Early Indian Architecture: I. Cities and City-Gates, etc.; II. Bodhi-gharas c7: Preface

Early Indian Architecture: I. Cities and City-Gates, etc.; II. Bodhi-gharas c7

Language: English

Preface

Coomaraswamy took interest in the traditional practices of building in South Asia in his two early studies on *Mediæval Sinhalese Art* (1908) and *The Indian Craftsman* (1909). He gave these an excellent general frame in his handbook on *The Arts and Crafts of India and Ceylon* in 1913 and some further elaboration in his *History of Indian and Indonesian Art* in 1927.

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The publication of P. K. Acharya’s massive *Indian Architecture According to the Mānasāra-śilpaśāstra* (1928) and *A Dictionary of Hindu Architecture* (1927), however, helped further focus Coomaraswamy’s attention on the availability of textual sources and the problems in establishing a general terminology. These he addressed in his review of Acharya’s volumes in the *Journal of the American Oriental Society*, 48, entitled “Indian Architectural Terms” (1928), which we reprint below, pp. 72-99.

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In Coomaraswamy’s introduction to that essay, he wrote that Acharya was “too little, if at all, acquainted with the actual buildings” (below, p. 72). “Sculptures and buildings of this and earlier periods survive in thousands,” Coomaraswamy wrote. For him, a scholar such as Jouveau-Dubreuil had “had the immense advantage of a thorough knowledge of the actual architecture, and of personal contact with living *sthapatis* able to explain the meaning of technical terms.” Coomaraswamy also stated that “a very great deal of exact information about the early architecture [of India] can be gathered from the Śuṅga, Kuṣāṇa, and Āndhra reliefs” and admitted that “I have myself in preparation a work based on this early material, which can and necessarily will be very fully illustrated.”

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Coomaraswamy’s series of essays on “Early Indian Architecture” began to appear in a new annual called *Eastern Art*, published by the fledgling College Art Association (from “Memorial Hall, Fairmount Park, Philadelphia”) and edited by Langdon Warner and Horace H. F. Jayne. Part I, exploring “Cities and Citygates, etc.,” appeared in *Eastern Art*, 2, in 1930 and concluded with a statement on the scope of Coomaraswamy’s further planned essays (p. 16):

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Other articles in the present series will deal with tree temples (No. II of the series, printed below); houses and palaces; hermits’ huts and domed shrines and early towers; windows, arches, and doorways; and pillars.

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Part II, “Bodhi-gharas,” Coomaraswamy included in the same issue of *Eastern Art*. Part III, on “Palaces,” appeared in *Eastern Art*, 3, in 1931. Subsequent issues of the journal, however, were cancelled and the material that Coomaraswamy had already submitted was never returned. A carbon of the typescript for Part IV on “Huts and Related Temple Types,” however, remained among Coomaraswamy’s papers. These papers have now been deposited in the Princeton University library by Coomaraswamy’s son, Dr. Rama Coomaraswamy, and from them I was able to prepare the edited and annotated version of Part IV that was first published in *Res* 15 in 1988.

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Coomaraswamy often worked at a fiendish pace, and in this period he also was producing a series on “Early Indian Iconography” for *Eastern Art*. His essays clearly were “work in progress,” rapidly recording the results of wide-ranging textual and visual explorations. The manuscript for Part IV, for example, covered both the “hermits' huts and domed shrines" that he had promised in his statement at the end of Part I, but not the "early towers" he also mentioned there.

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Many of the drawings intended as part of the documentation for a separate discussion of "windows, arches, and doorways" he instead included at the end of Part III, "Palaces," in order to discuss the "development of the *gavākṣa*" and its transformation over time into a decorative "honeycomb" *jāla* design "of which the sources are no longer obvious" (p. 51, below). (This "arched window," he wrote, "appears in a fully developed type as a characteristic feature of early Indian architecture, and is perhaps its most distinctive feature.") What also could not have been obvious to most of his readers without a knowledge of Coomaraswamy's changing scholarly objectives was the need for so extensive a visual documentation to illustrate this brief published discussion. He ended Part III with the disclaimer that "the foregoing account of palaces and windows does not pretend to be exhaustive" (emphasis mine; p. 57), although he had, in fact, compacted two of his planned articles into the space of one.

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No material survives of Coomaraswamy's intended article on pillars except, perhaps, that part of his discussion that he placed in "Early Indian Architecture: III. Palaces." He repeated there his promise that "the forms of early Indian columns will be discussed in a later article" (below, p. 37). Discouraged by the collapse of *Eastern Art* and the loss of the illustrative material for Part IV, Coomaraswamy also was moving rapidly toward a phase in his life where the dense entanglements of philosophic texts were to be his greatest obsession.¹

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¹ Roger Lipsey, *Coomaraswamy, His Life and Work*, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977; see also my review in *Journal of the American Oriental Society* 100 (1980): 151-154.

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His exploration of early architecture — both its imagery and terminology — had been an important methodological transition from the layering of his earlier archaeological and art-historical obsessions and the mental layerings of his later and more metaphysical work. These we can see in his exceptional essay on "The Symbolism of the Dome" in the *Indian Historical Quarterly*, 14 (1938) where he "propose[d] to ask rather why *than how* . . . ."²

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² Reprinted in *Coomaraswamy, 1: Selected Papers, Traditional Art and Symbolism*, ed. Roger Lipsey, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977, pp. 415-464. Coomaraswamy is addressing Eric Schroeder's statements in *A Survey of Persian Art*, VI, pp. 1005-1006, that "the square chamber is *obliged* to forsake its plan and strain forward to meet the round dome in which it must terminate" and that domes "appear to have been *destined* to symbolize the passage from unity to quadrature through the mediation of the triangle of the squinches" (Coomaraswamy's emphases).

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He returned to temple architecture only in the last year of his life in an essay entitled "An Indian Temple: The Kandarya Mahadeo" published in both *Art in America*, 35, and *Śilpi*, 2, in 1947.³ This essay he had written in appreciation of the publication of Stella Kramrisch's *The Hindu Temple* (1946), which so successfully had been able to return the study of religious architecture in India to its metaphysical base.⁴ His position by then had become primarily traditional and universal, seeking in all things a structural foundation. As he wrote in the essay:⁵

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³ Ibid., pp. 3-10.

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⁴ Stella Kramrisch, *The Hindu Temple*, Calcutta: University of Calcutta Press, 1946, 2 vols. (reprinted Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1976). See also my review in *Artibus Asiae* 62 (1980): 180-182.

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⁵ Op. cit., p. 8.

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We are thus brought back . . . to the concept of the three analogous — bodily, architectural, and cosmic — "houses" that the Spirit of Life inhabits and fills; and we recognize at the same time that the values of the oldest architectural symbolism are preserved in the latest buildings and serve to explain their use.