Essay on the Architecture of the Hindus c3.29

c3.29

whom our ancient legislators have ranked amongst the lower orders of society. This class, perhaps, jealous of the Bráhmans, whose sacerdotal authority they have always opposed with a spirit of independence, or more naturally, apprehensive of competition in their trade, took particular care to conceal the sacred volumes which have descended to them, from the rest of the people; but as they have on their own part been long denied the benefit of Sanskrit literature, these treatises could be but of little use to themselves; and the consequence has been, that while the practical part of the science continued to be followed up amongst them as a kind of inheritance from generation to generation, the theory became gradually lost to the whole nation, if not to the whole world. Even the few scattered fragments which have escaped the hand which either jealousy or the fear of competition has raised to conceal or rather destroy the science, are now quite unavailable to those who kept them to themselves and to the priests The former being compelled to refer to the latter for the interpretation of the superior dialect, and the latter to seek from the former for definitions of technical terms, which neither the one nor the other seem to have been able to explain or understand accurately. This circumstance, more than any other, has cost me considerable time and expense, without any adequate advantage. Our best dictionaries, at least the best that I have been able to procure, do not contain a single architectural term, and the best of our workmen have been so long disused to their own ancient style of building durable public edifices, that it is not to be wondered at they should now ascribe their ignorance of the art as revealed from heaven to the want of encouragement, which appears indeed to have ceased on the decline of native rule. Such is the state of knowledge among those to whom we could look for any illustration respecting an art, the study of which has been so long neglected in this country, and the few manuscripts too, which have escaped the corroding hand of time inevitably contain numerous errors and defects which it requires no small labour and time to correct and supply.