The Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India: A Study of Indo-Aryan Civilisation c10.2

c10.2

THE previous chapters will enable the reader to put in its proper place in Indian architectural history, and in the life of ancient India, the interesting structure which I will now proceed to discuss, the stûpa or funeral monument, which Fergusson took for his starting-point. The stûpa itself, being originally only a tomb or cenotaph, never came within the enclosure of an Indian village except as a symbol; it belonged to the cemetery or cremation-ground outside. It was only when it had been consecrated as a religious symbol, like so many other structural elements in Indian building, that it became, like the village shrine, associated with life as well as death and was used to mark places made sacred by the events in the life of the saint whom it commemorated, and also as an ideograph in a hieratic language employed decoratively in Buddhist-Hindu art in the same way as Arabic and other script was afterwards used by Muhammadan craftsmen.