The Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India: A Study of Indo-Aryan Civilisation c6: Introduction
The Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India: A Study of Indo-Aryan Civilisation c6
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- English
Introduction
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ONCE upon a time a Botanist, very learned but with rather defective eyesight, went travelling in far-distant lands. And he came to a great primeval forest with lordly trees, to whose branches many kinds of creepers and curious plants were clinging. Wishing to know what kind of trees these were, he began to gather the leaves and flowers of the creepers and parasites which had intertwined themselves with the branches, without noticing that they were not the real growth of those great forest trees. And he brought them home and dried them carefully, gave them long Latin names, and sent them to other men of science as leaves and flowers of the very rare and curious trees which he had found. So he became famous as a great discoverer.
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But soon afterwards another traveller, not learned but loving the beauty of the forest, went the same way and saw the same lordly trees. And at first he too thought he had never seen such trees before; but, looking at them closer and pulling the creepers and undergrowth aside, he saw that the trees were really of the same species as those which grew in his native land—such as the oak, chestnut, the elm and ash tree—only in a tropical climate they grew larger and more luxuriantly. The Botanist, when he heard of this, smiled scornfully and said: "That fellow knows nothing about trees. Did I not examine every branch and give the trees their proper names? Of course, the leaves and flowers I took were of the creepers and parasites; but the trees themselves are rotten and useless. The forest should be cut down, so that the soil may be ploughed and used for growing things that are useful and good for food."
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And the King who ruled over all those lands, wishing to know the truth, for he was building a new city and wanted good timber for it, sent some of his servants who were learned in forest lore to inquire into the matter. And they came back to the King and said: "It is true, O King, that these trees are of the same kind as those we have always used for building in our country: they are very old, but sound and fit for use. The forest should not be cut down, for if the parasites, creepers and undergrowth which are spoiling the trees are removed, the forest will be of great value to the State and give good timber for building many cities." What the King did belongs to another story; but as he was a good and wise King, I do not think he had the forest cut down as the Botanist advised.
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I must leave the interpretation of the parable to my readers. The present work only deals with city building incidentally, as part of a much greater subject—the history of the civilisation introduced into India by the Aryan race and its relation to empire-building. It does not profess to give more than an outline of its fundamental ideas. The materials dealt with are mainly those furnished by the ancient and medieval monuments of India—an open book for those who can read it, but one which has remained closely sealed for Europeans even to the present day. Fergusson, in his great pioneer work, "The History of Indian and Eastern Architecture," made an attempt to interpret it at a time when the difficulties of the subject were immeasurably greater than they are now. It says much for his genius as a historian that he seized at once the great cardinal truth stated so admirably in his introduction—one that cannot be repeated too often: "Architecture in India is still a living art, practised on the principles which caused its wonderful development in Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and there, consequently, and there alone, the student of architecture has a chance of seeing the real principles of the art in action. In Europe, at the present day, architecture is practised in a manner so anomalous and abnormal that few, if any, have hitherto been able to shake off the influence of a false system and to see that the art of ornamental building can be based upon principles of common sense; and that when so practised the result not only is but must be satisfactory. Those who have an opportunity of seeing what perfect buildings the uneducated natives of India produce, will easily understand how success may be achieved; while those who observe what failures the best educated and most talented architects in Europe frequently perpetrate, may by a study of Indian models easily see why this must inevitably be the result. It is only in India that the two systems can be seen practised side by side—the educated and intellectual European failing because his principles are wrong, the feeble and uneducated native as invariably succeeding because his principles are right.”
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Fergusson did not always rise above prejudices which are as strong now as in his own day, and the keynote of his writings on Indian art was that “it cannot, of course, be for one moment contended that India ever reached the intellectual supremacy of Greece or the moral greatness of Rome.” But, making allowances for this, the statement quoted above is as profoundly true in every respect now as when it was written over fifty years ago. If Fergusson’s followers had taken it for their starting-point, they might have added much to our knowledge of one of the most important chapters of the world’s history. But with a blindness characteristic of imitators they have quietly buried with his bones the one vital truth which illumines Fergusson’s pages, and have only taken for their texts the fallacies which Fergusson, if he had lived in the present day, would have been the first to reject—his classifications of "styles." The history of Indian architecture has therefore remained where Fergusson left it—not a history of Indian life, but a Museum of Antiquities wrongly labelled.
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"Bureaucracy to me in India," said a distinguished historian of English politics, formerly Secretary of State for India, "is a great and splendid machine performing the most difficult task ever committed to the charge of any nation. Show me where it fails—no sensible man would hold it perfect in every respect—show me from day to day any point where bureaucracy has been at fault, and do you suppose I will not show my resentment at the fault and will not do all I can to remedy it?"¹
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¹ Mr. John Morley, M.P. (Lord Morley of Blackburn), *The Times* Parliamentary Report, Feb. 1, 1908.
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There is much food for reflection in the fact that the abiding cause of the failings—such as they are—of bureaucracy in India has always been, and still is, its complete ignorance of Indo-Aryan history—the only history of India which really matters. It is an axiom in British Imperial administration to trust the man on the spot. In India he is the District Officer, the eyes and ears of the Government of India, dispensing British justice under the village banyan tree. His knowledge of India is certainly extensive and peculiar—only his India is not Aryan India. It is aboriginal or prehistoric, Muhammadan India, and the India of the Government files. The India which counts most in history, Aryan India, is not on the file, and under these circumstances the District Officer would be more than human if he knew much of it.
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It might be supposed that the educated Indian, born in an Indian village, must know his India if any one does. But neither is his point of view, as a rule, Indo-Aryan India. He does not read the open book of Indian art for himself—he trusts to the Anglo-Indian interpretation of it. He learns his history mostly from official text-books, and if he is an official, from the Government files.
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A bare recital of the historical fallacies which form the basis of European histories of India would fill a large volume, and the omission of essential facts another one. Perhaps one illustration will be sufficient. In the Session of 1913 the Under-Secretary of State for India, when presenting the Indian Budget to Parliament, explained that the chief difficulty of British government in India lay in the fact that the great mass of the people "still lived in the fifth century A.D." These words may express a profound historical truth, but only when taken in a sense the very opposite of that which they were intended to convey. Mr. Montagu wished to paint a picture of the Cimmerian darkness in which the Indian masses dwelt, but not to revive memories of the time when Indo-Aryan civilisation reached its zenith; when Vikrâmaditya, the hero of Indian romance and legend, had saved the liberties of Aryan India from the savage barbarians who were ravaging Europe; and when Indian culture was the inspiration of the civilised world. An impartial historian might well consider that the greatest triumph of British administration would be to restore to India all that she enjoyed in the fifth century A.D.
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Many explanations have been given of the causes of Indian unrest, but none seem to take into account that which has always been the great disturbing cause in the history of India. It has never been a racial question. India has been as happy and contented under Scythian or Mogul rulers as under those of Aryan race. It has not been a religious question, for no people have been more open-minded in religious thought than Indians. But ever since the Aryans made India prosperous and content with the wonderful organization of their village communities and the splendid culture which grew out of them, those who have tampered with it, knowingly or ignorantly, have had to meet the active or passive resistance of all—to whatever race or sect they might belong—who had learned to love the freedom of Indo-Aryan institutions.
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It may seem paradoxical to those who have been taught as schoolboys that the basis of Indian polity has always been what is called "oriental despotism," to speak of India as a land of freedom. "Oriental despotism" is one of those historical fallacies upon which British administrators of India are nurtured. Of despotism like that of Imperial Rome, or of the Greek Tyrants, there are very few recorded instances in Indian history, either before Muhammadan times or after. One was the Hun king, Mihiragula, but his tyranny was short-lived. His freedom-loving Aryan subjects rebelled and escorted him beyond the confines of India. Aurangzîb was a tyrant of the Western pattern. He threw India into chaos and shattered the Mogul Empire.
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There were two things which most impressed the Greek Megasthenes in what he learnt of Indian politics as ambassador at the Court of Chandragupta Maurya—first, that "it was a great thing in India that all Indians were free," and, secondly, that the power of Indian kings was restrained by the "Five Great Assemblies" of the people. Taking into consideration that the Indian franchise was the franchise of intellect, not of wealth or physical force, and that it was limited to those who wore the sacred thread, *i.e.* the three highest castes and skilled craftsmen attached to the temple service, India, down to the time of Aurangzîb, probably enjoyed as much political liberty as any European country before the eighteenth century. Evidently the Indian system of serfdom seemed to Megasthenes like freedom compared with the helotage of Greece, and at its worst it may be questioned whether it was more cruel and tyrannical than the feudal system of Europe.
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It is true that Indo-Aryan liberty was not of the crude Western type represented by the formula "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité." It was liberty for every man, whether king or peasant, to follow his own Dharma—the Dharma being that which long tradition and the wisest of Aryan law-givers, who knew Indian history and the Indian people, had taught every man within the Aryan pale to regard as his duty to God, the State, his household, and himself. And the constitution which preserved this fine ideal of liberty was the Aryan miniature Republic, with its Council of Five, which was the political unit of Indo-Aryan Government.
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The Dharma of Indian Emperors and Kings was to maintain this constitution. Those who did so were honoured as Aryans, whatever their race or religion might be. Those who trampled it underfoot, even those of the purest Aryan stock, were written down in Indian history as Mhlechchas—barbarians, and enemies of God and man. The Kshatriya warriors fought for this freedom—not merely for their cattle and pastures—as valiantly as their Western brothers fought at Marathon. No people were more willing to accept alien rule under these conditions. The Rajputs who defended Chitor heroically against Akbar, believing him an enemy of Aryan traditions, built him a throne as Vishnu's Vicegerent on Earth¹ when they knew him as their friend; and the Mogul dynasty had no more staunch and devoted adherents so long as it remained true to its Dharma.
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¹ In the Dîwân-î-Khâs at Fatehpur-Sîkrî. See "Handbook to Agra and the Taj," by the author (Longmans).
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The history of India is the history of Aryan institutions, traditions, and culture. But what does the Anglo-Indian historian say about them? He digs up the names of forgotten dynasties—of those who failed in their Dharma—but the "Imperial Gazetteer of India," in its summary of Indian history, does not even mention the Aryan village community. Indo-Aryan history has dropped off the official files. The same authority declares that there is little Indian sculpture to be called art after the fourth century A.D. Similarly in its history of Indian architecture, all of Fergusson' anatomy¹—more practical than that which is taught in Western academies—has finally disposed of the old European misconceptions of that subject. Yet Western anatomy and perspective are still taught in Government schools as the correct formulæ for art education in India.
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¹ “Some Notes on Indian Anatomy,” by Abanindro Nath Tagore, C.I.E. Published by the Indian Society of Oriental Art, Calcutta.
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With greater rashness I called attention in 1901 to another error in the summary of the District Officer’s knowledge of India, the statement in the then current edition of the “Imperial Gazetteer” that “the greatest industry in India, after agriculture, is the spinning and weaving carried on in power-loom mills.” I showed, by facts and figures taken from the census of India, that this industry was of infinitely less economic importance to India than one which was omitted altogether from official statistics of industry, although carried on under the eyes of every District Officer—the village hand-weaving industry. That brought me into departmental disgrace at once. Only a sentimentalist and idealist would think of mentioning an industry which was moribund and doomed to disappear before the march of Western progress. What did 5,000,000 village hand-weavers matter when 350,000 coolies were working the latest Western machinery in the mills of Bombay and Calcutta? However, as the result of my indiscretion, during the last thirteen years some knowledge of the economics of Indian village life has been slowly trickling on to the official files.
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Two years ago I made another offering at the shrine of Truth by calling public attention to the work of the living Indian master-builder, whose existence is ignored by the “Imperial Gazetteer.” Departmentalism became seriously alarmed. He was not on the file—the District Officer had not seen him. He must be extinct, for Sir Lepel Griffin, K.C.S.I., when Agent to the Governor-General for Central India, had written that “the love for and practice of noble and beautiful architecture seems to have died out of India previous to the advent of the English.”¹ Official experts said he was a to revise it. By the irony of fate, it seems quite probable that the *deus ex machinâ* who will secure this long-deferred reform for India will be the English craftsman who is now in revolt against a system which, as Ruskin said, makes him the most pitiful form of slave—a mere machine with its valves smoothed with heart's blood instead of oil, when he might be a living, progressive, and happy human being.¹
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In questioning most sacred thing in India—the fountain head of all her culture and religion, that its plan was built into the fabric of Indian temples, and that its daily life and very name were consecrated in Indian religious ritual by the tradition of five thousand years.
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And it has never since occurred to Anglo-Indian historians that the great upheaval of 1857, when Hindu and Musalmân joined in a desperate Europeans like these machines, just as they like gramophones, pianolas, oleographs, and other mechanical devices, may be taken too seriously. The renaissance of Indian culture, of which there are many evident signs, is indirectly the effect of British administration. It might become its greatest strength, if instead of the pinchbeck Imperialism and spurious Nationalism which are now so rampant everywhere, a wiser policy informed by years handed down an oral tradition of the highest philosophy and the finest literature are not illiterate; though they use not pen and ink, they are not less cultured or intelligent than the majority of those who enjoy the franchise in Western countries. But when their own instruments of culture are taken from them, and replaced by others which they cannot or will not use, they tend to become illiterate and uncultured both in an Eastern and Western sense. The Anglo-Indian pedagogue has been sterilising Indian soil, so that he may plant in it seeds of a Western culture which will not grow. The Anglo-Indian statesman digs up the roots of Indian civilisation and expects to maintain law and order upon principles totally foreign to the Indian mind. The Indian masses are unfitted for Western forms of self-government, and will remain so as long as the British Raj endures; but they are not unfitted for self-governing functions which their fathers (and mothers) exercised for countless generations while the British Raj was yet unborn.
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The study of Indo-Aryan civilisation throws much needed light upon another vital question—Indian religion. Christianity will not suffer by a sympathetic attitude towards Indian religious convictions. Can the Christian teacher who regards his duty otherwise be said to be fulfilling his Master's mission in the Vineyard where Christ Himself laboured? It is a fatal misconception to consider Aryan India as idolatrous or polytheistic. No religion has been more careful to discriminate between the Symbol and the Reality behind it than that which has been taught by Indo-Aryan teachers; and if its principles have not been fully understood by the masses of the people, can it be said that Christianity has been more successful in this respect in its own special field? But that the teachings of Aryan India have been far more successful than is generally supposed is proved by a remarkable paragraph in the Indian Census Report for 1901, one of those flashes of insight which occasionally appear in Anglo-Indian records. The Census Commissioner had asked the Superintendents to make special inquiries into the actual beliefs of the ordinary man, his standards of right and wrong, and his ideas of a Supreme Deity. The result is summarised in the words of Mr. Burn, I.C.S., one of the Superintendents, as follows :
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“The general result of my inquiries is that the great majority of Hindus have a firm belief in One Supreme God, called Bhagwan, Parameshwar, Ishwar, or Narain. Mr. Baillie made some inquiries which showed that this involved a clear idea of a single personal God, and I am inclined to think that this is distinctly characteristic of Hindus as a whole.”¹
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¹ Census Report for 1901, vol. i. p. 363.
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If Indian art throws any light upon Indian history, religion, sociology and the inner working of the Indian mind, it demands the careful study of all who are concerned in the administration of India, whatever their functions may be. One of the greatest artists of our age, M. Rodin, has truly said that the word “artist” in its widest acceptation means the man who takes pleasure in his work. My aims as an art teacher will be fulfilled if through my interpretations of Indian art I succeed in adding a new intellectual pleasure to Anglo-Indian work and in strengthening the bonds of sympathy between the Eastern and Western branches of that great Aryan family which has done so much for the advancement of civilisation.
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*June*, 1914.
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Map of INDIA Showing the Principal Buddhist Localities.