds, another frieze, an elaborate cornice, windows of pierced slabs of stone, and panels of sculpture. On one side, in place of the windows, there was a frieze of Hindu deities, each five feet six inches high and extending to 400 feet. It included at least fourteen Siva and Parvati groups and considerably more Vishnus.
Some of these are carved with a minute elaboration of detail which can only be reproduced by photography, and may probably be considered as one of the most marvellous exhibitions of human labour to be found even in the patient East. It must not, however, be considered that it is only for patient industry that this building is remarkable&. The variety of outline, and the arrangement and subordination of the various facets in which it is disposed, must be considered as a masterpiece of design in its class. 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 have never attained so perfectly as was done at Halebid.
Fergusson contrasted the Halebid temple with the Parthenon. The one was the absolute antithesis of the other, and all the world’s architecture fell somewhere between these two poles. The Parthenon was a product of the intellect, calculated with mathematical precision to such a degree of exactness and complexity that it passed into artistic perfection. Halebid was the exact opposite.
All the pillars of the Parthenon are identical, while no two facets of the Indian temple are the same; every convolution of every scroll is different. No two canopies in the whole building are alike, and every part exhibits a joyous exuberance of fancy scorning every mechanical restraint. All that is wild in human faith and warm in human feeling is found portrayed on these walls, but of pure intellect there is little.
There was more intellect in the soaring outline of the third temple style, what Fergusson called Indo-Aryan although now more commonly known as the Northern or Nagara style. The distinctive feature of this style was the sikhara, the curvilinear tower or spire, and there lay Fergusson’s biggest problem. ‘I have looked longer, and perhaps thought more on this problem than on any other of its class connected with Indian architecture.’ But he had found no certain solution. Its forms varied from an almost straight-sided pyramid in some of the earliest examples, to a shape like a bishop’s mitre, to the soaring Gothic pinnacles of Khajuraho, to something more like a full-blown pineapple at Bhuvaneswar. The curvilinear tower was as much the glory of Hindu architecture as the dome was of Mohammedan buildings. Yet where had the idea come from? Fergusson explored several possibilities in vain. He was convinced, though, that it was a purely Indian invention. Indeed, it could only be handled effectively by In
dian craftsmen, because only they could bestow on its blank faces the ingenuity in ornamentation needed to break them up and lighten the effect.
Khajuraho’s temples were a good example, but Fergusson had never been there and was loth to place too much confidence in Cunningham’s descriptions. Instead, he concentrated on the other major temple complexes of north India, at Puri and Bhuvaneswar in Orissa.
The outline of this temple [the Great Temple or Linga Raja at Bhuvaneswar] is not, at first sight, pleasing to the European eye; but when once the eye is accustomed to it, it has a singularly solemn and pleasing effect&. Taking it all in all it is perhaps the finest example of a purely Hindu temple in India.
The Khajuraho temples’ tapering profiles are certainly more acceptable to tastes tutored on the Gothic arch and the spire: at a considerable distance the Khandariya Mahadeo could almost pass muster as a village church. The Orissa temples, though, are very different. Their porches have tiered pyramidal roofs with upturned cornices suggestive of a Chinese pagoda. And the sikharas of the Linga Raja and Rajrani are so elaborately vaned and ribbed that to the unprepared traveller they look as if they belong in an electricity generating station. Fergusson had spent most of his Indian career in Bengal and knew Orissa well. He had verified that every single stone in the Linga Raja’s tower had a pattern carved upon it, and that the sculptures were ‘of a very high order and great beauty of design’. In short, his eye had become accustomed to it and it therefore outraged his sense of ‘true architecture’ far less than, say, the gopurams of a Dravidian temple.
This, however, was not quite the same thing as taking Indian architecture at its Indian value. For Fergusson, as for Macaulay, Hinduism was still ‘the most monstrous superstition the world has ever known’. He made no attempt to master the symbolism and iconography of Hindu temples, and took his stand simply on what he regarded as the universal values of architecture. This dispassionate outlook eased the business of classification and his three temple styles (Dravidian, Chalukyan and Indo-Aryan), though much subdivided, are still accepted today. But one can understand how irritating such pontifications must have been to Alexander Cunningham, whose scholarly bent precluded all aesthetic judgements. Havell, too, rightly insisted that Fergusson’s ‘true styles of architecture’, ‘true principles’ and ‘universal values’ were nothing of the sort. They were just a rationalization of his European outlook.
Of the many specific points on which Cunningham and Havell took issue with Fergusson, none proved more contentious than the origin of the arch in India. Moving on from Hindu architecture to Mohammedan – or, as he preferred, ‘Saracenic’ – Fergusson stated categorically that ‘the Hindus up to this time (about AD 1100) had never built arches’. He qualified this by explaining that he was talking about the ‘true’ arch – one constructed by using wedge-shaped stones, or voussoirs, to achieve the bend, and with a key-stone at the apex. The ancient Hindus had, of course, built small trabeate arches which used brackets and cantilevers to span the gap; but the true, voussoir arch was a purely Mohammedan invention.
Cunningham was at first inclined to accept this. When, in the walls of the great temple at Boddh Gaya, he found some voussoir arches and vaults (now built over) he agreed with Fergusson that this proved that the main structure of the building could not be older than the fourteenth century. But Cunningham later found several other examples of the true arch in buildings that had apparently existed at the time of Hsuan Tsang in the seventh century. By 1870 he realized that Fergusson must have got it wrong again, and in 1892 the old General, now well into his eighties, published a volume re-examining the history of Boddh Gaya.
Formerly it was the settled belief of all European enquirers that the ancient Hindus were ignorant of the arch. This belief no doubt arose from the total absence of arches in any of the Hindu temples. Thirty years ago I shared this belief with Mr Fergusson & but during my late employment with the Archaeological Survey of India several buildings of undoubted antiquity were discovered in which both vaults and arches formed part of the original construction.
Cunningham listed three or four examples and showed that the Boddh Gaya temple, though rebuilt more often and more extensively than any other building in India, dated from the fifth century. He was still unsure whether the arches were part of the original building, but they were certainly earlier than the Mohammedan conquest.
Havell agreed and took the argument still further. Concentrating on the pointed arch, which was the hallmark of Islamic buildings, he claimed that not only had the ancient peoples of India known all about it, but the West, and Islam, had originally got the idea from India. A horseshoe arch with a point to it was a characteristic feature on the façades of Buddhist cave temples and a simple pointed arch was found on the image niches that ringed some of the Gandhara stupas. When Buddhism, under the Kushans, spread west into Afghanistan, the arch went with it and thus came to the notice of the Arabs. Havell pointed to the façade of St Mark’s in Venice, which has a very Buddhist-looking arch, as an example of this East-West trend. But his ideas were highly conjectural. His concern was to stem the tide, to redress the balance; people like Fergusson put far too much in Indian culture down to outside influences. Havell wanted to show that India probably gave as much as she got.
A site which spawned as much controversy and heart-searching as Boddh Gaya was the well known Qutb mosque and minar outside Delhi. In the early nineteenth century the Qutb Minar was considered one of the wonders of the East, second only to the Taj Mahal. It looked even higher than its 250 feet because of the exaggerated tapering and with its elaborate fluting and magnificent symmetry, it seemed the noblest possible monument to the victory of Islam in India. Today our tastes have been somewhat warped by familiarity with industrial shapes. The Qutb Minar has an unfortunate hint of the factory chimney and the brick kiln; a wisp of white smoke trailing from its summit would not seem out of place. But to Fergusson and his generation no praise was too extravagant for it.
It is not too much to assert that the Qutb Minar is the most beautiful example of its class known to exist anywhere. The rival that will occur at once to most people is the Campanile at Florence, built by Giotto. That is, it is true, thirty feet taller, but it is crushed by the mass of the cathedral alongside; and beautiful as it is, it wants that poetry of design and exquisite finish of detail which marks every moulding of the Minar; & when viewed from the court of the mosque its form is perfect, and, under any aspect, is preferable to the prosaic squareness of the outline of the Italian example.
Universal as was the praise, it was not at all clear who had built it or whether it could be attributed to Islam. Fergusson placed it firmly in his first category of Saracenic buildings. ‘Early Pathan’ he called it, although the dynasty that included Qutb-ud-din was Turkish and, as Havell observed, the Pathans were not, and never had been, notable builders. But semantics apart, Fergusson saw it as a classic example of how the lofty ideals of a conquering race, which was already imbued with strong architectural instincts, could exploit the consummate skills of the Indian craftsman and produce something way beyond the latter’s limited imagination. In other words, Indians provided the skills and the decoration but foreigners the ideals and the design.
Cunningham, though, was not so sure. As well as numerous inscriptions there was also a wealth of literary evidence for the Qutb. One work put the beginning of the Minar in the reign of the last Hindu ruler of Delhi. Others suggested that the building and rebuilding – the Minar was very susceptible to earthquakes – had gone on over a period of 150 years, and that the top two sections were not added until the fourteenth century. In Volume One of the Archaeological Survey’s reports he finally dismissed the idea that the original plan was pre-Mohammedan – only to find his assistant readopting the idea in Volume Four. A hasty retraction was extorted from the unfortunate Mr Beglar, but it showed that the origins of the building were still not a foregone conclusion.
What bothered Beglar and Cunningham was that, for a
group of buildings supposedly celebrating the triumph of Islam, there was so little about them that could be called Islamic. The mosque consisted of a courtyard and colonnade, in which the columns were all purloined from Hindu or Jain temples, and in which the most conspicuous object was the famous iron pillar, dating from the Gupta period and celebrating the success of an ancient Hindu dynasty. Even the magnificent arches, though massive even by Islamic standards, were built according to the traditional trabeate design of India. On these, and on the Minar, the ornamentation was typically, and superbly, Indian, while the star-shaped ground plan of the Minar was strongly reminiscent of that of a Jain temple. Indeed, the very idea of victory columns was an Indian one and dated back to the Ashoka columns. There was just not enough in the way of innovation to support Fergusson’s hypothesis of a blast of new and nobler ideals somehow releasing Indian architecture from its obsession with ornament and relaunching it onto a higher plane. Apart from the introduction of Koranic graphics in place of animal friezes, the absence of all figure sculpture, and the adoption of massive archways, the buildings were purely Indian.
A hundred years, and three miles, separate the Delhi of Qutb-ud-din (1206–10) from that of Tughluk Shah (1325–51), another of the early Sultans. But in architectural terms they are poles apart. The fortified city of Tughlakabad, and the tomb of its founder, have the cold and uncompromising air of a stern and alien autocracy. The city walls are more than six feet thick, with loopholes and battlements, and are built from some of the most massive stones ever used for constructional purposes. A similar wall surrounds Tughluk’s tomb, which has sloping sides emphasizing its indestructibility. All is plain, rough-hewn, solid, making it in Fergusson’s view ‘the model of a warrior’s tomb hardly to be matched anywhere’. Fergusson called this style Late Pathan and thought it marked the final emancipation of Islamic ideals from their initial flirtation with Hindu skills and tastes.