The Antiquities of Orissa v1.c9.193

v1.c9.193

Little need be said of Orissan temples as "Lamps of Memory"—i. e., "as monuments of history, conservators of old ideas, and relics of the past".⁸² Every detail on them is a living monument,—every figure—every flower—every scroll records faithfully the feelings, desires and aspirations, the joys and the sorrows, the religion, the habits of life, and the social condition of a bygone age. They are not what Ruskin calls "the pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up in mildewed forwardness out of the kneaded fields about our capital—those thin, tottering foundationless shells of splintered wood and imitated stone—those gloomy rows of formalised minuteness, alike without difference and without fellowship", but living emblems of eternity, hoaried by age, and hallowed by ten thousand associations, pages of history in which the people of this country have read, and will read for centuries to come, lessons of a more endearing and stirring nature than can ever be acquired from the mist-encumbered folia of the bulkiest tomes. If they fail in any one point as "Lamps of Memory", it is as regards political history. They bear no representations of battles with foreign foemen, no files of prisoners led in chains to swell the pageant of a mighty conqueror, no lines of potent king seated in a regal state, no varied groups of various nationalities to indicate the different races of men with which the kings of the country came in contact, such as endow the bas-reliefs and paintings of Egypt and Persia with engrossing interest. But it should be borne in mind that the structures on which such political representations appear are places and tombs, i.e., to use the terminology of Ruskin, "civil" and "memorial" edifices, and there they are most appropriate and becoming; whereas those which form the subjects of this work as "devotional", earthly abodes raised by weak man for the habitation of the visible emblem of Him who is without beginning and without end, before which all men are equal, and the vanity and pomp of potentates melt into insignificance. Before them the sovereigns of Orissa assumed the humble title of "sweepers", and they could not venture to portray on such holy structures their own achievements and glory as sovereigns. Had their palaces been in existence, they would probably have shown some political bas-relief, but they have long since been swept away by the tide of time and the inundations of political vandalism.