History of Indian and Eastern Architecture

by James Fergusson

Girnar.

The hill of Girnar, on the south coast of Gujerat, not far from Puttun Somnath, is another shrine of the Jains, as sacred, but somehow not so fashionable in modern times as that at Palitana. It wants, consequently, that bewildering magnificence arising from the number and variety of buildings of all ages that crowd that temple city. Besides this, the temples themselves at Girnar lose much of their apparent size from being perched on the side of a hill rising 3500 ft. above the level of the sea, composed of granite rocks strewn about in most picturesque confusion.

Although we have no Girnar Mahatmya to retail fables and falsify dates, as is done at Sutrunjya, we have at Girnar inscriptions which prove that in ancient times it must have been a place of great importance. On a rock outside the town at its foot, called par excellence Junaghar—the Old Fort—Asoka, B.C. 250, carved a copy of his celebrated edicts.[262] On the same rock, in A.D. 151, Rudra Dama, the Sah king of Saurastra, carved an inscription, in which he boasted of his victories over the Sat Karni, king of the Dekhan, and recorded his having repaired the bridge built by the Maurya Asoka.[263] The embankment of the Sudarsana lake again burst and carried away this bridge, but was again repaired by Skanda, the last of the great Guptas, in the year A.D. 457,[264] and another inscription on the same rock records this event.

A place where three such kings thought it worth while to record their deeds or proclaim their laws must, one would think, have been an important city or place at that time; but what is so characteristic of India occurs here as elsewhere. No material remains are found to testify to the fact.[265] There are no remains of an ancient city, no temples or ruins that can approach the age of the inscriptions, and but for their existence we should not be aware that the place was known before the 10th century. There are, it is true, some caves in the Uparkot which may be old; but they have not yet been examined by any one capable of discriminating between ancient and modern things, and till so visited their evidence is not available.[266] My impression is that they may belong to the age of the Guptas, which was a great age for excavating caves of this class in India, but we must await further information before deciding.

126. Temple of Neminatha, Girnar. (From a Plan by Mr. Burgess.) Scale 50 ft. to 1 in.

The principal group of temples at Girnar, some sixteen in number, is situated on a ledge about 600 ft. below the summit, and still consequently nearly 3000 ft. above the level of the sea. The largest, possibly also the oldest of these, is that of Neminatha ([Woodcut No. 120]). An inscription upon it records that it was repaired in A.D. 1278, and unfortunately a subsequent restorer has laid his heavy hand upon it, so that it is difficult now to realise what its original appearance may have been. This unfortunately is only too often the case with Jaina temples. If a Hindu temple or Mahomedan mosque is once deserted and goes to decay, no one ever after repairs it, but its materials are ruthlessly employed to build a new temple or mosque according to the newest fashion of the day. With the Jains it is otherwise. If a man is not rich enough to build a new fane, he may at least be able to restore an old one, and the act with them seems equally meritorious, as it usually is considered to be with us; but the way they set about it generally consists in covering up the whole of the outside with a thick coating of chunam, filling up and hiding all the details, and leaving only the outline. The interior is generally adorned with repeated coats of whitewash, as destructive to artistic effect, but not so irreparable.

The plan and the outline are generally, however, left as they were originally erected, and that is the case with the temple of Neminatha. It stands in a courtyard measuring 195 ft. by 130 ft. over all externally. The temple itself has two porches or mantapas, one of which is called by Hindu architects the Maha Mantapa, the other the Ard’ha Mantapa,[267] though it is not quite clear to which of the two the term Maha, or great, should be applied in this instance; I would say the inner, though that is certainly not the sense in which the term is usually understood.

Around the courtyard are arranged seventy cells with a covered and enclosed passage in front of them, and each of these contains a cross-legged seated figure of the Tirthankar to whom the temple is dedicated, and generally with a bas-relief or picture representing some act in his life. But for the fall of the rock there would have been nine or ten more cells, and indeed this repetition of the images of the saint, like the multiplication of temples, seems to have been the great aim of the Jaina architects. As we shall presently see in a Jaina temple at Brambanam in Java, there were 236 small temples or cells surrounding the great one, and there, as here, each of them was intended to contain a similar image of one of the Tirthankars.