Vastu-shastra (Vol. I: Hindu Science of Architecture; Vol. II: Hindu Canons of Iconography and Painting) v1.c11.8

v1.c11.8

Let us now peep into the finds especially connected with buildings as discovered in the excavations at Mohenjodaro and Harappa. ‘The buildings discovered at the different strata at Mohenjo-daro may be classified under the following heads : (1) dwelling-houses, (2) public baths of religious or secular character, (3) temples of some kind, and (4) raised platforms, possibly tombs’. I am particularly interested in storeyed buildings and those serving as shrines or temples and I may take liberty to quote Dr. Acharya and Sir John Marshall in this context. Dr. Acharya says, “With regard to the existence of a temple, private or public, and of emblems for worship, Sir John Marshall appears to have been in fix. He can neither deny the implications of his own finds nor can he get rid of some kind of prejudice. Thus in the following quotation he appears to deny the very thing which he seems to believe: ‘All this, however, is sheer conjecture. Like the Minoans, the Indus people may have had no public shrines at all, or if they had them, the shrines may have been wholly unlike their ordinary residences. Among the buildings of Mohenjo-daro are several whose purpose we have not yet succeeded in discovering, and any one of these might have been a shrine as well as anything else.’ Then he refers to two buildings which bear all the essential features of a Hindu temple : ‘There is the little building containing two chambers, one much larger than the other with a corridor at the side, and there is the larger structure, which comprises a large central chamber with a corridor on its western and southern sides, a well and two other small chambers as its southern end, and a group of somewhat larger chambers at its northern, the original plan of which is obscured beneath latter accretions. Little, unfortunate'y, is left of this interesting ruin except its foundations, but these are unusually massive, nearly 10 feet deep with a solid infilling of crude brick, and presuppose a correspondingly high superstructure, which might very well have taken the form of a corbelled śikhara over the central apartment". 'One without a pre-conceived idea, but familiar with the common features of a Hindu temple, would feel no difficulty in identifying the above buildings as ordinary shrines, with a central room where a deity or an emblem is installed, with necessary side rooms and corridors, and finally, surmounted with a śikhara'.