The Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India: A Study of Indo-Aryan Civilisation c10.4

c10.4

It seems likely that the earliest Aryan immigrants into India also disposed of their dead by burial, marking the grave with the tumulus, which afterwards developed into the structural stûpa, and that they only adopted cremation after they had settled down to life under tropical conditions, for obvious sanitary reasons. Certainly in Asoka’s time the stûpa was generally, like the modern chattri, only a cenotaph, or reliquary.