The case is different when we turn to Further India. Instead of only 150 pages and 50 illustrations, both these figures ought at least to be doubled to bring that branch of the subject up to the same stage of completeness as that describing the architecture of India Proper. For this, however, the materials do not at present exist. Of Japan we know almost nothing except from photographs, without plans, dimensions, or dates; and, except as regards Pekin and the Treaty Ports, we know almost as little of China. We know a great deal about one or two buildings in Cambodia and Java, but our information regarding all the rest is so fragmentary and incomplete, that it is hardly available for the purposes of a general history, and the same may be said of Burmah and Siam. Ten years hence this deficiency may be supplied, and it may then be possible to bring the whole into harmony. At present a slight sketch indicating the relative position of each, and their relation to the styles of India Proper, is all that can well be accomplished.
Although appearing as the third volume of the second edition of the ‘General History of Architecture,’ the present may be considered as an independent and original work. In the last edition the Indian chapters extended only to about 300 pages, with 200 illustrations,[2] and though most of the woodcuts reappear in the present volume, more than half the original text has been cancelled, and consequently at least 600 pages of the present work are original matter, and 200 illustrations—and these by far the most important—have been added. These, with the new chronological and topographical details, present the subject to the English reader in a more compact and complete form than has been attempted in any work on Indian architecture hitherto published. It does not, as I feel only too keenly, contain all the information that could be desired, but I am afraid it contains nearly all that the materials at present available will admit of being utilised, in a general history of the style.
When I published my first work on Indian architecture thirty years ago, I was reproached for making dogmatic assertions, and propounding theories which I did not even attempt to sustain. The defect was, I am afraid, inevitable. My conclusions were based upon the examination of the actual buildings throughout the three Presidencies of India and in China during ten years’ residence in the East, and to have placed before the world the multitudinous details which were the ground of my generalisations, would have required an additional amount of description and engravings which was not warranted by the interest felt in the subject at that time. The numerous engravings in the present volume, the extended letterpress, and the references to works of later labourers in the wide domain of Indian architecture, will greatly diminish, but cannot entirely remove, the old objection. No man can direct his mind for forty years to the earnest investigation of any department of knowledge, and not become acquainted with a host of particulars, and acquire a species of insight which neither time, nor space, nor perhaps the resources of language will permit him to reproduce in their fulness. I possess, to give a single instance, more than 3000 photographs of Indian buildings, with which constant use has made me as familiar as with any other object that is perpetually before my eyes, and to recapitulate all the information they convey to long-continued scrutiny, would be an endless, if not indeed an impossible undertaking. The necessities of the case demand that broad results should often be given when the evidence for the statements must be merely indicated or greatly abridged, and if the conclusions sometimes go beyond the appended proofs, I can only ask my readers to believe that the assertions are not speculative fancies, but deductions from facts. My endeavour from the first has been to present a distinct view of the general principles which have governed the historical development of Indian architecture, and my hope is that those who pursue the subject beyond the pages of the present work, will find that the principles I have enunciated will reduce to order the multifarious details, and that the details in turn will confirm the principles. Though the vast amount of fresh knowledge which has gone on accumulating since I commenced my investigations has enabled me to correct, modify, and enlarge my views, yet the classification I adopted, and the historical sequences I pointed out thirty years since, have in their essential outlines been confirmed, and will continue, I trust, to stand good. Many subsidiary questions remain unsettled, but my impression is, that not a few of the discordant opinions that may be observed, arise principally from the different courses which inquirers have pursued in their investigations. Some men of great eminence and learning, more conversant with books than buildings, have naturally drawn their knowledge and inferences from written authorities, none of which are contemporaneous with the events they relate, and all of which have been avowedly altered and falsified in later times. My authorities, on the contrary, have been mainly the imperishable records in the rocks, or on sculptures and carvings, which necessarily represented at the time the faith and feelings of those who executed them, and which retain their original impress to this day. In such a country as India, the chisels of her sculptors are, so far as I can judge, immeasurably more to be trusted than the pens of her authors. These secondary points, however, may well await the solution which time and further study will doubtless supply. In the meanwhile, I shall have realised a long-cherished dream if I have succeeded in popularising the subject by rendering its principles generally intelligible, and can thus give an impulse to its study, and assist in establishing Indian architecture on a stable basis, so that it may take its true position among the other great styles which have ennobled the arts of mankind.
The publication of this volume completes the history of the ‘Architecture in all Countries, from the earliest times to the present day, in four volumes,’ and there it must at present rest. As originally projected, it was intended to have added a fifth volume on ‘Rude Stone Monuments,’ which is still wanted to make the series quite complete; but, as explained in the preface to my work bearing that title, the subject was not, when it was written, ripe for a historical treatment, and the materials collected were consequently used in an argumentative essay. Since that work was published, in 1872, no serious examination of its arguments has been undertaken by any competent authority, while every new fact that has come to light—especially in India—has served to confirm me more and more in the correctness of the principles I then tried to establish.[3] Unless, however, the matter is taken up seriously, and re-examined by those who, from their position, have the ear of the public in these matters, no such progress will be made as would justify the publication of a second work on the same subject. I consequently see no chance of my ever having an opportunity of taking up the subject again, so as to be able to describe its objects in a more consecutive or more exhaustive manner than was done in the work just alluded to.
Buddha preaching.
(From a fresco painting at Ajunta.)
NOTE.
One of the great difficulties that meets every one attempting to write on Indian subjects at the present day is to know how to spell Indian proper names. The Gilchristian mode of using double vowels, which was fashionable fifty years ago, has now been entirely done away with, as contrary to the spirit of Indian orthography, though it certainly is the mode which enables the ordinary Englishman to pronounce Indian names with the greatest readiness and certainty. On the other hand, an attempt is now being made to form out of the ordinary English alphabet a more extended one, by accents over the vowels, and dots under the consonants, and other devices, so that every letter of the Devanagari or Arabic alphabets shall have an exact equivalent in this one.
In attempting to print Sanscrit or Persian books in Roman characters, such a system is indispensable, but if used for printing Indian names in English books, intended principally for the use of Englishmen, it seems to me to add not only immensely to the repulsiveness of the subject, but to lead to the most ludicrous mistakes. According to this alphabet for instance, ḍ with dot under it represents a consonant we pronounce as r; but as not one educated Englishman in 10,000 is aware of this fact, he reads such words as Kattiwaḍ, Chîtoḍ, and Himaḍpanti as if spelt literally with a d, though they are pronounced Kattiwar, Chittore, and Himarpanti, and are so written in all books hitherto published, and the two first are so spelt in all maps hitherto engraved. A hundred years hence, when Sanscrit and Indian alphabets are taught in all schools in England, it may be otherwise, but in the present state of knowledge on the subject some simpler plan seems more expedient.