The Antiquities of Orissa v1.c7.294

Language: English

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But we take leave to doubt the accuracy of the conclusion that has been drawn from these general premises. The question at issue is not one of natural sequence, but of dates. Few will deny the order in which the architectural faculty of man has evolved itself, but considerable difference of opinion may exist as to the time when any one nation attained a particular stage in its course of progress. It wauld be foreign to the subject of this essay to discuss at length the history of architecture among the Aryans from the time they issued forth from the plateau of central Asia to people India, Persia, and diverse parts of Europe, but certain it is that one branch of them, the colonists in Greece, attained a higher pitch of excellence, if not in magnitude and thereforė in majesty, but certainly in exquisite perfection of artistic beauty, elegance and taste, than the Semites, or the Turanians, ever did in any part of the world, and the argument therefore of the Aryans never having been a building race, may be rejected as gratuitous. The Grecians may have borrowed the idea of large edifices from the Egyptians, or the Pelasgians, and the most successful building tribes among them may have had some Pelasgic blood in their veins as supposed by Mr. Fergusson, but as a nation they were Aryans, and, having once got the idea, they worked it out in their own way, independently of their teachers.

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The Aryans who came to India had the same intellectual capacity and it remains yet to be seen how far they utilised it in the country of their adoption. They had, it is true, no Egyptian or Pelasgic monuments at hand to excite their ambition, and their religiprimitive. Mr. Wheeler, in his *History of India*, imagines that the wall round the palace of Daśaratha was nothing more substantial than a hedge. Following this idea he supposes the palaces and fortresses described in the *Mahābhārata* to have been thatched structures, constructed of mats, bamboos, and mud, but devoid of everything in the way of true masonry architecture. Depicting Hastināpur, the capital of the Kurus, he says : “A non-descript population, which may have comprised cultivators, herdsmen, mechanics, retainers, and petty shop-keepers seem to have dwelt in an assemblage of huts, or houses, constructed of mats, bamboos, mud, or bricks which was dignified by the name of city. The palace was very likely built after a similar fashion, though on a larger scale, and with some pretensions to strength. Probably it was a rude quadrangular building, having men’s apartments on one side, and women’s apartments on the other ; whilst the third side was devoted to the kitchens and household servants.” Elsewhere he fancies the central quadrangle of the palace of Daśaratha contained a thatched granary which formed the treasury.² Mr.

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Fergusson, the highest authority on Indian architecture, in his latest essay on the subject, says : “It cannot be too strongly insisted upon, or too often repeated, that stone architecture in India commences with the age of Aśoka, (B.C. 250). Not only have we as yet discovered no remains whatever of stone buildings anterior to his reign, but all the earliest caves, either in Behar, or in the western Ghats, show architecture in the first stage of transition from wood to stone.” In his lecture on the study [14] of Indian architecture, the same author, adverting to a cave in Behar, observes : “It is a well-authenticated example of his (Daśaratha’s) reign, and, though cut in the granite rock, every form, every detail, is copied from some wooden original, shewing that at the time it was executed, stone architure was unknown in India, and men were only beginning to think of a more durable material. From that time we have hundreds of examples, in which we see the wooden forms gradually being replaced by those more appropriate to stone”.⁴ In his *History of Architecture* he states : “The Indians first learnt this art from the Bactrian Greeks”.⁵ Elsewhere he says : “We are not surprised to find wooden forms copied in stone in the early caves of the Buddhists about the Christian era, because we know that no stone architecture existed in India till the Greeks taught them the use of the more durable material”.⁶ Mrs. Manning is of opinion that this teaching commenced a little earlier.

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According to her, “Alexander the Great left Greek and other foreign artists in India, about the year B.C. 326 ; and sculptures found in Kashmere, and coins struck in mints established on the Indus, give undoubted signs of Greek influence at dates somewhat earlier than our own era ; whilst no Buddhist monument clims to be earlier than about B.C. 247.”⁷ These assertions and opinions have derived great support from the fact of the primitive Hindu religion having been purely domestic, requiring no lordely edifice for its observance. It is not to be denied that the greatest incentives to architecture in ancient times, were the rites of religion, and respect for the memory of the dead, and temples and tombs called forth the greatest efforts of the builder. It must follow that where the dead were disposed of on the funeral pyre, and the ceremonials of religion observed by the domestic hearth, or in the courtyard of a house under the canopy of heaven, or a cloth awning,⁸ sufficient attention was not likely to be directed to structures that should accommodate large numbers, or last for ages. It is also undeniable that the first attempt of man to build must have resulted in mud huts, or log cabines, retaining closely the character of the caves and excavations on the model of which they were executed, add designed principally, if not exclusively, for the purpose of protection from the inclemencies of the weather, and the attacks of wild beasts.

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Then would follow the era of domesticism, when men would build cottages and houses, less for purposes of defence, more for convenience, utility and comfort. Next in order, or perhaps simultaneously, would come sacred piles and monuments for the the dead, which would begin to separate architecture as a fine art from mere constructive ingenuity ; and prepare the way for palaces, towers and sacred edifices, temples, sanctuaries and public buildings, structures combining the vastness, grandeur, utility, simplicity and beauty of previous stages and gradually leading to the perfection of the art.