Indian Architecture (Buddhist and Hindu Periods) c20.26

c20.26

As a rule the Indian masons prepared their building material not on the site of the structure, but in the quarry itself, often some considerable distance away. Here the rough mass of stone, after being won from the living rock, was made into suitable sizes and shapes by cleavage. A groove was sunk along the line of the required division, and holes jumped along this a few inches part. Into the holes thus formed wooden wedges were driven, which, on being wet, swelled, and the blocks split off in this manner. The facing of these blocks was obtained by hammer-dressing, surfaces also being levelled by chiselling parallel lines with a large iron tool, afterwards with a finer one. The presence of numerous fragments of carving in some of the quarries, as for example on the Silasankar hill in Dharwar, from which outcrop the stones used in the Gadag, Lakkundi, and Dambal temples were extracted, points to the sculpture also being executed in the stone-yard. From here the blocks, ready dressed to level beds and carved to pattern, were assembled on the temple site, a staff of workmen being on the spot to lay the stones in their proper courses, and put the finishing touches to the joints in the sculpture. Such a process would necessitate detailed and accurate measurements being made available, while an early record shows that models to scale were also sometimes prepared. In the Upanishads it is related that an architect of the name of Suradevi exhibited to his patron a model of a temple which he had built at Pataliputra.¹ While the foregoing was the general practice of the builders, the alternative process was not unusual, as there are temples which indicate that the masonry was left boasted on the building, so that the carver could chisel it into pattern on the structure itself. An instance of this, among others, is the eleventh century temple of Rajarani at Bhubaneswar, where some of the carving is marked out and left unfinished, thus showing that the Orissan artisan preferred the other method, which is the one almost invariably followed in the West.