215. Garden Pavilion at Vijayanagar. (From a Photograph.)
The palace buildings at Vijayanagar are much more detached and scattered than those either at Tanjore or Mádura, but they are older, and probably reproduce more nearly the arrangements of a Hindu prince’s residence, before they fell completely under the sway of Moslem influence. Practically the palace consists of a number of detached pavilions, baths, hareems, and other buildings, that may have been joined by wooden arcades. They certainly were situated in gardens, and may consequently have had a unity we miss in their present state of desolation. One of these pavilions is represented in the preceding woodcut (No. [215]). It is a fair specimen of that picturesque mixed style which arose from the mixture of the Saracenic and Hindu styles.
Even this mixed style, however, died out wherever the Europeans settled, or their influence extended. The modern palaces of the Nawabs of the Carnatic, of the Rajas of Ramnad or Travancore, are all in the bastard Italian style, adopted by the Nawabs of Lucknow and the Babus of Calcutta. Sometimes, it must be confessed, the buildings are imposing from their mass, and picturesque from their variety of outline, but the details are always detestable, first from being bad copies of a style that was not understood or appreciated, but also generally from their being unsuited for the use to which they were applied. To these defects it must be added, that the whole style is generally characterised by a vulgarity it is difficult to understand in a people who have generally shown themselves capable of so much refinement in former times.
In some parts of the north of India matters have not sunk so low as in the Madras Presidency, but in the south civil architecture as a fine art is quite extinct, and though sacred architecture still survives in a certain queer, quaint form of temple-building, it is of so low a type that it would hardly be a matter of regret if it, too, ceased to exist, and the curtain dropped over the graves of both, as they are arts that practically have become extinct.
BOOK V.
CHALUKYAN STYLE.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
CONTENTS.
Temple at Buchropully—Kirti Stambha at Worangul—Temples at Somnathpûr and Baillûr—The Kait Iswara at Hullabîd—Temple at Hullabîd.
Of the three styles into which Hindu architecture naturally divides itself, the Chalukyan is neither the least extensive nor the least beautiful, but it certainly is the least known. The very name of the people was hardly recognised by early writers on Indian subjects, and the first clear ideas regarding them were put forward, in 1826, in a paper by Sir Walter Elliot, in the fourth volume of the ‘Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.’ To this he added another paper, in the twentieth volume of the ‘Madras Journal:’ and since then numerous inscriptions of this dynasty and of its allied families have been found, and translated by General Le Grand, Jacob and others, in the ‘Bombay Journal,’ and by Professor Dowson in the ‘Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society’ here.[401]
From all this we gather that early in the sixth century of our era[402] this family rose into importance at Kalyan—in what is now the Nizam’s territory—and spread eastward as far as the shores of the Bay of Bengal, in the neighbourhood of the mouths of the Kistnah and Godavery. They extended, in fact, from shore to shore, right across the peninsula, and occupied a considerable portion of the country now known as Mysore, and northward extended as far, at least, as Dowlutabad.