The Antiquities of Orissa v1.c7.369

Language: English

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Mr. Fergusson is startled to find at Bijapur, some fifteen centuries after the Christian era, “a recurrence to the same principle. The balconies with their hoods, and the brackets which support these, are the principal ornaments in the four faces of this little monument” (Mehtari Mahal), “yet every part of their construction, every detail of their ornament, is evidently copied from a wooden original. We find the same balconies used at the present day; and in any city between Benares, and Boorhanpur similar objects might be found with almost identical details, but always constructed in wood. From the remains of Hindu temples we know that stone architecture did exist in the Deccan for centuries before Beejapoor was founded.”⁴⁸ To account for this anomaly the learned author continues: “It is clear, however, that the Moslims could have had very little experience in building in stone when this work was undertaken, and as little knowledge of their own style as then practised at Agra and Delhi. They must also have been actuated by a wonderful aversion to anything savouring of Hinduism, when they designed a building so original as this, and one so manifestly unlike anything to be found in the country in which they had settled.”⁴⁹ Bearing in mind, however, that the Moslim population of the south was formed of a miscellaneous collection of foreigners, Pathāns, Moghals, Abyssinians, and others, the bulk proceeding from the north;

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that everywhere these men adapted Hindu buildings and temples to serve as mosques; and that the founder of the Bahminy dynasty, Allauddin Hussan, (1347 A.D.), was a native of Delhi who expelled the Emperor Muhammad Tughlak from Dowlatabad where he had transferred the capital of the Pathān empire, it is difficult to believe they were so perfectly ignorant of stone architecture as to be under the necessity of copying from wood, and still more difficult to suppose that those who built the largest dome on earth, between 1640 A.D. and 1660 A.D., larger even than that of St. Peter at Rome, had, three reigns anteriorly, between 1550 and 1557, so little experience in building in stone, as to copy from wood, and that at a time when the intercourse between [23] the north and the south, was perfectly uninterrupted for considerably over three centuries. We believe survival of custom exerted a much more potent influence in such cases than ignorance. Adverting to the caves of Kennari, at Salsette, Mr.

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Fergusson observes: “Although the style begins in wood and ends in stones, it is not a little startling to find so little change either in the plan, or general disposition of these caves, during the ten centuries through which we can certainly trace them,”⁵⁰ and to account for the peculiarity he adds, “The cave at Kennari, or the last at Ajunta, is practically identical with that at Karli, in so far as its general plan and design is concerned, and even the last retains so strongly a reminiscence of its wooden origin, that we have little reason to doubt, that the practice of erecting such halls in that perishable material was continued contemporaneously.”⁵¹ This solution of the difficulty, however, is by no means favourable to the position assumed by the author, that architecture in India must have commenced after the invasion of Alexander, (250 B.C.) because all the earliest specimens show traces of their wooden origin. If those traces are visible in stone structures raised twelve centuries afterwards, and may be accounted for by the assumption of imitation from contemporaneous structures, the argument would lose little of its force when applied to the erections and excavations of the time of Aśoka, and of his immediate successors. Wooden houses have existed at all times, and exist to this day;

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but they afford no reason to suppose that races who have known stone houses for a thousand years, in copying wooden features in stone, do so directly from wood, and not from stone which has preserved those features from generation to generation in a country, like India, where custom has exercised the most despotic sway, and held the mind of man in such abject slavery.