Early Indian Architecture: I. Cities and City-Gates, etc.; II. Bodhi-gharas c9.s8: Preface

Early Indian Architecture: I. Cities and City-Gates, etc.; II. Bodhi-gharas c9.s8

Language: English

Preface

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*Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (1877–1947) was born of a Sinhalese father and British mother, raised and educated in Great Britain, and trained as a geologist and botanist. He revisited Ceylon around 1903, and his work on the geology of his native island in that period led to the establishment of a Mineralogical Survey for Ceylon. Close to crafts movements in England and influenced by the thinking of William Morris concerning the "unity between art, craft and labour," in Joseph Rykwert's words, Coomaraswamy undertook an extensive ethnographic survey of surviving arts and crafts guilds in Ceylon at that time, leading to his first major publication,* Mediaeval Sinhalese Art, a Monograph on Mediaeval Sinhalese Arts and Crafts, Mainly as Surviving in the Eighteenth Century with an Account of the Structure of Society and the Status of the Craftsman (Broad Campden, 1908),¹ *followed in 1909 by a collection of* Essays in National Idealism *and a volume on* The Indian Craftsman.² *After several trips to India that increased his contacts but offered no professional base, and after problems with conscription laws in England (he seems to have registered as a conscientious objector during the First World War), he settled in the United States, where he served as curator of Indian art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 1917 until his death in 1947.*³

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¹ *Published in a limited, handcrafted edition by Essex House Press and reprinted commercially only in 1956, with the support of the Sri Lankan government.*

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² *Columbo: Columbo Apothecaries Co., Ltd.; London: Probsthain.*

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³ *Roger Lipsey,* Coomaraswamy, His Life and Work, *Princeton, 1977; Lipsey, ed.,* Coomaraswamy, Selected Papers, *2 vols., Princeton, 1977. Reviewed by Joseph Rykwert,* Religion *9 (1979): 104–115. Reviewed by Michael W. Meister,* Journal of the American Oriental Society *100 (1980): 151–154.*

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*Science and idealism combined in his methodology, leading him eventually from close studies of the strata of textual, visual, and experiential evidence to a* metaphysics rich in "alternative formulations," as Roger Lipsey puts it.⁴ His essays on "*Early Indian Architecture*" come from a period in the late 1920s and early 1930s of high productivity but of transition, as if all the data available to scientific seriation were being put in place as a foundation for later speculation.⁵ This primarily art-historical work includes the six parts of his *Catalogue of Indian Art in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts*, published between 1924 and 1930, his *History of Indian and Indonesian Art*, published in 1927, *Yakṣas*, parts 1 (1928) and 2 (1931),⁶ and "Indian Architectural Terms," published in the *Journal of the American Oriental Society* in 1928.⁷ Seven essays on significant art-historical issues also from this period were collected as *The Transformation of Nature in Art* in 1934; at the beginning of one of these, "The Origin and Use of Images in India," he cites fondly from T. A. G. Rao's *Elements of Hindu Iconography* that "it may be said that images are to the Hindu worshipper what diagrams are to the geometrician."⁸

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⁴ Lipsey, *Coomaraswamy, His Life and Work*, pp. 191–192, 199; Lipsey (p. 191) cites a translation by Coomaraswamy of a passage in which the Buddha describes his method of teaching: "*When the analytical factors of the meaning have been verified both as regards what is laid down and what is elaborated, I then explain them by many alternative formulae, teach and illuminate them, make them comprehensible, open them up, dissect and spread them out.*"

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⁵ "Early Indian Architecture, I. Cities and City-Gates, etc.; II. Bodhi-Gharas," *Eastern Art* II (1930): 208–235; "III. Palaces," *Eastern Art* III (1931): 181–217. Coomaraswamy's copy of the manuscript of Part IV, which *Eastern Art* failed to publish before its demise, was deposited, among other archival material, with the Firestone Library, Princeton University, by Dr. Rama P. Coomaraswamy.

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⁶ Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; reprinted in one volume, New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1971.

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⁷ *Journal of the American Oriental Society* 48 (1928): 250–275.

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⁸ Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.; reprinted, New York: Dover Publications, 1956, p. 155.

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Portrait of Ananda Coomaraswamy by Arnold Ronnebeck, 1929. Collection of the Denver Art Museum (1929.6). Photography courtesy The Denver Art Museum. This bust represents Coomaraswamy at about the time he was working on "Early Indian Architecture" and other works "in transition."

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Lipsey compares the "'murderous overwork,' in Rhys Davids' phrase" of many of Coomaraswamy's later writings to an "'intellectual preparation' for spiritual initiation,"⁹ yet it also seems to me a reflection of his training as a geologist and botanist. Homologies between strata of soil, species, texts, beliefs, and images were inherent in his interpretive thinking. The labour of his youth prepared him for the thinking of his old age.

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⁹ Lipsey, *op. cit.*, pp. 190–191.

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In the three published parts of "*Early Indian Architecture*," Coomaraswamy densely documents textual references and images from stone reliefs of early Indian "*Cities and City-Gates*" (pt. I), "*Bodhi-Gharas*" (the hypaethral shrines of early India enclosing objects of high sanctity—whether trees and altars, images, or symbolically potent constructions such as the stūpa) (pt. II), and "*Palaces*" (pt. III). Part IV, which was never published, completed his survey of early evidence for architectural forms by looking at "*Huts and Related Temple-Types*"—a significant movement away from documentation toward the "deep description" of his later metaphysical analyses.

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In his "*Early Indian Architecture*," Coomaraswamy provided a foundation for the discussion of Indian urbanism and its architectural language that no work since has supplanted; he also laid a groundwork—never fully explicit—for understanding the means by which the morphology of later Indian temples had been rooted in both the symbolic and the formal language of early Indian architecture.¹⁰ His rush to completion in this work can be seen in the extensive series of drawings he provides in part III, showing the integration of the typical Indian dormer-window type into a decorative surface for the later temple; this particularly important contribution plays little part in his text's discussion of Indian palatial structures and receives hardly cursory explanation in his description of plates.¹¹

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¹⁰ Michael W. Meister, "On the Development of a Morphology for a Symbolic Architecture, India," *Res* 12 (1986): 33–50.

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¹¹ His line of investigation of this particular motif was continued by Odette Viennot, *Temples de l'Inde centrale et occidentale*, Paris: École française d'Extrême-orient (Mémoires archéologiques XII), 1976.

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"*Early Indian Architecture*" provided a foundation for discussing India's architectural language—formal as well as symbolic—first by documenting the reality of early Indian urban and vernacular forms of the first few centuries B.C. and A.D., then by relating these to the great symbolic monuments of Hindu worship, built centuries later, that constitute the major portion of our image of Indian architecture. To do so, he intertwined visual and textual evidence. The former survives primarily in the form of small-scale narrative relief-carvings on Buddhist stūpas of the first centuries B.C. and A.D.—which often show village scenes as well as cityscapes that reflect a developed, expressive, indigenous wooden architecture—and as Buddhist rock-cut monastic halls that mimic and essentially preserve wooden forms (the oldest surviving carpentry in India is the wooden beams and vaulting within some of these caves). Technical terminology Coomaraswamy culled from wide-ranging reading in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Buddhist Pali texts, often interpreting the words he found there by reference to forms he knew from reliefs. His sensitivity to evidence he found for the craft of *particularly personal and poignant summation of Coomaraswamy's philosophia perennis in the year before his death that I believe should be cited in full:*¹⁴

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¹⁴ *Ibid.*, p. 10.

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Buddhist temple of the second or third century A.D. represented on a terracotta plaque from Kumrahar, Bihar. Drawing copyright the American Institute of Indian Studies, Varanasi.

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The deity who assumes innumerable forms, and has no form, is one and the same Puruṣa [cosmic entity], and to worship in either way leads to the same liberation: "however men approach Me, even so do I welcome them" [Bhagavad Gītā 4·2]. In the last analysis, the ritual, like that of the old Vedic Sacrifice, is an interior procedure, of which the outward forms are only a support, indispensable for those who—being still on their way—have not yet reached its end, but that can be dispensed with by those who have already found the end, and who, though they may be still in the world, are not of it. In the meantime, there can be no greater danger or hindrance than that of the premature iconoclasm of those who still confuse their own existence with their own being, and have not yet "known the Self"; these are the vast majority, and for them the temple and all its figurations are signposts on their way.

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Michael W. Meister