Indian Architecture (Buddhist and Hindu Periods) c33.15

c33.15

The largest and most important of the temples at Brindaban is that of Gobind Devi, built in 1590, now a truncated composition, as its sanctuary was completely destroyed during the reign of Aurengzabe. (Plate CXV, Fig. 2). What remains therefore is the assembly hall or *maha-mandapa* which takes the shape of a spacious cruciform structure, with the eastern arm converted into an extemporary sanctuary in place of the one which originally extended out of this and has disappeared. The present building differs but little in the proportions of its plan from a Greek cross, as its arms from east to west measure 177 feet and it is 105 feet in breadth; when the sanctuary existed the whole composition may have been as much as 175 feet in length. Externally the principles on which this temple has been designed are not dissimilar from those of other large temples in the Indo-Aryan style, as for example the Sas-Bahu at Gwalior described above, its elevation being formed of several stories containing open arcades. But the manner in which this traditional arrangement has been treated, shows that during the intervening period the builders had acquired an entirely new orientation in the field of temple architecture. The Gobind Devi temple signifies, as comprehensively as any building could do, the change that had taken place in the constitution of this part of the country, owing to the conditions brought about by the Islamic domination, a change, in the case of the building art, from the aesthetically natural to the ordered conventional, from architecture produced largely by rule of thumb, to that resulting from the application of certain well-defined structural principles. One noticeable fact in this temple is the almost entire absence of figure-carving, a circumstance not improbably due to the Islamic usage prohibiting any display of imagery, and communicated to the guilds of artisans by the Emperor Akbar, although that monarch himself was no bigot in this respect. The consequence of these various influences is that while the Gobind Devi temple is an architectural composition of no little formal beauty, consisting as it does of a combination of balconies and loggias, of bracketed archways and moulded buttresses, wide eaves and ornamental parapets, all carefully disposed so as to be in perfect accord with one another, there is at the same time an almost complete absence of that quality of humanism, together with a deficiency in that supreme spiritual content which one has learned to expect incorporated in the design of all Hindu temples of the more orthodox type. In this building more than in any other we see the effect of the imposition of Islamic ideals on those of the Hindus, perpetuated in stone. Even more pronounced is the outcome of this impact on the structural treatment of the interior, which except for the fact that the entire conception appears to be an anomaly, is a very fine architectural effort of great mandapa, instead of being the low curved ceiling usual in the temple design, consists of a high vaulted dome formed of intersecting pointed arches, in its structural procedure not unlike what is known as the four-part pointed vaulting of the Gothic style. This system of roofing in the temple is an illustration of the influence of the contemporary construction of the Mughals being copied and adapted from that used in several of the mosques of this period, as for instance in the aisles of the Jami Masjid (c. 1580) at Fatehpur Sikri, the state capital of the Emperor Akbar. (Plate CXVI, Fig. 1).