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The Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India: A Study of Indo-Aryan Civilisation c21: Chapter XV. The Hindu Decadence in the North of India—The Temples of Khajurâho—The Domes of Mandapams—Sankarâcharya and his Mission—Southern Indian Architecture in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries

The Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India: A Study of Indo-Aryan Civilisation c21

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Chapter XV. The Hindu Decadence in the North of India—The Temples of Khajurâho—The Domes of Mandapams—Sankarâcharya and his Mission—Southern Indian Architecture in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries

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THE HINDU DECADENCE IN THE NORTH OF INDIA—THE TEMPLES OF KHAJURÂHO—THE DOMES OF MANDAPAMS—SANKARÂCHARYA AND HIS MISSION—SOUTHERN INDIAN ARCHITECTURE IN THE TENTH AND ELEVENTH CENTURIES

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The Kailâsa temple at Ellora, magnificently conceived and superbly wrought though it was, must always rank lower as an artistic achievement than the great temple of Elephanta. The eighth century in the north of India was artistically and politically the beginning of the Hindu decadence which continued its downward course until, after several centuries of ineffectual struggles against the Muhammadan invader, India at last, under the great Akbar, once more enjoyed the blessings of a lasting peace, and a renaissance began of which Hinduism, purified and strengthened by the ordeal of fire and sword, was again the moving spirit. Politically, the decadence began with the death of Harsha in A.D. 647, soon after the return of Hiuen Tsang to China, when one of his ministers, Arjuna or Arunâsra, seized the throne. Shortly afterwards, owing to his ill-treatment of an envoy sent by the Emperor of China, a Tibetan army invaded Magadha and the usurper's career was cut short by a disastrous campaign in which he was taken prisoner and sent off to China in the train of the imperial envoy he had insulted. Harsha's empire was then broken up.

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Except the Chalukyan king, Krishna I, whose reign was made memorable by the Kailâsa temple, there is hardly a name of distinction in the next three and a half centuries among the rulers of the numerous kingdoms, great and small, into which India was divided, until Mahmûd of Ghaznî began his series of ferocious raids which ended with the capture of Somnath and the destruction of the famous temple in 1026. The dynastic history of this period, so far as it has been ascertained by patient research, is a tedious record of petty internecine warfare caused by the rivalries and quarrels of kings and chieftains, who, except for the record of conquest or defeat, seem to have very little claim to be remembered by posterity.

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But during this long period India remained free from the ravages of foreign invasions, and owing to the solidity of the Indo-Aryan social fabric these constant local wars probably affected the economic condition of the country far less than might be supposed. Fighting was the business of the Kshatriya caste alone, and when there was no vital national interest at stake, the wars which were the outcome of dynastic jealousies were only gladiatorial contests on a large scale in which none but the combatants and their relatives were deeply interested. The other three castes, Brahmans, Vaisyas, and Sudras, went on with their respective occupations as philosophers, traders, and husbandmen, and looked for protection from the winners in the game, whoever they might be. The description given by Megasthenes of men ploughing and digging the soil in perfect security, while close at hand armies in battle array were fighting desperately, may seem highly coloured, but it gives an insight into social conditions which prevailed in India under the caste system for many centuries after the time of Chandragupta.

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The causes which led to the spiritual and intellectual degradation of India in this period were those which affect every state of culture too long confined within itself and deprived of the stimulant of new ideas which enable it to re-adjust itself to changing conditions of life in every age. Indo-

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GOPURAM OF THE MADHAVA PERUMAL TEMPLE, GANDIKOTA, CUDDAPAH DISTRICT

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Aryan religion, which was based upon a profound philosophy of life, physical and spiritual, became bound up with the personal interests of a corrupt priestly caste which exploited the instinctive piety of the people, and the original simple meanings of its formularies were buried under a mass of ritualistic mummery. The respect paid by the people to monasticism led thousands to adopt it solely for the easy life and prospects of worldly advantages which it held out to its votaries. Philosophy, losing touch with realities, stultified itself with hair-splitting dialectics, and as in the Middle Ages in Europe, religion, superstition, and rascality too often went hand in hand. As a religion Buddhism had become infected with the prevailing sacerdotal vices against which the original teaching of Sâkiya Muni was a protest. His ethical doctrines had long since become the common property of Hinduism, and the Buddha himself was acknowledged as one of the ten incarnations of Vishnu; but as a sect Buddhism was fast declining in the land of its birth, although in China and the Far East it was gaining many adherents.

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But neither the spiritual and intellectual degeneracy of the times nor the frequent local wars caused any diminution in the activity of the builder. On the contrary, the enormous increase of monastic institutions and the encouragement of superstition by a crafty priesthood gave a great impetus to religious foundations, while the constant fighting made the fortification of towns and villages a necessity. Temple building also, by the very degeneracy of religious teaching, received an enormous increase. According to the true spirit of Indo-Aryan religion there were certain worshipful places marked out by nature as the dwellings of the gods, and the temples built there by man were but symbols of the divinity that was immanent in the site. But superstition encouraged the belief that temple building had a virtue of its own, and that the presence of the gods could be compelled by establishing earthly thrones for them in places where their presence was most needed. So every petty Râja who busied himself in robbing and killing his neighbour invoked the blessing of God upon his undertakings by providing sumptuous temples in his capital, or at the tîrth which his Brahman counsellors advised him to patronise, or by providing accommodation for the crowds of monks who were the parasites of every royal court.

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It is the architecture of this decadent period, labelled “Puranic” or “Hindu” by antiquarians, which the European student has been taught to believe is most typical of the Indian mind. The art of every country has passed through the same phase of deterioration when its vital creative energy begins to wane. The undiscerning critic is unable to see that the defects of the qualities of Indian art do not represent its highest ideals. Most of the great temples of India with which Europeans are more or less familiar belong to the period of decadence, either before or after the Muhammadan invasions. Though many of them certainly can stand by themselves as splendid monuments of art, it is impossible to appreciate them rightly without a careful study of the classical models which furnished the motifs of their design. From about the eighth or ninth century, until the time of Akbar, the creative energy of the Indian master-builder kept to the beaten track of Hindu tradition and did little but elaborate upon old ideas.

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In Northern India one city after another grew in architectural splendour with the rise of new dynasties and the creation of new kingdoms. Kanauj had been Harsha’s capital, and its fine gardens and public bathing-tanks attracted the notice of Hiuen Tsang. In the ninth and tenth centuries it became still grander as the capital of the Panchâla kingdom, and when Mahmûd of Ghaznî captured it in a.d. 1018, his iconoclastic fury vented itself upon the destruction of its temples, which were said to number ten thousand. In 1193 Shihâbu-d-Dîn, the first of the Ghûri line which succeeded Mahmûd's dynasty, completed its ruin, and only the mosque which he built with the masonry borrowed from its temples remains to witness its departed glory.

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Gaur, which under the name of Lakhnautî succeeded Pâtaliputra as the principal city of the Magadha country, became one of the capitals of the Pâla and Sena kings of Bengal. It was likewise sumptuously laid out with parks and bathing-tanks and extended for about nine miles along the bank of the Ganges. In 1194 it shared the fate of Kanauj when the last of the Sen dynasty was overthrown by one of Kutbu-d-Dîn's generals, and thereafter its craftsmen were employed in reconstructing its innumerable temples to suit Muhammadan ritual. Thus though the style of the mosques and other buildings which now remain is essentially Hindu and in no sense "Saracenic," as understood architecturally, there is nothing left of the architecture of the place belonging to the period treated in this volume. Benares and Ujjain, though historically two of the oldest and most famous cities of India, and even now of great architectural interest, contain few important buildings of the pre-Muhammadan period, most of them having fallen under the mailed fist of the iconoclast Aurangzîb in the seventeenth century.

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In spite of the wholesale destruction which went on almost unchecked for several centuries, there are still remaining enough of the great buildings of the Hindu decadence to make the architectural reputation of any country. The immense building activity of the period was by no means confined to temples and monasteries. India had always been famous from the days of Chandragupta for its great public highways with fine bridges and sumptuous rest-houses for travellers. The earliest Muhammadan visitors to India, like Alberuni, were amazed at the magnificence of the irrigation works built of massive masonry, and all that was done subsequently by the Mogul rulers was but a revival of the

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KANDARYA MAHÂDEVA TEMPLE, KHAJURÂHO

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tecture of the middle period of the Hindu decadence which was shortly before Mahmûd of Ghaznî's raids. They were probably built, together with a number of magnificent reservoirs formed by building great embankments of masonry across the valley of Bundelkhand, in the course of the century beginning with A.D. 950, when the Chandêlas, who had for a long time been petty feudatory Râjas, became powerful independent sovereigns who played a considerable part in the attempt to repel the Muhammadan invasions. The temples of their capital, now a deserted place lying about 150 miles south-east of Gwalior, escaped entire destruction, and about thirty of them still remain more or less intact. Though the sectarian dedication of them differs, some being Jain, others Saivaite and Vaishnavaite, they are nearly all of the Vishnu type of design, but elaborated with extraordinary richness.

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FIG. 63.—Plan of Kandarya Mahâdeva Temple, Khajurâho. (From Fergusson's " History.")

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Pl. LXXIV, a view of the sikhara of the Kandarya Mahâdeva temple, will show with what magnificent imaginative power and technical skill pinnacle upon pinnacle, crowned with Vishnu's lotus emblem, are piled round the central tower of the shrine to give the impression of the holy mountain upholding the highest heavens. The sculpture in itself is not of the finest art, but nothing could surpass the skill with which details of bewildering complexity are co-ordinated together in masses so as to form a perfectly balanced architectonic unity.

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The plan of the temple (fig. 63) points to the probability that the structure is not all of the same age, but that the sanctum and perhaps the inner four-pillared mandapam belong to a more ancient shrine which was enclosed in the tenth century by the wonderful casket which now forms the exterior, on the same principle as the great Siva temples of Southern India were gradually built round a nucleus of a simple yogi's cell.

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The view of the Chutterbhuj temple (

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CHUTTERBHUJ AND MRITANGA MAHÂDEVA TEMPLES, KHAJURÂHO

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with lotus flowers (fig. 13), in order to provide an open floor space in the centre of the pillared halls for the convenience of public meetings, musical entertainments, nautches, etc., which were held at the temple. Sometimes, as in the larger temples at Khajurâho, separate mandapams were provided for music and dancing. The mand implying any moral depravity. The indecency was generally introduced on account of the popular belief that it was a protection against the evil eye. There was never any obscenity in the sculpture of the sacred images worshipped within the sanctum and elsewhere. The imagers, being often Brahmans, were much more highly cultured than the ordinary craftsmen, and their art was the authorised interpretation of the esoteric philosophy of Hinduism.

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The temples of Khajurâho may be regarded as typical both of the greatness and weakness of the architecture of the north of India in the period immediately preceding the Muhammadan conquest. In the south the decadence was deferred for at least two centuries later, for South Indian architecture hardly passed its zenith before the end of the tenth century. The demoralising effect of the Hun invasions and of Mahmûd of Ghaznî's devastating raids did not penetrate into Southern India, and probably on that account Aryan culture there retained its vitality much longer. The eighth century in the south was the beginning of an intellectual revival heralded by the appearance of the great philosopher Sankarâcharya, the protestant reformer and defender of Vedic religion. His mission, like that of the Buddha, was to free Indo-Aryan religion from the superstitious abuses which had accumulated round it and to propound a new philosophical synthesis of all the spiritual wisdom of Hinduism. But while the Buddha's doctrines were agnostic, Sankarâcharya's religious teaching was essentially pantheistic and his philosophy set forth a rationalistic theory of the First Cause based upon the teaching of the Upanishads and of the Bhagavad Gîta.

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Both on religious and philosophical grounds he was an uncompromising opponent of the Buddhism of his day, though it differed fundamentally from the original creed of the Hînayâna school; but he sought to reconcile the differences of

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DOME OF MANDAPAM, KHANWAR MATH TEMPLE, KHAJURÂHO

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DOME OF MANDAPAM, VIMALA SAHA TEMPLE, MT. ÂBÛ

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all the Brahmanical sects which took their stand upon the Vedas. Sankarâcharya may be regarded as the founder of the modern Saivaite cult, as Râmanûja, his opponent in the twelfth century, was the protagonist of modern Vaishnavism.

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Sankarâcharya was a Brahman of the Nambudri class, and is supposed to have lived about the end of the eighth and beginning of the ninth centuries. His birthplace according to one account was in a village of the Malabar district, according to another at Chidambaram. There are numerous legends of the miraculous events attending his birth and early years. After some years of studentship at an âsrama on the banks of the Narmada under a famous Guru called Govinda, he renounced marriage and the life of a householder and took the vow of a sannyâsin. Then, like the Buddha, he went to Benares, where he gathered round him a number of disciples and probably wrote his most important works, the commentaries on the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gîta. He was still a young man when, accompanied by great numbers of his chelas, he started on his great pilgrimage throughout India, preaching the philosophy of the Vedanta, denouncing the immoral ritualistic practices of the Saktas and other sects, and refuting the arguments of the pandits of different schools who opposed him. To establish his teaching on a permanent footing he organised an order of sannyâsins open to all castes, after the model of the Buddhist Sangha, which was divided into ten grades, and with the help of his many royal adherents he built and endowed a number of monastic institutions as training centres for the exponents of reformed Hinduism. The chief Guru of the Sringeri Math, the most famous of his monasteries in Southern India, continues to be regarded as the spiritual head of the Saivaite cult to the present day. When Sankarâcharya’s mission had been thus accomplished, he retired to the Himâlayas, and, according to tradition, died at Kedarnath, one of the most venerated of the Siva tîrths, in A.D. 828, at the age of thirty-eight.¹

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¹ For further details of Sankarâcharya's life and work, see "Sri Sankarâcharya," by C. N. Krishnasamy Aiyar, M.A., and Pandit Sitanath Tattvabushan's explanation of his philosophy (Natesan & Co., Madras).

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As before mentioned, the architecture of Southern India from the ninth to the eleventh centuries bears witness to the vitality of Indo-Aryan culture at this period, and Sankarâcharya's influence was so lasting that even when Râmanûja subsequently succeeded in creating a diversion in favour of Vaishnavism, the temple buildings of the south continued to adopt the Saivaite forms of architecture in preference to the proper symbolism of the Vaishnavaite sect. Thus the great Vaishnava temple of Srirangam and the Vaikuntha Perumal temple at Conjeveram ² are designed entirely as Siva shrines, and differ only from the traditional type in the symbolism of the images worshipped there.

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² See Fergusson's "History" (revised edit.), vol. i. pp. 359 and 371.

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The records of the Chola king of the tenth century, Parântaka I, in connection with the mode of election for village councils, have already been mentioned. The most powerful king of his line, Râjarâja the Great (A.D. 985–1018), conquered Ceylon and became suzerain of nearly the whole of Southern India. He built the stately Siva temple at Tanjore to commemorate his victories, but other temples of lesser note belonging to his or his son's reign are more interesting on account of their superb sculpture. Pls. LXXVIII–IX illustrate some of the wall shrines of a temple at Gangaikonda-cholapuram in the Trichinopoly district which show South Indian sculpture at its finest. The magnificent bronze images of this period, examples of which are preserved in the Madras Museum, are among the greatest achievements of Indian art.

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The classic dignity of the mandapam of the temple at

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A. THE DANCE OF SIVA

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B. GAṆEŚA

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SCULPTURED PANELS FROM TEMPLE AT GANGAI-KONDA-CHŌḶAPURAM, TRICHINOPOLY DISTRICT

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Dârâsuram in the Tanjore district (Pl. LXXX) may be said to reflect something of the austere intellectuality of Sankarâcharya's teaching. The strength and simplicity of the structural design and the comparative reticence of the ornament stand in striking contrast with the almost riotous profusion of the Khajurâho temples, though the magnificent *tout ensemble* of the latter may be more impressive. These two buildings are contemporary documents which give a faithful record of the life of the times when the intellectual and spiritual centre of Aryan India had moved from the northern to the southern provinces.

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It is to this period that Fergusson assigns the most delusive of all his classifications of Indian architecture, the "Chalukyan style." His definitions of it are so vague that it is difficult to make anything intelligible out of them. He is nearest the mark in describing it as being locally "halfway between the Dravidian and northern styles," for most of his examples are a composite form of Vishnu and Siva temples—that is, the Vishnu sikhara is crowned by the Siva dome instead of by the amalaka—a natural consequence of the fact that the districts in which he locates the style lie just between the special spheres of influence of the Vaishnavaite and Saivaite cults in the north and south of India respectively.

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The temple at Ittagi in the Hyderabad dominions (Pl. LXXXI), which Fergusson cites as one of the most typical of the style, is evidently only an elaboration of the Vishnu temple at Pattadakal (Pl. LIX), which he labels "Indo-Aryan." The "star-shaped" plan of some of the vimânas given as examples is also only an elaboration of the circular plan of the stûpa and a structural application of the symbolism of the eight- or sixteen-petalled lotus. The circular vimâna, technically called *vesara*, was by no means confined to the provinces described as the location of the style.

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Nor are richly carved doorways and pillars a peculiarity of these provinces, and if technical distinctions like that of pillars turned in a lathe are to be catalogued, every one of the provinces of India must be assigned its own style, for every locality had its own school of craftsmanship with certain technical traditions peculiar to itself. In this case the local school developed a special skill in turning massive stone columns upon a vertical lathe, and consequently every temple in those districts was ornamented with elaborately turned pillars as specimens of its skilled craftsmanship. The mandapam of the temple of Rangaswami in the Dharwar district of the Bombay Presidency (Pl. LXXXII) is a fine example of this local peculiarity; but though admirable as a technical achievement, it is not altogether an artistic success on account of the bewildering repetition of circular mouldings by which the craftsmen sought to display their skill in turning.

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When the fundamental ideas which underlie the structure and symbolism of Indian architecture are properly understood, it will be easy for the student to analyse the innumerable variations of traditional themes which are to be found in other great buildings and which must be left unnoticed in this work. India, in spite of its heterogeneous sectarian and racial composition, is spiritually and intellectually one country. That is a fact clearly stated in its architecture. The artificial boundaries which antiquarians have sought to establish are academic conventions which leave the heart of the matter untouched, for they are without either æsthetic, scientific, or historic foundation. The Indian synthesis must be understood before any of the elements of its composition can be intelligently analysed.

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SIVA AND PARVATI, TEMPLE AT GANGAI-KONDA-CHOLAPURAM, TRICHINOPOLY DISTRICT

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