India Discovered (20 page)

The outline of this temple [the Great Temple or Linga Raja at Bhuvaneswar] is not, at first sight, pleasing to the European eye; but when once the eye is accustomed to it, it has a singularly solemn and pleasing effect&. Taking it all in all it is perhaps the finest example of a purely Hindu temple in India.

The Khajuraho temples’ tapering profiles are certainly more acceptable to tastes tutored
on the Gothic arch and the spire: at a considerable distance the Khandariya Mahadeo could almost pass muster as a village church. The Orissa temples, though, are very different. Their porches have tiered pyramidal roofs with upturned cornices suggestive of a Chinese pagoda. And the
sikharas
of the Linga Raja and Rajrani are so elaborately vaned and ribbed that to the unprepared traveller they
look as if they belong in an electricity generating station. Fergusson had spent most of his Indian career in Bengal and knew Orissa well. He had verified that every single stone in the Linga Raja’s tower had a pattern carved upon it, and that the sculptures were ‘of a very high order and great beauty of design’. In short, his eye had become accustomed to it and it therefore outraged his sense of
‘true architecture’ far less than, say, the
gopurams
of a Dravidian temple.

This, however, was not quite the same thing as taking Indian architecture at its Indian value. For Fergusson, as for Macaulay, Hinduism was still ‘the most monstrous superstition the world has ever known’. He made no attempt to master the symbolism and iconography of Hindu temples, and took his stand simply on what he
regarded as the universal values of architecture. This dispassionate outlook eased the business of classification and his three temple styles (Dravidian, Chalukyan and Indo-Aryan), though much subdivided, are still accepted today. But one can understand how irritating such pontifications must have been to Alexander Cunningham, whose scholarly bent precluded all aesthetic judgements. Havell, too,
rightly insisted that Fergusson’s ‘true styles of architecture’, ‘true principles’ and ‘universal values’ were nothing of the sort. They were just a rationalization of his European outlook.

Of the many specific points on which Cunningham and Havell took issue with Fergusson, none proved more contentious than the origin of the arch in India. Moving on from Hindu architecture to Mohammedan – or,
as he preferred, ‘Saracenic’ – Fergusson stated categorically that ‘the Hindus up to this time (about
AD 1100)
had never built arches’. He qualified this by explaining that he was talking about the ‘true’ arch – one constructed by using wedge-shaped stones, or voussoirs, to achieve the bend, and with a key-stone at the apex. The ancient Hindus had, of course, built small trabeate arches which
used brackets and cantilevers to span the gap; but the true, voussoir arch was a purely Mohammedan invention.

Cunningham was at first inclined to accept this. When, in the walls of the great temple at Boddh Gaya, he found some voussoir arches and vaults (now built over) he agreed with Fergusson that this proved that the main structure of the building could not be older than the fourteenth century.
But Cunningham later found several other examples of the true arch in buildings that had apparently existed at the time of Hsuan Tsang in the seventh century. By 1870 he realized that Fergusson must have got it wrong again, and in 1892 the old General, now well into his eighties, published a volume re-examining the history of Boddh Gaya.

Formerly it was the settled belief of all European enquirers that the ancient Hindus were ignorant of the arch. This belief no doubt arose from the total absence of arches in any of the Hindu temples. Thirty years ago I shared this belief with Mr Fergusson & but during my late employment with the Archaeological Survey of India several buildings of undoubted antiquity were discovered in which both vaults and arches formed part of the original construction.

Cunningham listed three or four examples and showed that the Boddh Gaya temple, though rebuilt more often and more extensively than any other building in India, dated from the fifth century. He was still unsure whether the arches were part of the original building, but they were certainly earlier than the Mohammedan conquest.

Havell agreed and took the argument still further. Concentrating
on the pointed arch, which was the hallmark of Islamic buildings, he claimed that not only had the ancient peoples of India known all about it, but the West, and Islam, had originally got the idea from India. A horseshoe arch with a point to it was a characteristic feature on the façades of Buddhist cave temples and a simple pointed arch was found on the image niches that ringed some of the Gandhara
stupas.
When Buddhism, under the Kushans, spread west into Afghanistan, the arch went with it and thus came to the notice of the Arabs. Havell pointed to the façade of St Mark’s in Venice, which has a very Buddhist-looking arch, as an example of this East-West trend. But his ideas were highly conjectural. His concern was to stem the tide, to redress the balance; people like Fergusson put far too
much in Indian culture down to outside influences. Havell wanted to show that India probably gave as much as she got.

A site which spawned as much controversy and heart-searching as Boddh Gaya was the well known Qutb mosque and minar outside Delhi. In the early nineteenth century the Qutb Minar was considered one of the wonders of the East, second only to the Taj Mahal. It looked even higher
than its 250 feet because of the exaggerated tapering and with its elaborate fluting and magnificent symmetry, it seemed the noblest possible monument to the victory of Islam in India. Today our tastes have been somewhat warped by familiarity with industrial shapes. The Qutb Minar has an unfortunate hint of the factory chimney and the brick kiln; a wisp of white smoke trailing from its summit would
not seem out of place. But to Fergusson and his generation no praise was too extravagant for it.

It is not too much to assert that the Qutb Minar is the most beautiful example of its class known to exist anywhere. The rival that will occur at once to most people is the Campanile at Florence, built by Giotto. That is, it is true, thirty feet taller, but it is crushed by the mass of the cathedral alongside; and beautiful as it is, it wants that poetry of design and exquisite finish of detail which marks every moulding of the Minar; & when viewed from the court of the mosque its form is perfect, and, under any aspect, is preferable to the prosaic squareness of the outline of the Italian example.

Universal as was the praise, it was not at all clear who had built it or whether it could
be attributed to Islam. Fergusson placed it firmly in his first category of Saracenic buildings. ‘Early Pathan’ he called it, although the dynasty that included Qutb-ud-din was Turkish and, as Havell observed, the Pathans were not, and never had been, notable builders. But semantics apart, Fergusson saw it as a classic example of how the lofty ideals of a conquering race, which was already imbued
with strong architectural instincts, could exploit the consummate skills of the Indian craftsman and produce something way beyond the latter’s limited imagination. In other words, Indians provided the skills and the decoration but foreigners the ideals and the design.

Cunningham, though, was not so sure. As well as numerous inscriptions there was also a wealth of literary evidence for the Qutb.
One work put the beginning of the Minar in the reign of the last Hindu ruler of Delhi. Others suggested that the building and rebuilding – the Minar was very susceptible to earthquakes – had gone on over a period of 150 years, and that the top two sections were not added until the fourteenth century. In Volume One of the Archaeological Survey’s reports he finally dismissed the idea that the original
plan was pre-Mohammedan – only to find his assistant readopting the idea in Volume Four. A hasty retraction was extorted from the unfortunate Mr Beglar, but it showed that the origins of the building were still not a foregone conclusion.

What bothered Beglar and Cunningham was that, for a group of buildings supposedly celebrating the triumph of Islam, there was so little about them that could
be called Islamic. The mosque consisted of a courtyard and colonnade, in which the columns were all purloined from Hindu or Jain temples, and in which the most conspicuous object was the famous iron pillar, dating from the Gupta period and celebrating the success of an ancient Hindu dynasty. Even the magnificent arches, though massive even by Islamic standards, were built according to the traditional
trabeate design of India. On these, and on the Minar, the ornamentation was typically, and superbly, Indian, while the star-shaped ground plan of the Minar was strongly reminiscent of that of a Jain temple. Indeed, the very idea of victory columns was an Indian one and dated back to the Ashoka columns. There was just not enough in the way of innovation to support Fergusson’s hypothesis of a blast
of new and nobler ideals somehow releasing Indian architecture from its obsession with ornament and relaunching it onto a higher plane. Apart from the introduction of Koranic graphics in place of animal friezes, the absence of all figure sculpture, and the adoption of massive archways, the buildings were purely Indian.

A hundred years, and three miles, separate the Delhi of Qutb-ud-din (1206–10)
from that of Tughluk Shah (1325–51), another of the early Sultans. But in architectural terms they are poles apart. The fortified city of Tughlakabad, and the tomb of its founder, have the cold and uncompromising air of a stern and alien autocracy. The city walls are more than six feet thick, with loopholes and battlements, and are built from some of the most massive stones ever used for constructional
purposes. A similar wall surrounds Tughluk’s tomb, which has sloping sides emphasizing its indestructibility. All is plain, rough-hewn, solid, making it in Fergusson’s view ‘the model of a warrior’s tomb hardly to be matched anywhere’. Fergusson called this style Late Pathan and thought it marked the final emancipation of Islamic ideals from their initial flirtation with Hindu skills and
tastes.

The Mohammedans had worked themselves entirely free from Hindu influence&. All the arches are true arches; all the details invented for the place where they are found & and from this time forward Mohammedan architecture in India was a new and complete style in itself, and developed according to the natural and inevitable sequences of true styles in all parts of the world.

These sequences
are often expressed in biological terms, as a budding, a flowering and a decay. The Late Pathan was the Saracenic style in the bud, the early Moghul period until the death of Shah Jehan its classical flowering, and the late Moghul period from Aurangzeb onwards its rococo decadence. In this ‘natural sequence’ the only exception according to Fergusson was the reign of Akbar (1556–1605). He alone
of all the Moghuls showed a spirit of tolerance towards the non-Islamic peoples and a willingness to adopt their artistic ideas. Hence the many Hindu features in his palaces at Fatehpur Sikri and Agra, the reappearance of the trabeate arch, fantastically carved brackets, ornate pillars and the peculiar snake-like struts so beloved of the Jains. These buildings were truly Indian, but Akbar was
the exception. ‘The spirit of tolerance died with him,’ wrote Fergusson. ‘There is no trace of Hinduism in the works of Jehangir or Shah Jehan.’

Unlike Fergusson, Cunningham was not greatly interested in Islamic architecture. He had reservations about Fergusson’s various styles, but he never propounded any grand theory about the relationship between Hindu and Mohammedan styles. Not so, though,
Ernest Havell. Whereas Fergusson saw the story of Islamic architecture as one of emancipation from Hindu influences, Havell insisted that, on the contrary, it was one of rapid capitulation to the superior indigenous art of India. Akbar was not the exception but the classic example. His wholesale adoption of Hindu styles and his patronage of Indian craftsmen marked the end of a brief experiment with
non-Indian forms (Tughluk’s tomb for example), and the beginning of one of the greatest periods for purely Indian building.

Taking the bull firmly by the horns, Havell turned to the classic age of Moghul architecture, the reign of Shah Jehan (1628–58), and in particular to none other than the Taj Mahal. The great dome of subtle contour, the soaring minarets, the formal Persian garden, the chaste
inlay work and tracery, the clustered cupolas – nothing, surely, could be more typically Mohammedan. But Havell was a determined polemicist and a uniquely qualified scholar. His first point was that whatever its inspiration, ‘there is one thing which has struck every writer about the Taj Mahal and that is its dissimilarity to any other monument in any other part of the world’. Outside India there
was nothing that approached it and, within India, its supposed precursor, Humayun’s tomb in Delhi, or the other two white marble tombs, those of Itimad-ud-Daula in Agra and Salim Chishti at Fatehpur Sikri, were so inferior as to be unworthy of comparison.

Fergusson would have agreed with this, though not with Havell’s conclusion – that what made the Taj unique was its sculptural quality. Because
for this there was no precedent in the strictly non-representational art of Islam. If the inspiration for the building was to be sought in sculpture rather than architecture, then it must be sought in Indian sculpture. The purity of line and subtlety of contour which characterized it were precisely the qualities that distinguished the Mathura Buddhas or the Khajuraho
apsaras.
Fergusson deplored
the hint of effeminacy in Shah Jehan’s buildings; but to many this represents the great appeal of the Taj. As the tomb of Shah Jehan’s beloved Mumtaz Mahal, it is the apotheosis of Indian womanhood, a radiant architectural embodiment of all that is feminine, India’s Venus de Milo perhaps. And only an Indian artist with his purely conceptual approach could have created a building that was so blatantly
seductive.