History of Indian and Eastern Architecture

by James Fergusson

Of the three styles into which Hindu architecture naturally divides itself, the northern is found spread over a far larger portion of the country than either of the other two. It wants, however, the compactness and strongly-marked individuality of the Dravidian, and never was developed with that exuberance which characterised the southern style from the 15th to the 18th century. In many respects it resembles more the Chalukyan style, the examples being small and elegant, and found dispersed over the face of the country, where wanted, without any apparent massing together in particular spots.

Unfortunately, we have no name which would describe the style in its ethnographical and geographical relations without being open to the objection of expressing either too much or too little. In this respect the southern style is singularly fortunate: Dravidian correctly limits it to people speaking Tamil, Telugu, or some cognate dialect; and the country where the people speaking those tongues are to be found is generally and correctly known as Dravida Desa, or country of the Dravidians.

The term Chalukyan, applied to the second style, is not so expressive; but it is unobjectionable, as it cannot mislead any one. It is only a conventional term, derived from the principal known dynasty ruling in that country, applied to a style occupying a borderland between the other two, but a land that has not yet been fully surveyed, and whose boundaries cannot now be fixed with precision. Till they are, a conventional name that does not mislead is all that can be hoped for.

If it were allowable to adopt the loose phraseology of philological ethnography, the term Aryan might be employed, as it is the name by which the people practising this style are usually known in India, and it would be particularly convenient here, as it is the correct and direct antithesis of Dravidian. It is evident, however, that any such term, if applied to architecture, ought to be descriptive of some style practised by that people, wherever they settled, all across Europe and Asia, between the shores of the Atlantic and the Bay of Bengal;[410] and it need hardly be said that no such style exists. If used in conjunction with the adjective Indian or Indo, it becomes much less objectionable, and has the advantage of limiting its use to the people who are generally known as Aryans in India—in other words, to all those parts of the country where Sanscrit was ever spoken, or where the people now speak tongues so far derived from Sanscrit as to be distinguishable as offsets of that great family of languages. Its use, in this respect, has the great convenience that any ordinary ethnographical or linguistic map of India is sufficient to describe the boundaries of the style. It extends, like the so-called Aryan tongues, from the Himalayas to the Vindhya mountains. On the east, it is found prevalent in Orissa; and on the west in Maharastra. Its southern boundary between these two provinces will only be known when the Nizam’s territory is architecturally surveyed; but meanwhile we may rest assured that wherever it is traced the linguistic and architectural boundary-lines will be found coincident.

Another reason why the term Aryan should be applied to the style is, that the country just described, where it prevails, is, and always has been, called Aryavarta by the natives themselves. They consider it as the land of the pure and just—meaning thereby the Sanscrit-speaking peoples—as contradistinguished from that of the casteless Dasyus, and other tribes, who, though they may have adopted Brahmanical institutions, could not acquire their purity of race.

The great defect of the term, however, is that the people inhabiting the north of India are not Aryans in any reasonable sense of the term, whatever philologists may say to the contrary. The Sanscrit-speaking people, who came into India 2000 or it may be 3000 years B.C., could never have been numerically one-half of the inhabitants of the country, except, perhaps, in some such limited district as that between the Sutlej and the Jumna; and since the Christian Era no Aryan race has migrated eastward across the Indus, but wave after wave of peoples of Turanian race, under the names of Yavanas, Sakas, Hunas, or Mongols, have poured into India. This, combined with the ascendancy of the aboriginal races during the period when Buddhism was the religion of the country, has so completely washed out Aryanism from northern India during the building ages, that there is probably no community there which could claim one-tenth of pure Aryan blood in its veins, and with nine-tenths of impurity the term is certainly a misnomer. If it were not, we would certainly find some trace of external Aryan affinities in their style; but this is not the case. In fact, no style is so purely local, and, if the term may be used, so aboriginal, as this. The origin of the Buddhist style is obvious and unmistakeable; that of the Dravidian and Chalukyan nearly as certain, though not quite so obvious; but the origin of the northern Hindu style remains a mystery, unless, indeed, the solution suggested above (ante, p. 224) be considered an explanation. It may be so, to some extent; but I confess it is to my mind neither quite satisfactory nor sufficient.

The style was adopted by the Jains, who, as the successors of the Buddhists, certainly were not Aryans, and several examples of the peculiar forms of their vimanas, or sikras have already been given (Woodcuts Nos. [137], [145], &c.); but it still remains to be ascertained from what original form the curvilinear square tower could have arisen. There is nothing in Buddhist, or any other art, at all like it. It does not seem to have been derived from any wooden form we know, nor from any brick or stone, or tile mode of roofing found anywhere else. I have looked longer, and, perhaps, thought more, on this problem than on any other of its class connected with Indian architecture, but I have no more plausible suggestion to offer than that hinted at above. The real solution will probably be found in the accidental discovery of old temples—so old as to betray in their primitive rudeness the secret we are now guessing at in vain. Meanwhile we probably may remain sure that it was not an imported form, but an indigenous production, and that it has no connection with the architecture of any other people Aryan, or others outside of India.

The view above proposed for the origin of the style derives considerable support from the mode in which the temples are now found distributed. There are more temples now in Orissa than in all the rest of Hindustan put together. They are very frequent in Maharastra, and, if we admit the Jains, who adopted this style, they are ten times more frequent in Gujerat and the valley of the Nerbudda than in the valley of the Ganges, or in Aryavarta, properly so called. The first and most obvious explanation of this fact might be that the last-named country has for 600 years been occupied by a Mahomedan empire, and they, hating idolatry and idol temples, have destroyed them wherever they were so absolutely in possession of the country as to be able to do so with impunity. This may be so, and it is an argument which, with our present materials, it is difficult to disprove. My impression, however, is that it does not correctly represent the true state of the case. That the Moslems did ruthlessly destroy Jaina temples at Ajmir, Delhi, Canouge, and elsewhere, may be quite true, but then it was because their columns served so admirably for the construction of their mosques. The astylar temples of the followers of Siva or Vishnu could only have served as quarries, and no stones that had been previously used in Hindu temples have been traced to any extent in Moslem buildings. Even admitting that at Delhi or Allahabad, or any of their capitals, all Hindu buildings have been utilised, this hardly would have been the case at such a provincial capital as Fyzabad, once Ayodhya, the celebrated capital of Dasaratha, the father of the hero of the ‘Ramayana,’ but where not one carved stone or even a foundation can be discovered that belongs to any ancient building.[411] The most crucial instance, however, is the city of Benares, so long the sacred city, par excellence, of the Hindus, yet, so far as is known, no vestige of an ancient Hindu temple exists within its precincts. James Prinsep resided there for ten years, and Major Kittoe, who had a keener eye than even his great master for an architectural form, lived long there as an archæologist and architect. They drew and measured everything, yet neither of them ever thought that they had found anything that was ancient; and it was not till Messrs. Horne and Sherring[412] started the theory that the buildings around the Bakariya Kund were ancient Buddhist or Hindu remains, that any one pretended to have discovered any traces of antiquity in that city. They certainly, however, are mistaken. Every building about the Bakariya Kund was not only erected by the Mahomedans, but the pillars and roofing-stones, with the fewest possible exceptions, were carved by them for the purposes for which they were applied. They may have used the stones of some deserted monasteries, or other Buddhist buildings, in the foundations or on their terraces, or for little detached pavilions; but all the architecture, properly so called, is in a style invented, or at least introduced by the Pathans, and brought to perfection under Akbar. That the Moslems did destroy Hindu temples may be admitted, but it is not clear that this was done wantonly. In all the instances which are authenticated, it was to gain ready-made materials for their mosques, and it was not till the time of Aurungzebe that any of their monarchs felt himself sufficiently powerful or was so bigoted as to dare the power and enmity of the Brahmans of Benares, by erecting a mosque on the site of one of the most sacred temples as an insult and a defiance to the Hindus. Even then, had such a temple as the great one at Bhuvaneswar ever existed in Benares, every stone of which, from the ground to the kullus, is covered with carving, it seems impossible that all these carved stones should be hid away and not one now to be found. I am myself personally tolerably familiar with Benares, and the conviction such knowledge as I have forces on my mind is, that though the city was the earliest and most important settlement of the Vedic Brahmans—the sacred city of the Aryan Hindus from the remotest ages—yet just from that cause it had fewer temples than any of the cities inhabited by less pure races. What few fragments remain are Buddhist or Jaina, and we must consequently ascribe the absence of anything really ancient more to the non-building instincts of the Brahmanical Aryans than the iconoclastic bigotry of the Moslems.

All this will be clearer as we proceed; but meanwhile it may be well to point to one or two other instances of this. The rock at Gualior was one of the earliest conquests of the Moslems, and they held it more or less directly for five centuries. They built palaces and mosques within its precincts, yet the most conspicuous objects on the hill are Hindu temples, that were erected before they obtained possession of it. In like manner Chittore was thrice besieged and thrice sacked by the Mahomedans, but its numerous buildings are intact, and I do not recollect observing a single instance of wanton destruction in the place. An even more striking instance is found at Ellora. Though Aurungzebe, the most bigoted of his race, built his capital in its neighbourhood, and lies buried within sight of the caves, there is no proof that he or any of his race were the authors of any of the damage that has been done to the idols there. Practically, they are intact, or have only received such mutilation as is easily accounted for from other causes.

It would be tedious to attempt it, but, fortunately, it is not necessary for our present purposes to go into the whole evidence; but I may state that the impression I have derived from such attention as I have been able to give to the subject is, that the absence of old temples in northern India is more owing to ethnographic than to religious causes. It seems more probable that they never existed than that they were destroyed. No temples are mentioned in the Vedas or the older Indian writings, and none were required for the simple quasi-domestic rites of their worship; and so long as they remained pure no temples were built. On the other hand, it appears as if between the fall of Buddhism and the advent of the Moslems the Jains had stepped in with a ready-made religion and style, and the followers of Siva and Vishnu had not time to develope anything very important in these northern provinces before it was too late.