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The Chalukyan Architecture of the Kanarese Districts c22: Baṅkāpur

The Chālukyan Architecture of the Kanarese Districts c22

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English

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Baṅkāpur

The Temple of Arvattukambhada

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THE temple of Arvattukambhada, or the ' Temple of the Sixty Columns,' is situated in the west side of the old fort of Baṅkāpur (Plate XCIV). When the fort was built the ramparts were carried right across the back wall of the temple, so that the latter is partly buried in it. This, in its time, was a very fine temple, similar, in plan and general style, to the temple of Tārakēśvara at Hāngal, but it has suffered greatly at the hands of iconoclasts and vandals. The great pillared hall was converted into a mosque when the fort was held by a Bijāpur garrison, but they appear to have built another mosque, subsequently, which stands at the other end of the fort near the gateway. We are told by Farishtah¹ that, when Baṅkāpur fell before the assaults of the troops of ‘Ali ‘Ādil Shāh of Bijāpur, “ The Sultan ordered a superb temple within it to be destroyed, and he laid the first stone of a mosque, which was built on the foundation, offering up praises for his victory,” and, further, “ Four months after the reduction of Baṅkāpur, when the country was properly settled by the royal officer, and the different chiefs had submitted to pay tribute, Ali Adil Shaw took up his residence in the fort, where he spent his time in a round of amusements.” To convert this temple to their use, the Muḥammadans squared off the back corners of the hall, which were originally recessed like the front (see plan, Plate LXXXIX). They then built up a wall upon the bench to meet the beams under the cornice, and finally inserted a *miḥrāb*, or prayer niche, within the doorway that led towards the shrine, thus cutting off the latter from the great hall. As it was against their religion to have any figure sculpture about their places of worship, they chiselled away the scores of little images which filled the numerous panels and niches round the outside of the basement wall of the hall. Upon the pillars are little figures outlined very lightly in little *pippala*-leaf scrolls, which have been pitted over with a blunt-pointed instrument, while the scrollwork around them is untouched. The central portion of the floor of the hall had been taken up and relaid very clumsily. Possibly the Muḥammadans expected to find treasure buried there beneath the great bull *Nandi*, which, if there had been no pavilion for it as at Hāngal, would have occupied this position. Outside the hall, and around about it, are several old Muḥammadan graves.

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¹ Scott's Farishtah, Vol. I, p. 303.

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Since the Muḥammadan requirements were sufficiently met by the use of the hall, they did little damage to the small images round the plinth of the southern porch attached to the smaller closed hall. There were two beautiful arabesque windows, one on each side of the porch between the inner and the outer halls, but both of these, which were full of scrollwork and images, like those at Unkal (see Plate CXXVIII) but much finer and larger, have been smashed up, only the jagged frames remaining (Plate XCV).

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But this was probably not the first time that the Muhammadans had laid sacrilegious hands upon this shrine, for the first time that they appeared before the gates of Bankāpur was when Firoz Shāh Bahmani besieged and took the fort in A.D. 1406. It was then considered the most important fortress in the Karnātak. It was even yet again at the mercy of Islām when Haidar ‘Ali took it from the Marāṭhās in 1797.

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As the great hall now stands, there are, without counting two between it and the closed hall, fifty-eight pillars; but from these six must be subtracted, which have been introduced by the Muhammadans to make the back corners square,¹ and this leaves fifty-two, the original number. This is the same number as occurs in the temple at Kundgol, which is of the same style as this. To arrive at the number sixty, from which the present name of the temple is derived, the two between the two halls have been counted in with the fifty-eight now standing in the great hall. It is thus evident that the name has been given to the temple since its occupation by the Muhammadans.

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¹ It is possible that these six pillars, and any other material they required, were taken from a *Nandi* pavilion which they destroyed.

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The pillars have been cut from selected blocks of the dark grey stone which was so universally used in these mediæval temples. Nearly the whole of the shaft has been turned in the lathe, and has been very highly finished, some having been so fully polished as to give, on the larger surfaces, a series of bright sparkling reflected lights. The shafts are divided up into numbers of minute and delicate horizontal rings of mouldings, with sharp clean edges, and some of these are sparingly decorated. The little *pippala*-leaf decorations, on the swell of the shaft, are incised, not left raised, which is due to the impossibility of leaving raised portions when in the lathe in the process of turning (Plate XCI). Other pillars rise from square bases into octagonal and sixteen-sided shafts, but have round capitals. The two columns which stand midway between the two halls, and those in the south porch, are of a different type altogether and are far more ornate (Plate XCV).

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The ceiling designs are particularly chaste. They are formed entirely of rosettes with *kirtimukha* corners in each compartment (Fig. 29). The central ceiling of the great open hall is domed, and rises in concentric

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Fig. 29.—Lotus ceiling panel from Bankāpur.

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circles of cusped ornament, but compared with other examples, and particularly with the Hāngal one, it is comparatively plain (Plate XCIII).

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The door of the closed hall, under the south porch, is very rich in decorative detail, but it is very much injured (Plate XCII). A great deal of the tracery, up the sides, like that of the hall door of Kaśiviśveśvara at Lakkuṇḍi, has been very much undercut, and the manner in which this has been injured would lead one to suppose that persons had been trying to knock off portions to carry away. The larger figures, that adorned the lower parts of the door jambs to the number of ten or so, and which were fixed in their places by tenons and slots, have all been removed. Above the doorway is a row of little niche shrines, each surmounted by a miniature śikhara, and supported by little pillars in full relief. These, no doubt, once held small images, but none of these now remain. It was not the practice of the Muḥammadans to carry off images, unless it was some very special one which they wished to dishonour; it sufficed to mutilate them where they stood, so that the evidence of their iconoclastic zeal might be plain to all eyes. Upon the dedicatory block is Gaja-Lakṣmī, who also presides over the shrine doorway. The shrine is quite empty, but lying in the antechamber is the śaluṅkā of a liṅga which is too small to have been the original one, being but 15" square.

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The graceful curve of the cornice, which in the photograph looks rather heavy and cumbersome, owing to the camera looking down upon it from high ground, is well worth notice, not only for its outward appearance, but also for the very neat manner in which it is ribbed beneath in imitation of wooden framing (Plates XCIII and XCVI). The underneath part of the turned up outer edge of the cornice is very richly wrought with a conventional leaf pattern, while rosettes are repeated, as bosses, between the ribbing underneath.

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This has often been called a Jaina temple, perhaps because of Gaja-Lakṣmī being found over the doorways, but, as pointed out in the architectural note, she graced the doorways of Brahmanical and Jaina doors equally, but, in the latter case, not the shrine door over which it was the rule to install a Jaina image. There is not a Jaina image or symbol about the temple, but there are images of Śiva, Viṣṇu, Gaṇapati, Brahmā, Mahākālī and other Hindu figures. It is now altogether in disuse, is much ruined and stands in a hollow.

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There can be no doubt of the original dedication of the temple to Śiva, for the inscriptions declare it. On the wall to the left of the south entrance of the inner hall are two short inscriptions, which begin with an invocation to Śambhu, and have, at the top, the liṅga and the bull. Upon either side of the shrine door are other inscriptions, two of which record grants to the god Nāgarēśvaradēva in A.D. 1138, and a third in 1091. But another inscription, near the last, tells us of a grant to a Jaina temple in A.D. 1120, a date between the last two, which are only forty-seven years apart. It thus cannot well refer to this temple, and there is no indication, whatever, of the temple ever having been used by the Jains.

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At the entrance to the fort was an inscribed slab which informs us that, in A.D. 1055, there were five religious colleges of the Jains at Baṅkāpur.