The Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India: A Study of Indo-Aryan Civilisation c8: Chapter II

The Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India: A Study of Indo-Aryan Civilisation c8

Language: English

Chapter II

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BUILDING BYE-LAWS—VILLAGE DWELLINGS—THE ASSEMBLY-HALL—THE ADMINISTRATION OF VILLAGES AND TOWNS—CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT IN ANCIENT INDIA—VILLAGE WALLS AND GATEWAYS

AMONG the building bye-laws laid down in the Mânasâra are the following: "Schools and buildings for religious study should be erected at the angular points of villages," *i.e.* they should be in the quietest places, out of the main traffic and near the least-used entrances of the village. A *dharamsâla* for travellers and pilgrims, with water and other accommodation, ought to be built at the S.E. approach to the village.

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"Private houses or mansions may consist of from one to nine stories; but this is to be determined by the rank of the person for whom they are built. The lower classes must never construct their houses of more than a single storey."

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"As far as practicable the height of buildings in the same street should correspond. Buildings of the same number of stories should correspond in height."

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"The front, middle, and back doors of a house should be on the same level, and in a straight line with each other. The outer door should be placed not exactly in the middle of the façade, but a little to one side. The usual rule is that in a house ten paces in length, the entrance should be between five on the right and four on the left. The same rule should be observed in the gates of temples. A *vedikâ*,¹ or raised seat, should be constructed on each side of the door."

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The quaint representations of buildings given in the Bharhut and Sânchî sculptures will give some idea of the aspect

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A. THATCHED COTTAGE, FRONT VIEW

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B. THATCHED COTTAGE, SIDE VIEW

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C. INTERIOR OF THATCHED ROOF, SHOWING BAMBU CONSTRUCTION

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D. ENLARGED DETAIL, SHOWING BAMBUS AND MATTING UNDER THE THATCH

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E. CABIN OF A BENGALI BOAT

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MODERN BENGALI COTTAGES AND ROOFS

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grain-seller is emptying a measureful. Outside, his assistant is waiting with his load of two baskets slung on a pole. There is a small window in the centre of the gable wall, and a larger one beneath it. The rooms of the front cottage, on either side of the doorway, are also lighted by windows in the centre.

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FIG. 7.—Seven-raftered Bambu Roof of Modern Thatched Bengali Cottage.

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The roofs of the cottages at Bharhut are barrel-shaped, with semicircular gables, as in Pl. I, B, or built with pointed gables as in fig. A of the same plate. The exact material used to cover them is not quite clear, but similar forms of roof and the methods of construction applicable to them survive in the Bengali thatched cottage of the present day (Pl. II, and figs. 7 and 8).

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FIG. 8.—Plan of Fig. 7.

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It is necessary to explain that the peculiar double curvature given to these Bengali roofs and the drawing-out of the eaves at the four corners of the cottage are not mere freaks of the unpractical Oriental builder, but thoroughly scientific inventions designed for throwing off heavy rain. A thatched roof of the straight-lined European type could hardly be made water-tight for a long time in the torrential monsoon rains of the lower Ganges valley. The same reason applies to the more permanent roofs of brick and plaster, designed on similar lines, used in the old temples and mosques of Bengal.

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The progressive European, rather than learn anything from the Hindu builder, endures patiently the leaky roofs which the British engineer puts over his head in the plains of Bengal. It is enough for him that they are British, or as near British as the ignorant Hindu can make them.¹

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¹ It would be interesting to know how much is spent annually by the Public Works Department and by municipalities in Bengal in repairing roofs of official buildings “designed” after the regulation departmental patterns which the Bengali builder has to copy; and the annual average rainfall inside the roofs of these buildings would be the most curious of meteorological records, as I have had occasion to observe.

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The derivation of the vaulted roofs of the great Buddhist chapter-houses, the stone vaults of Akbar’s Rajput master-builders, and those of the mosques at Gaur, from these Indian village prototypes is quite easy to follow.²

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² See below, p. 91. Compare the sketch of the interior of a five-raftered Bengali thatched roof (Pl. II) with the vaulting of the Sonâ Masjid, Gaur (“Indian Architecture,” Plate XLIII, A); and the plan of the seven-raftered roof, fig. 8, with that of the stone-vaulted roof of the Buland Darwâza, Fatehpur-Sîkrî (“Indian Architecture,” p. 166, fig. 39), or with the roof of Ibrahîm’s tomb at Bijâpûr, *ibid.* Pl. LXXXVII.

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I think, however, it is a great error to suppose that thatched or wooden roofs were universal in the India of Asoka’s time, merely because the sculptures of Bharhut, Sânchî, and Amarâvatî give no indication of any other. Professor Rhys Davids tells us that the old Pâli writings describe great houses with a flat roof called the *uparî-pâsâdatala*, “where the owner sat, usually under a pavilion, which answered the purpose at once of a drawing-room, an office, and a dining-hall.”³ Such houses—with the entrance through a large gateway, to the right and left of which were storehouses leading into an inner courtyard surrounded by living-apartments—correspond exactly with the terraced-roof mansions of modern Rajputana; and there is every reason to believe that in localities where wood was scarce, brick and stone houses of this type were built in Asoka’s time as they are to-day.

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³ “Buddhist India,” pp. 68-9.

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A. "THE PALACE OF THE GODS," BHARHUT SCULPTURES

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B. A MODERN HOUSE, RAJPUTANA

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ANCIENT AND MODERN HOUSES IN RAJPUTANA

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Three-storied houses or palaces are frequently represented in Asokan sculpture. The general arrangement of the "Palace of the Gods" (Pl. III, A), which may be taken for a crude representation of a typical Indian mansion about 250 B.C., does not differ much from that of a well-to-do family house in modern Rajputana. There are the familiar *chhajas* (verandah roofs used as cornices), to protect the walls from rain and the burning heat of the midday sun, which are so conspicuous a feature in modern Indian buildings. The lower storey has open verandahs with the vedikâ, where the men of the household can sit to transact business or converse with their friends. The first floor has balconies with Bengali arches and screened openings, where doubtless the ladies sat as they do in the India of to-day. The upper storey, or attic, corresponds to the modern Rajput open-terraced roof, with its domed pavilions, or *chhattris*, only here the chhattri apparently covers the whole roof. It is probable that houses of this type were built in the third century B.C., not only in towns, but in the larger villages, whose inhabitants belonged to the higher classes of Indo-Aryan society.

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Besides domestic and religious buildings, the Indian village, as before mentioned, had sometimes its Assembly-hall or Mote-house, where the village council met, as well as school buildings and rest-houses for travellers and pilgrims. These were generally pillared pavilions, which were the prototypes of the Dîwân-i-Âm, or public audience-hall, of the Mogul Emperors. A double-storied pavilion of this kind from the Bharhut sculptures is shown in Pl. IV, A. In this case the building is a religious one, but it must be remembered that all Indian religious buildings had their secular or domestic prototypes. A royal audience-pavilion of about the seventh century A.D., from a fresco at Ajantâ (Pl. IV, B), with a chhaja¹ and flat roof, closely resembles the Mogul palace buildings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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¹ The stone or wooden chhaja is derived from the bambu-and-mat or thatched lean-to roof of a verandah.

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Though the ancient Indo-Aryan village was essentially a self-governing community, managing its own domestic concerns and only paying to a central authority the customary *bali*, or tribute, due to it, the principle of co-operation for the purpose of carrying out larger public works which were beyond the means of single villages was always recognised. Not only were the village artisans liable to be called upon for the King's service in war or peace, but the villages united of their own accord to build assembly-halls, pilgrims' rest-houses, and irrigation works, to lay out and plant public parks, and to keep in order the main roads of the district.¹

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¹ Rhys Davids, "Buddhist India," p. 49.

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The wonderful organisation of Chandragupta's empire, of which Megasthenes gives us glimpses, was not the creation of the Mauryan statesmen, but the centralisation of the social and economic activities of the self-governing Indo-Aryan village communities. Pâtaliputra itself was only an aggregation of Indian villages joined together by spacious parks (the sacred groves) and stately avenues. The administration of the city by a board of thirty commissioners,² divided into six committees of five members each, was only an enlargement of the elected *panchâyat*, or Council of Five, assisted by a staff of permanent officials—the headman, accountant, watchman, banker, master-craftsman, schoolmaster, story-teller, and musicians—by which every Indo-Aryan village managed its own affairs. An inscription of the tenth century a.d., lately discovered in Southern India, prescribes the qualifications of voters and the mode of election for a municipal commission, similar to that of Chandragupta's city, consisting of thirty members—one for each ward of the town.³

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² See Vincent Smith's "Early History of India," pp. 125-7.

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³ *See infra*, pp. 172-4.

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A. DOUBLE-STORIED PAVILION, BHARHUT SCULPTURES

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B. WOODEN PAVILION, FROM A FRESCO-PAINTING AT AJANTÂ

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PILLARED PAVILIONS IN ANCIENT INDIA

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The King's Road, which ran from Pâtaliputra to the northwest frontier of India, was the main highway of commerce, linking together the hundreds of single villages planned on the principles of the Silpa-sâstras, which lay between the seat of the central government and the farthest confines of the empire. It was not the work of Chandragupta's government, but of the Indo-Aryan village communities. And there can hardly be any doubt that the construction of the great irrigation works of Chandragupta's time, and all the regulations for using them and keeping them in order, were natural developments of the traditional organisation of these communities, and not any new departure in the economic life of India.

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For imperial administrative and political purposes villages in ancient and medieval India were grouped together in tens, twenties, hundreds, and thousands, each group acknowledging a Râja—the over-lord or chief of a tribe—whose duty it was to protect the village lands and the public roads under his control from robbers and to defend them from other enemies, in return for which each village or group of villages paid him a certain *vali*, or tribute. But the principle of mutual obligation between the rulers and ruled was recognised to such an extent that in case the officers of the over-lord who were responsible for public safety failed to detect and punish offenders, the overlord himself was expected to make good from his treasury any loss which individuals or the community might suffer. Whether this obligation was generally fulfilled by the central authority is another matter—the fact that this was one of the implications in *noblesse oblige* shows that the democratic principle of government was fully understood in ancient India.

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The duty of loyal devotion to the supreme authority, which is always strongly insisted upon in the sacred literature of India, was something quite different to the Western notion of the divine right of kings. The principle of constitutional government for which the nations of Europe struggled throughout the Middle Ages until the present day was the essence of Indo-Aryan policy. The King was the Vicegerent of Vishnu on earth in so far and as long as he remained the constituted Defender of the Faith—of the laws, customs, and religion of Aryan civilisation.

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The English schoolboy is taught to believe that all Oriental monarchs were like Darius of Persia, and that the Greeks were the sole defenders of liberty against Oriental despotism. The Indo-Aryans

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NORTHERN GATEWAY OF THE SÂNCHÎ STÛPA

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“Go and build villages on the line of march!” When the Bôsat, his minister, had finished his preparations he said to the Râja, “‘ inverts the whole sequence of their derivation. The rail surrounding a Buddhist or Jain stûpa, and placed there to protect it from the influence It is evidently part of the defences of the town or fortress-palace of King Suddhodana. Above the toran, or torans (for it must have been doubled to carry the superstructure), is built a guard-house, with the usual barrel-vaulted roof and framed balustrade, made in the same way as the wooden walls of the town. This gateway is clearly the wooden prototype of the guard-houses of later Hindu and Muhammadan fortresses, with their *naubat-khâna*, or music-gallery, where the royal drummers announced the King’s going and coming at any state function, and sounded the alarm in case of attack.

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TOWN GATEWAY IN ANCIENT INDIA

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FIG. 9.—Plan of the Great Sânchî Stûpa (from Fergusson’s “History”).

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But the origin of the toran may be taken farther back than the time of Buddha to the gateway of the Vedic Indian village. Here its practical use would also be for defence, and as a watch-tower upon which the village sentinels could easily clamber to survey the surrounding country and to give the alarm in case of a sudden raid upon their crops or cattle. There was magic in the swastika, which is introduced into the gateways of Bharhut and Sânchî (see plan, fig. 9), because it was a practical device for strengthening the defence of the village entrances. The symbolical meaning, as an indication of the path of the sun across the heavens, and the propitious direction for the priest or pious pilgrim to circumambulate, grew into it gradually with the evolution of Aryan religious ritual.

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The construction of the wooden rail, and of the stone imitation of it, is shown in fig. 10. It may be observed that the form into which the horizontal bars is shaped is exactly that which is used in the traditional timber houses of Norway. It is, in fact, the simplest method for ensuring good horizontal joints in the walls of wooden houses.

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FIG. 10.—Rail of Stûpa No. 2 at Sânchî (from Fergusson's “History”).

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Brick and stone walls in an ancient Indian village or town were constructed either on the principle of the “embattled fret” (fig. 11), which follows closely the outline of the timber railing, or in a wavy line like the edge of a lotus leaf, or “like the wreath of waves rising in the milky ocean.”¹ The latter type can be seen in the village plan called Padmâka, described in the Mânasâra (fig. 4). It was probably built of mud or brick, but might have been simply a bambu fence bent round a line of upright posts.

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¹ Ummagga Jâtaka, p. 98. It may be noticed that the whiteness of houses and walls is often referred to in Sanskrit and Pâli literature, showing that the practice of plastering brick, stone, and clay walls with fine polished chunam was common in ancient India. The plaster was a protection against damp in the rainy season and kept the walls cool in the hot season.

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FIG. 11.—Plan of Brick or Stone Wall.

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Pl. VII, B, from the Amarâvatî sculptures, shows a town gateway built of brick, with a wooden guard-house over it of the same description as that given in Pl. VI. This is the prototype of later Indian fortress-gateways like that of the Purana Kîla at Delhi (Pl. VII, C), and the Hâthî Pôl of Akbar’s Fort at Agra.

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The origin of another important feature in later Indian architecture is also stated in

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B. FORTRESS GATEWAY, AMARĀVATĪ SCULPTURES (*circa* FIRST CENTURY A.D.)

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A. FORTRESS WALL, BHARHUT SCULPTURES (250 B.C.)

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C. PURANA KĪLA, DELHI

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FORTRESS WALLS AND GATES

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the gateways of the ancient Indo-Aryan village—the gopuram or gateway of Indian temples: both those which Fergusson classifies as “Indo-Aryan”—a type which now belongs to Northern India—and those which he labelled “Dravidian.” The former, Pl. VIII, a, with the naubat-khâna over it, roofed in Bengali fashion, is clearly related to the town gateway of ancient India built of brick or stone with a wooden superstructure, as in Pl. VI.

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A careful study of the façade of the great hall or *mandapam* of the temple of Virûpâksha at Pattadakal (Pl. VIII, b), one of the earliest of the so-called Dravidian type now extinct, will show a similar relationship between it and the fortified town walls of ancient India. The treatment of the walls, which are divided at regular intervals into pilastered bays each containing the shrine of a deity, is structurally based upon the “embattled fret,” like the brick and stone walls which surrounded an Indo-Aryan fortified village or town: the walls are crowned with an entablature which is a close adaptation in stone of the ancient superstructure with the vaulted roof, which gave shelter to its Kshatriya defenders. Even the sun-windows of the traditional Bengali design are reproduced as decorative features on the stone chhaja. Over the entrance-porch, which may be taken as the type of an ancient Indian town gateway in localities where stone was the usual building material, the naubat-khâna appears as usual, only employed here for purely ornamental purposes.

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In the Râmâyana the word gopuram is used in the sense of a town gateway, and the meaning of it, “cow fort,” or shelter, also gives a clue to its secular origin in the daily life of an Indian village. The medieval temple gopurams are not cattle-shelters; but it is easy to imagine that in the ancient Aryan village communities the gate through which the cattle went to their pastures would be called the “cow-gate,” and that in case of a hostile raid they would be first driven to the "cow-fort" for safety. And as the routine of daily life became recognised as the *dharma* of Aryan religion, the forms and names of secular things sanctified by immemorial usage in the Aryan family were woven into the ritual of the pious Hindu. In India, religion is never regarded as external to secular life, but as its consecration and illumination.

The Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India: A Study of Indo-Aryan Civilisation c8: Chapter II

Chapter II

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