The History of Art Survey:  Lecture 30

The Art of Ancient II: Ancient and Medieval

[Gardner  172-179 +]

 

A         Historiography:  Cultural specificity

 

B         Art Historiography: indigenous creativity  regionalism

 

C         Ancient and Medieval Brahmanical Imagery: the cultural continuity

 

D         The coming of West Asian and Islamic Imagery: The modern paradigm: multi-cultural cross pollination and florescence

 

16   Boar Avatar of Vishnu, Cave V, 12ı 8², c 408 CE,                                        Udayagiri

A    Badami Cave I, c 560-70 ,                                                                             Badami

17   Dancing Shiva, Cave I, c 560-70                                                                    Badami

18   Shiva as Mahadeva, c 525  , Great cave,                                                       Elephanta

B     Shiva as the Linga

24   Panch Pandava Raths, ca 675 ,                                                                      Mahabalipuram

C     Draupadi ratha, ca 625 ,                                                                                Mahabalipuram

D    Dharmaraja ratha, ca 625 ,                                                                             Mahabalipuram

E     Virupaksha temple, 733-745  ,                                                                      Pattadakal

F     Rajarajesvara temple, ca 1002-1212 ,                                                            Tanjavur

25   Shiva as Nataraja (Lord of Dance), Naltunai Isvaram t., ca 1000 ,  Punjab

G    Shiva as Nataraja, Kansas City Museum

19   Das Avatar temple, c 525 ,                                                                            Deogarh

H    Vishnu on the Cosmic Serpent, Das Avatar temple, c 525 ,                         Deogarh

I      Sangameshvara temple, c 700 ,,                                                                     Mahakuta

J      Shiva Ardhanari, Sangameshvara temple, c 700 ,                                          Mahakuta

21   Vishvanatha temple, ca 1000 ,                                                                       Khajuraho

22   Plan, Vishvanatha temple, ca 1000 ,                                                              Khajuraho

23   Antarala wall, Vishvanatha temple, ca 1000 ,                                               Khajuraho

19   Lingaraja temple, ca 1000,                                                                             Bhuvaneswar

K   Adinatha temple, c 1450                                                                                 Ranakpur

L    Quwwat al-Islam mosque, Delhi Sultanate, 1197-     Delhi,

M  Tomb of Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq, Delhi Sultanate, ca 1325,                          Delhi,

N   Tomb of Sher Shah Sur,                                                                                  Delhi,

O   Tomb of Humayun, Mughal, 1565  ,                                                              Delhi,

P    Baswan & Chatar, Akbar riding a demented elephant, c 1590

Q   Great Mosque,                                                                                                Fatehpur Sikri

13-27  Taj Mahal, Ustad Ahmad, Agra, Mughal, 1632-1647, , Agra

Art Historiography

 

In the first part of our survey of South Asian art I have focused on the art of Buddhism, which was the first major South Asian tradition to develop in monumental materials in the historical period.  In terms of geographic spread within India, and in terms of population, Buddhist India was never as extensive as Brahmanical India.  It is difficult to estimate how important either was.  Since Hinduism has been used to identify a very wide variety of quite different traditions, including the heterodox, Jainism and Buddhism that the Anglo-European academic tradition likes to consider as separate, it is not always clear what different books consider.  Here I will be considering the art of the Agamic or Puranic forms of Brahmanical Hinduism, which identifies the core of what most mean when they are talking about Hinduism and Indian art. 

 

Brahmanical Hinduism becomes distinguishable from the Brahmanical religion of the Vedas at the beginning of the common era.  Like Mahayana Buddhism it is a product of the Bhakti movement that swept through all Indian creeds, pushing elements of each into theistic devotional cults of particular deities.  And in important ways it is an orthodox response to the success of the heterodox Buddhism.  Where the Vedic rituals reached out to a variety of deities for practical benefits by way of the fire sacrifice, the theistic cults of Vishnu, Shiva and Devi that superseded the sacrifice cults were based on devotion to an individual deity thought of as more or less the essential power in the universe.  For these Puranic temple cults the Vedas continued to be held in highest esteem, and to be taken as an important model, but the Gods and ceremonies of the Veda, with certain royal investiture rites, were thoroughly abandoned. 

 

There are very few examples of Brahmanical deities illustrated on coins or receiving worship in large public temples before the common era, and relatively few in permanent materials before the Gupta period of the 4th to 5th century.  There may have been a good amount created in perishable materials, due to a general prejudice against work in stone.  What we do know of the earliest Brahmanical art in stone is that it was done in the same styles of the contemporaneous Buddhists we have been following, and it was of the same fine quality.

 

 

16    Boar Avatar of Vishnu, Cave V, 12ı 8², c 408 CE, Udayagiri

 

Brahmanical art didnıt get into stone in a serious way until the Gupta period (c 320- 500), when it began to flourish.  The giant image of Vishnuıs Boar incarnation at Udayagiri is the rock-cut icon of a partly structural temple a few less than a dozen miles north of Sanchi.  It is not unlikely that some of the same artists worked on both sites.  Though it is a ritual requirement that the makers of Brahmanical icons be Brahmanical Hindus of particular castes, there is no limit to who may work on Buddhist icons or monuments. 

 

The God Vishnu is one of the two great male deities of the Brahmanical sects.  Among his most important manifestations are the ten Avatars (incarnations) in which he saves the social world from disaster.  In the first three of these avatars he saves the world from floods, as a fish, a tortoise and, as seen here, in the form of a Boar.  As indicative of the symbolic nature of Brahmanical imagery, Vishnu as the Boar may be depicted in a purely zoomorphic form, or as here in the form of a boar headed human.  If one were to ask ‹as many outsiders have‹ why Indians would have as Gods monsters of such hybrid shapes, or with multiple arms, like the Nataraj we are about to consider, the answer would come back, ³what would make us think the Godıs have arms or human forms at all?  The human personification of deities is symbolic, their reality is cosmic and its actuality beyond human comprehension.²

 

The Boar avatar is seen here according to the usual conventions, standing in the archerıs pose, facing to the proper left (the viewerıs right) with his left leg raised up on the coils of the Nagaraja (Serpent King) symbolizing the waters of the flood, with the Earth Goddess dangling from his tusk and resting against his shoulder.  He wears a dhoti and a necklace and has a grand circling garland, that is a regular feature of early images of Vishnu.  Behind the God an attendant holds the end of a lotus that grows up above his head, like a royal parasol.  Behind him on the wall the Gods and ascetics have lined up to observe his victory over the flood. 

 

The picture in our book is a detail from a fuller panel, containing imagery of Ganga and Jamuna, the two rivers that mark off Aryavarta (the Arya heartland) as they flow toward Varuna the sea.  The full image was the back wall, and so the root worship icon, of a Brahmanical temple, whose structural elements have been lost. 

 

The figure is be dated to circa 408 because it is from one of a pair of temples standing side by side, carved out of the same boulder, that appear to have been done at more or less the same time, this one Vaishnava and the other Saiva.  The Saiva temple has an inscription next to its doorway recording the visit of the emperor, Chandra Gupta, in the 88th year of the dynastyıs rule.  The style is a broad version of the high relief and simplified naturalism of the fourth century.  It is closer to the fleshy style weıve seen at Mathura in the second century image from the Katra mound (6-14) than the more suave imagery of Sarnath in the later fifth (6-13).

 

 

*      Facade Badami Cave I, c 560-70,                                Badami

 

Many of the earliest surviving Brahmanical images and nearly all of the earliest temples to survive in tact are rock-cut.  The brick and other structural temples of that time have disintegrated.  Udayagiri is in the center of north India on a major trade route near the ancient city of Vidisa, from which the Emperor Ashokaıs wife came.  Badami is in the Deccan (southern) plateau in the cultural region of the Dravidian languages.  It is the capital of a dynasty called the Chalukya, who ruled broad swath of the Deccan for over two centuries.  No dynasty ever ruled more than a portion of South Asia, and languages being a important as they are, few ruled in both the Indo-European speaking north and the Dravidian south.  The Chalukya, who ruled from 542, when the fortified the bluffs at Badami, until 753, when they were overthrown by one of their feudal vassals, excavated and constructed the earliest stone temples in southern India, and are considered to be the rulers who brought Brahmanical culture to the region.  They were the first dynasties of the south to legitimize their rule with Brahmanical sacrifices.

 

[Badami being one of the sites visited by Iowa State Students on our Summer program, we can see the site of the caves with our students included.]

 

Cave I is a temple of the God Shiva, excavated from its boulder some time in the sixth decade of the sixth century, at the same moment as a Vishnu temple was excavated in the adjoining boulder.  There is a special chapel on the west of the facade of Cave I with an eighteen armed image of Shiva as Nataraja, the king of dancers, decorating the wall beside it.  The most important distinction among Brahmanical images is between murti, empowered or inspired images, capable of being worshipped, and images that are merely narrative or pictorial.  In the language of the Saiva agamas, the texts that explain the temple imagery of Shiva, this is a lila or play image.  It shows one of the Godıs many aspects.  It is not a murti.  Figure 6-25, below, is a murti.

 

 

17    Dancing Shiva, Cave I, c 560-70                                  Badami

 

Shiva stands here upon a lotus pedestal in a dance pose called laliti (charming), up on one toe and down on one heel. his knees splayed apart, his body bent in a strong (reversed) S, and his eighteen arms rotating around his torso.  Shiva, who is the great yogi, wears his hair in locks piled upon his head.  There is a halo behind.  Beneath stand his symbolic vehicle, the bull, Nandi, the elephant-headed, remover-of-obstacles Ganesh and the drummer who keeps the time for the dance.  As with the Buddha, Brahmanical Gods are hardly ever shown alone, but usually with other, smaller figures to indicate their superior scale and centrality.

 

 

18    Shiva as Mahadeva, c 525 CE, Great cave,               Elephanta

 

The Abrahamic religions, each has one great textual source or at most two or three, and yet interpretation has divided them into different sectarian traditions, each with somewhat different understandings of what is meant by the very terms ³God,² ³salvation² or ³heaven.²  The later Brahmanical traditions are much more various.  There are a two dozen Puranas and hundreds of other authoritative scriptures possessed by the many distinct sects that their Anglo-European conqueror lumped together under the title ³Hindu.²  The oldest uses of that term, was to designate the people the Persian speakers saw living around the Indus river and beyond it.  That is why Columbus called the native peoples of the western hemisphere ³Indians.²  What this means for our understanding of the Gods of India, is that there is no simple agreement.  Different authoritative texts and interpreters disagree.  Many academic specialists would say there is no such thing as Hinduism. 

 

Indians in general solve the problem in more or less the same manner as Abrahamic monotheists.  Jews, Christians and Muslims speak of the same God, however differently the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Quran, explain that being.  The people who follow the more various traditions based in different ways on the Vedas and the Puranas and the Brahmanical caste system follow many shared concepts, that link their ideas and practices, without actually making them the same.

 

Shiva Mahadeva, pictured in the colossal 17 foot bust in the rock-cut temple at Elephanta island in Mumbai harbor,[1] is in many ways a different aspect of the deity with we call Shiva Nataraja at Badami.  There is a seventeen foot Shiva Nataraja panel in the same temple to confirm this.  What the different images of the God offer us are depictions of what different interpreters see as different aspects of the same being.  Talking with a worshipper of Shiva, and there are quite a number on this campus, you would quickly come to the agreement that they are not talking about a deity much different than the one you may believe in.  You may be speaking of different aspects of the same omnipotent, omniscient being, or at least trying to. 

 

Shiva Mahadeva is an image that responds to this difficulty of depicting through human form the power and personality of the universe.  It depicts a three faced being that the worshiper is to understand as having five faces.  Framed between guardians  and dwarfs, that remind us of the various classes of beings in the universe, we see three of the Godıs aspects.  Facing to our right is a feminine face, with jewelry in its hair, a smiling expression offering protection and sustenance.  Facing to our left is the Godıs fierce personality of retribution for misbehavior, depicted with mustaches and fangs, a serpent in its hair and a scowling male personality.  Facing toward us, in between we see the more benign image of the transcendent lord of the universe that unites the two others and the fourth, which we canıt see because it is facing in the other direction and this is a relief.  In a free standing image the fourth can be seen.  But the fifth, which faces up, the text tell us can never be seen.  Understanding God is not as simple as any of us would like to believe.

 

 

B      Shiva as the Linga

 

In the sanctum of the temples of the God Shiva the image is not a human personality  by a simple cylindrical form called the Linga.  In its most common form this column is carved with lines to depict it as a phallus, and so many have misunderstood Shiva as a fertility deity.  With or with out the lines, the linga is a simple column expressing the unity of all.  The Linga set inside the altars of the stone temples is divided into three sections: below it is four-sided representing the four faces of Brahma (who stands for the 4 vedas); in the center it is eight sided, representing Vishnu; and above, where it is visible, it is one sided, or cylindrical represented the unity of all. 

 

For the philosophers and theologians of the Shaiva tradition, Shiva is the being who most cogently and thoroughly expresses the monistic concept that all in the universe is of a single unity, that all the maya of diversity we see swirling around us in the material plane we are conscious of, is a crude distraction from that essential unity.  Brahmanical worship is not congregational like the Abrahamic religions, but individual and by family.  As the Shaiva worshipper makes their way physically through a temple and toward the God, they are encouraged to be making an internal passage towards their deepest self, so that arriving at the linga in the sanctum they arrive with the understanding that they are indeed looking back at themselves. 

 

 

Temples of the Dravida style

 

The major division of South Asian culture between Indo-European and Dravidian languages is paralleled by a division of many cultural forms along the same lines.  The division is an irregular one, but a distinctive expression of the regionality that is characteristic of this vast region.  Because the Southern, or Dravida, style of temple design is a bit simpler and closer to the earliest temple forms we will consider it first and the Northern, or Nagara, tradition following.  The division is a purely esthetic, stylistic one, there is no difference in the meaning of the temples. 

 

This is more or less the same sort of esthetic, formal division we found among the temples of the Greeks into Doric and Ionic orders.  Originally this division also was between the temples of the Dorian Greeks of the Peloponnesos on the west and the Ionic Greeks of the islands and coast of what is today Turkey, on the east.

 

 

24    Panch Pandava Raths, ca 675 CE, Mahabalipuram

 

Another way in which the Brahmanical world acknowledges the variety of the world is in the way it gathers together temples to different Gods at a single site.  We can see an example of this at Mahabalipuram, two dayıs walk south of Chenai.[2]  Here we see another sort of rock-cut temple, one carved not only into but also out-of a boulder.  A careful look here shows a series of temples that themselves depict even more.  Following the Tamil languageıs term for referring to temples as chariots of the gods, each of the temples here is called a ratha (chariot).  Reading from the left in figure 6-24, we see the Dharmaraja (King of Dharma) ratha, the Bhima ratha, the Arjuna ratha, and the Draupadi ratha.  We can look at each individually as examples of the Dravida or Southern style of temple architecture.  But before we move on, we can notice the dark, silhouetted globe shape at the bottom of 6-24.  It is the kalasha, the symbol of the vessel of water used to consecrate the temple, which is itself a consecrated image.  The fact that this  one is still engaged in the rock beside the Dharmaraja ratha, rather than placed onto its octagonal peak, indicates that it was never put into worship.

 

 

C     Draupadi ratha, ca 625 CE, Mahabalipuram

 

The Draupadi ratha represents the essential unit from which the entire Dravida style is developed.  It is a miniature representation of the universe the home of the deity.  It is a single, cubical cell, raised over a basement and carrying an arching tower above.  It thus represents, in its three elements, the three worlds into which the universe is divided: terrestrial, aerial and celestial.  However the Dravida style is  developed beyond this core, its designs are resolved into compounds of this basic unit of the domed pavilion.

 

Hindu imagery, like the Buddhist imagery rendered into stone earlier, and the Vedic imagery from which both evolved, is unites many layers of meaning.  The Hindu religion is the theistic phase of Brahmanical religion, the Hindu temple bases many of its forms on the altars of the Vedic sacrifice it has replaced.  The texts say, for instance that the construction of a temple is the equivalent of the performance of a sacrifice, and that the builder of a temple receives the same merit as the maker of a sacrifice.  The universal altar of the sacrifice is cubical in form like the universe itself.  The essential form of the Hindu temple sanctum is cubical.

 

The Draupadi ratha is a Goddess temple.  The cube of its sanctum has an entrance on the west and niches, on the other three sides, depicting views into the sanctum.  There is an elaborate arch over the doorway and matching arches over the niches.  The are also guardians to either side of the passage.  Inside we can see the Goddess on the rear wall of the sanctum, surrounded by worshippers like the Boar at Udayagiri. 

 

The Draupadi ratha shares its platform with a temple of Shiva that we can recognize as multiplication of its forms.  Its cubical sanctum stands over its own base and carries a tower of three stories, each composed of a sequence of miniature temples.  

 

The third ratha in line shows us a different tower form.  This one has an oblong, barrel vaulted dome. 

 

 

D     Dharmaraja ratha, ca 625 CE, Mahabalipuram

 

We can see this compounding even more developed in the Dharmaraja ratha.  Here the tower is composed of four stories of miniature towers.  And here we can see how each story is composed of a square ring of miniature towers around the parapet.  At the same time that the temple tower symbolizes an architecture of many stories it also symbolizes an architecture of outer rings of cells surrounding inner rings.  The eight sided dome, that is the upper-most element on the temple, symbolizes the sanctum of the God below, at the center of the cells of the various subordinate beings of its court.  When we look at the images on the temple wall we see figures within each element. 

 

The tower of the Hindu temple represents the hierarchical organization of the Brahmanical caste system, the highest God at the center and the lower beings at various removes of lower stories or more distant rings beyond.  Within the temple is carries out this hierarchy, with only a particular Brahman allowed into the sanctum and others excluded from approach by degree.

 

We can also see here the templeıs various layers of imagery, that parallel those Buddhists saw in the stupa.  The temple is at once the chariot of the God, the mountain paradise of the God, and the palace of the God, where the worshipper can go to have darshan (direct experience) of the God, in the hierarchy of its royal court. 

 

 

E     Virupaksha temple, 733-745  CE,                                Pattadakal

 

A worshipper can actually climb up to the third story of the Dharmaraja ratha and enter a sanctum there to witness the God Shiva there.  We can see this idea developed on a larger scale into a temple compound that can be entered by larger numbers at the Virupaksha temple of Pattadakal.  As at Mahabalipuram the architecture mixes actual rooms with representations of a more elaborate and developed ideal projection of rooms multiplied into the heavens. 

 

This is quite esthetic presentation of the earthly worship hall as a representation of the cosmos as a heavenly architecture is quite equivalent to the elaboration actual into heavenly representation in the Byzantine church (e.g., 12-30), the Romanesque church (e.g., 17-14), or the Gothic cathedral at (e.g., 18-23).

 

In its developed form the Shiva temples of the Dravida style included separate shrines for Nandi the great Godıs alter ego and ideal worshipper, and for Ganesh the one who obstacles from the worshipers approaching the God, and for Devi, the Goddess, seen as the Shivaıs Queen.  All are gathered within a walled compound entered through a distinctive gateway.  Though we can reasonably think of Brahmanical religion as polytheistically containing many deities, we can all recognize that for any particular sect there is the vision that their particular deity is the one being that personifies the universe and the others are subordinates in that deityıs realm.

 

 

*      The Site plan of Pattadakal

 

In the model universe of the Brahmanical temple this idea of a God at the center of a palace universe, where they are surrounded by the palatial worlds of their subordinates, reaching out by removes into the social world their human worshippers is developed without limits.  Lesser court figures built temples for their Gods in the presence of the great kingıs temple, as in Christian Europe lesser nobles patronized the chapels surrounding the main altars of the great churches built by the greater nobles.

 

It is worth point out that the monumental stone temples were constructed by members of the elite for reasons of the personal and dynastic prestige and for spiritual merit.  Their very creation was as important to their builders as their continuing subsequent use for worship.  Thus we often get larger numbers of temples at a site than there were regular worshippers to use.  The personal, rather than congregational nature of Hindu temples may explain this.  Worshippers visit temples, or more correctly the Gods in temples.  They can do this at any time.  There is no moment of community gathering that requires a large interior or that monumental temples be located at distances from each other as churches or mosques must be to have a congregation.

 

 

F      Rajarajesvara temple, ca1002-1212 ,                          Tanjavur

 

As time went on the Dravida style temple was developed both regionally into a variety of local sub styles, and chronologically into distinctive elaborations and transformations of the essential form.  Here we see it at Tanjavur just after the year 1000.  At Tanjavur the sanctum is multi-storied on the inside and even more elaborated on the exterior.  The halls for approaching worshippers stretch out before it.  There are Nandi and Goddess pavilions within its perimeter wall and a separate pavilion of the Nataraja form.  At the center of the main sanctum is the Linga form of the God.  Images of the Godıs various forms and the forms of the beings subordinate ring it in myriad numbers

 

 

25    Shiva as Nataraja (Lord of the Dance), Naltunai Isvaram         temple, ca 1000 CE,  Punjai

 

Here, from our book is a movable, utsava (festival) icon of the God, made of bronze, for transporting in a car for public festivals.  This is a murti, an image manufactured by ritually defined means, and caste defined beings, to be contain a special form of the Godıs presence.  Precisely as the host in the Christian Eucharist mass is considered to become the flesh of God, so in the theology of Brahmanical ritual the God is considered to be present in its murti images.  This is an idol. an image of the God which the worshipper may address as a humanized personification, believed to have actual power. 

 

As with so many other South Asian concepts here, we are not as far from the ³western² concepts of the Anglo-European and Mediterranean world as we might have thought.  As much as the murti of the Brahmanical world are idols to be worshipped and so more or less what the Abrahamic religions have rejected as dolls treated as Gods, in fact they are not much different from the mental images the Abrahamic worshipper carries in their minds or the symbols for them that they hold to be particularly sacred.  The worshipper of a murti does not suppose that inanimate object before them is the ruler of the universe, but that it is an artifact particularly connected to the power that controls the universe.  It certainly does matter with absolute significance how one may describe and understand that power, from the different points of views of each of the worldıs religions, but there is very little difference in this case between what Hindus believe themselves to be doing and what Jews, Christians, Muslims or Mahayana Buddhists believe themselves to be doing.

 

The image here is the characteristic form of Shiva as the Nataraja developed in the centuries following the depiction seen on the wall outside Badamiıs Cave I.  Here we see the God dancing upon the dwarf, Muyalaka, symbol of the ignorance.  Shivaıs dance, like his temple represents a rich congery of imageries.  It represents the maya of mundane reality that we believe ourselves to be walking through in our conscious lives.  It represents the dissolution of the universe at the end of the eon, when all is destroyed, only to be recreated again.  We see the God within a halo composed of a ring of flames.  His upper right hands hold the drum, with which he keeps the time by which he maintains the universe.  His upper left holds a flame, like those in the surrounding halo, by which he will bring the universe to an end when the eon is completed.  His natural right hand displays the abhaya gesture, fear not, we have seen with the Buddha (6-15).  The left is thrown across his chest pointing down toward his upraised leg, in the form of a rod, both indicating the rule of the law and the Gods judgment to which all are subject.  It is an image not greatly different from the Pantocrator at the height of the Byzantine dome or the Christ in the aureole of glory at the center of the Romanesque tympanum of the Last Judgment.

 

[I noticed after completing this description that the text in Gardner (p 178-9) offers a different interpretation than I have just given you on a couple of points.  Gardnerıs author says  ³His lower left hand points to his upraised foot, indicating the foot as the place where his devotees can find refuge and enlightenment.  This is true, and a meaning that goes along with the one I have given above.  On quite a different hand the text says that ³Shiva dances to impress and seduce his wife Parvati.²  It is unquestionably true that he dances to impress her.  The texts say danced in a competition, that she eventually lost out of modesty, refusing to take poses she considered inappropriate for a female.  It is highly misleading to call his attempts to please the Goddess attempts to seduce her, however.  Indeed the Godıs major definition is as Mahayogi, the great yogi.  The two children attributed to the couple are each the result of their individual acts of creation.  They have no children together.  When Gardnerıs text calls Ganesha ³Shivaıs son² (p 173) it may be somewhat misleading to anyone unfamiliar with the Brahmanical tradition.  Ganesh is Parvatiıs son, granted to her as a boon from Brahma, because Shiva yoga has no place for expend his divine energy on producing a child.]

 

 

*      Shiva as Nataraja, Nelson Atkins Gallery, Kansas City

 

There is a fine Nataraja from the Chola tradition centered at Tanjavur, at the Nelson Atkins Gallery in Kansas City, which we visited earlier in the semester.  It has lost its halo of flames, but is worth a second look.

 

When we examine the idealized and relatively inorganic style of this image and compare it with the Nataraja from Badami, with which we began our survey of Indiaıs Brahmanical art we may recognize how unlike the long European waves of stylistic development ‹from less to more naturalistic depiction and then from more to less‹ the Indian tradition has been.  We can see relatively organic and naturalist works in the Indus Valley Civilization and from time to time in one region or another, but the fact is, Indians found a level of abstract naturalism by the Early Andhra period, noticed here in the Yakshi from Sanchi and the mithuna pair from Karli, that they been satisfied with ever since in their religious imagery. 

 

 

Temples of the Nagara style

 

The Nagara style is the elite temple order of northern India.  A bit of observation shows that it depicts the same sort of multiplication of simple units into grand multiples found in the southern style, but with distinctly different underlying logic.  One way of seeing that logic is in its parallel to the linguistic differences between the Indo-European and Dravidian languages.  Dravidian languages are agglutinative, like English, linking words as discreetly separate entities, like the separate miniature temples on the architrave of the Dravida temple, one separate unit after another into a compound unity.  The Indo-European languages of north India, and most particularly the Sanskrit of the elite ritual texts of the first Brahmanical temple builders, are quite different.  The sophisticated sandhi,  joinery, I spoke of in the previous lecture, that gave Sanskrit the particular refinement for which it is named, is a matter of the manner in which all words are adjusted in their prefixes by the words that precede them and in their suffixes by the words that follow.  In the same way, the major units of the Nagara temple style are adjusted into a unity where each is elided with the other elements in its sequence.  Thus the series of miniature temples that make up the Nagara architrave are not linked as discrete units, but elided into complex unities.

 

 

19    Das Avatar temple, c 525 CE,                                     Deogarh

 

In the Das Avatar temple at Deogarh we see one of the earliest examples of the Brahmanical temple of the Nagara style to survive.  We can see its cubical sanctum and a bit of its basement, while its tower reaches up ruins.  These ruins show well enough the vulnerability of human construction to the elements and the centuries that have lost earlier temples.  We know from inscriptions and archaeological fragments that Brahmanical temples go back nearly as far as Buddhist stupas, but it was only in the later fifth century that they carved into the living (unquarried) rock, as we have seen at Badami, and then constructed out of quarried stone, as here.

 

 

 

 

H     Vishnu on the Cosmic Serpent, Das Avatar temple,

        c 525 , Deogarh

 

Like the Dravida temple, the Nagara temple has niches on each side of the sanctum that display aspects of the God within. The Das Avatar (Ten Incarnation) temple at Deogarh is a temple of Vishnu, the other transcendent male deity in the Brahmanical bhakti tradition.  We can see here one of those image panels up close.  It is the cosmic vision of Vishnu, equivalent in many ways to the image of Shiva as Nataraja.  Vishnu on the Cosmic Serpent (Vishnu Anantasyana) shows the God recumbent in the universe as he rests in between the dissolution at the end of one cycle and the creation at the beginning of the next. 

 

For his worshippers Vishnu is the universe.  In this image we see the contradictions of that reality and our human attempts to understand reality.  On one hand we see Vishnu on the Serpent floating in the cosmic ocean.  On the other we are told by the texts that Ananta (or endless) the serpent upon which he reclines is not only infinity but Vishnu himself, and that Vishnu is also the cosmic ocean as well.  Above we see the other Gods  who have come to observe the greater being to which they are subordinate.  Below Vishnuıs various powers line up to protect the universe while he sleeps, a pair of demons lined up with them. 

 

 

*       Layout, Deogarh

 

A view of the temple from a bit further back reveals the Das Avatarıs location at the center of a panchayatana (five altar) plan surrounded by the temples of the other Gods subordinate to it.

 

 

I      Sangameshvara temple, c 700, Mahakuta

 

The Sangameshvara temple at Mahakuta a few miles east of Badami, is a good example of the Nagara tradition with its tower in tact.  Here we can see the multiplied stories and rings of miniatures in their northern variation.  In the Nagara style instead of distinct miniature temples there is the shorthand of a set of dormer windows that represents the entire structure.  The Chalukya Nagara typically joins all its elements into one domical canopy silhouette with a cogged wheel, called the amalaka, at the top.  The lack of a kalasha, water pot, above, indicates that the temple is no longer in worship.

 

Horizontally this unifying silhouette is a divided into a central column and side columns.  The central column repeats layer upon layer of miniature dormer windows.  The corner columns combine two layers of these miniature dormers in a unit with a miniature cogged wheel, representing a miniature temple more fully. If we read up the corner we will see three of these miniatures one above the other.  Together, within the unifying tower silhouette we can see the vertical and horizontal elisions of the Nagara.  The total is an non-agglutinative variation on the Dravida form.  It is still a many layered tower of miniature towers circling the central sanctum.

 

One most prominent element of both the Dravida and Nagara styles is the arched window, reduced to the miniature form, set as a dormer on every level of architectural molding or tower course to indicate the inhabited nature of the architecture.  There is a miniature window, a chandrashala in each of the Dravida styleıs miniature pavilions, and there are chandrashala in most layers of the Nagara style.  They are repetitions of the same doorway we saw in the Ajivaka shrine at Lomas Rishi, and of the great windows fronting the Buddhistıs chaitya.  The chandrashala is indeed the aedicula of Indian temple art, used in a comparable variety of ways as the pillar supported pediment becomes the aedicula of the Mediterranean temple.

 

In the art of the  Badami Chalukya and their successors in Karnataka we have the rare case of Nagara and Dravida styles at the same sites. 

 

 

J*    Shiva Ardhanari, Sangameshvara temple, c 700,       Mahakuta

 

When we look at the icon niche on the side of the Sangameshvaraıs sanctum we can see an image of one of Shivaıs other forms, Ardhanari, Shiva as half-Shiva and half-Parvati.  Buddhists depict the limits of gender through their description of the Enlightened-oneıs neuter gender in language and by the monkıs robe that is different from both the male and female garb of their day.  Shaiva iconography depicts the difference by showing the God as half male and half female.  The point is the same, at the highest level differences of gender describe unlimited no more than any other limit.  There is also a Shaiva icon called Harihara, half-Shiva half-Vishnu.  The Shaiva vision is, as described above a monistic one in which at the highest level sees all as one.  Vaishnava tradition, by contrast sees Shiva not as another way to understand Vishnu but as subordinate to Vishnu. 

 

 

21    Vishvanatha temple, ca 1000,  Khajuraho

 

The Vishvanatha temple at Khajuraho shows the Nagara temple style at a later and more elaborated stage of development.  It is one of nearly two dozen monumental temples created by the Chandella dynasty at the site.  Vishvanatha is Shivaıs name as the Lord of the Universe.  Inscriptions indicate that it was dedicated in 1002.

 

Here in the Vishvanatha we see the development of the image of the temple as the Godıs mountain paradise, which is based on the same Vedic image of the meru, the world mountain of the Vedas, that lies somewhere behind the Buddhist stupa.  The Vishvanatha is a veritable range mountains, set as a rising crescendo of mandapa roofs leading to the sailing shikhara (tower) rising over the high plinth. 

 

22    Plan, Vishvanatha temple, ca 1000 CE,                       Khajuraho

 

 

Though it isnıt clearly visible in Gardnerıs view or plan (6-21 and 6-22) the Vishvanatha stands the center of a panchayatana plan, like the Das Avatar, and as a Shiva temple itıs plinth is extended to include a hall for Nandi as well.  Thus the rise of the templeıs profile as we read first up onto the plinth and then over the next staircase to the outer most of the two porches takes place in the midst of outer temple pinnacles as well.  Entering this temple is entering a fantastic heavenly realm that surrounds one as the architecture of the Romanesque or Gothic cathedral does. 

 

The outer porch has a peaked tower and the inner porch a slightly wider and taller tower.  The next, larger room, is the templeıs mandapa (worshippers hall) with its own balconies and peak, and finally we get to vimana (temple) of the God with its own balconies and the tallest tower, which stands over the garbha griha (womb chamber) sanctum for the God.  Only the shikhara over the sanctum is considered a tower in the temple texts.  It is ritually necessary.  The other peaks are esthetic enhancements.

 

The sikhara over the Vishvanathaıs sanctum shows the essence of the Nagara styleıs consolidation of temple towerıs multitude of cells into a single unity.  The inner sanctum is symbolized by the form beneath the spreading amalaka (cogged-wheel-form), which indicates its incorporation of multiple cells through the segments on its corners.  As se descend from this peak we find the buttressing forms of engaged towers on the sides  In contrast to the southern styleıs separate pavilions, the multiples here are elided with central form.

 

 

23    Antarala wall, Vishvanatha temple, ca 1000, Khajuraho

 

The walls of the Vishvanathaıs mandapa and vimana each carry three courses of large figurative imagery.  Like the images of the Gothic cathedral they are arranged according to elaborate programs.  [Quite to the contrary of Gardnerıs text, they are not a ³focus of worship² or used for worship of any sort.  They are not murti, but lila (play) narrative images.  Because the texts written with these temples are lost we donıt know their exact meanings, but some general meanings are clear.  The essential pattern here is to arrange major forms of Shiva between pairs of decorative females. 

 

Possibly the most striking aspect of Hindu temple architecture for others has been their inclusion of sexual imagery that is hidden in most other cultures.  Mithuna couples are a common form going back to such images as the ones we saw on the facade at Karli (6-11).  As the Shalabhanjika at Sanchi (6-8) displays genitals curiously lacking on the vast majority of nude female images in Greek and Roman art, so the presence of figures in sexual embraces on major monuments is surprising to outsiders.  And indeed it is surprising to most Hindus as well.  Iıve watched villagers coming to visit the temples.  As the men boldly stare, most of the women seem to shy away.  Though not all. 

 

There are two levels of explanations necessary here.  The first is of the symbolism of the images themselves.  They stand as images for the psychological merging of personalities in sexual congress that is an analogy in some texts for the merging of the human in prayer with the God.  The sexual images at Khajuraho are not found all over the temples, but at only one place, on the axis that divides, or in this case we need to say unites, the mandapa with the garbha griha. 

 

The second point is their question of their appropriateness.  A small relatively minuscule sexual pair appears on many temples, but in so obscure a place that unless you are a dedicated student will seldom be able to locate them.  In the case the large explicit images at Khajuraho, they are an example of something that exists at only one other site in India.  As such they are apparently an expression of the Chandella royal house and not a common phenomenon.  They were certainly seen as controversial.  You will notice that the figures flanking the lower maithuna in our detail (6-23) are covering their faces in shame.

 

 

*       Domed Ceiling, Vishvanatha temple, ca 1000 CE,       

 

Before we leave the Vishvanatha I want to point out the Indian manner of forming domes through corbel rings.  Indian architects were never interested in the radiating arch, before the coming of the Iranians who helped initiate Indiaıs Islamic traditions.  The corbel arch here is like the one we saw at Mycenae (4-22), each layer extended out a bit further than the one below. 

 

 

19    Lingaraja temple, ca 1000 CE,  Bhuvaneswar

 

 

The Lingaraja is another regional variation that shows the Nagara style at its tallest, in far eastern India.  Here you can see the horizontal layers multiplied in vast numbers as the niche images on each side at the base each grows a separate pavilion. 

 

 

K  Adinatha temple, c 1450  CE, Ranakpur

 

The Adinatha temple at Ranakpur is included in our survey for a western regional variation, and one that comes from the Jain religious tradition.  The Adinatha shows how the tradition of setting the God at the center and surrounding it with subordinate figures at various distances is developed.  The central tallest tower is buttressed by somewhat lower towers at its corners with even lower rings of smaller domed pavilions circling the whole.  Hierarchies of towers and cells surrounding the central pavilion. 

 

If we look back to the Vishvanatha temple we see this is subtle elision into a closed profile, if we look toward the southern style we see it expanded.

 

 

Coming of a New Ideology

 

The Arab explosion that carried Umayyad rule west to the Atlantic ocean and the Iberian Peninsula in the middle of the eighth century travelled east as well.  Arab armies reached beyond the Indus region early in the eighth century, only o be driven back by, among others the vassals of the Badami Chalukyas.  The significant cultural impact, of course was the coming of Islam.  Marauding bandits, invading neighbors and the conquest of one region by the armed men of another was a constant of the ancient world.  The name of dynasties and famous warriors remembered in history are largely those who people.  What was most important about the Arab conquest was the new religion they brought with them.  South Asiaıs western border was now entirely controlled by Muslim rulers.  As Persians and the Turks of Central Asia converted to Islam all South Asiaıs overland commerce was with Muslims.  In 1192 a Turkish Afghan warrior invasion region extended brought the rule of Muslim kings and armies across the entire Indus region and most of the Ganga region, with the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate. 

 

As with the Arab Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula or the Arya infiltration of the Punjab, the Turkish-Afghan conquest of South Asia was not a massive invasion that displaced local populations but a warrior capture of the region that over time led to a progressive development of the warriorıs religious ideology along with their integration into the local economy and culture.  As the men of the Delhi Sultanateıs armies settled, they married into Indian families.  As their courts grew Muslim traders and artisans and clergy came as well.  Over time Islam, which was highly patronized but relatively negligible at first, took on increasingly greater significance.  Because Islam was the religion of the conquerors an impressive series of the mosques and Iranian style royal tombs vaunting the prestige and power were constructed.  The eventual conversion of something like a quarter of the population of South Asia to Islam took place only slowly. 

 

It may be important to note that most of the conversion took place in the regions of where Buddhism had been most prominent earlier, in what is now Bangladesh on the far east and in the Indus region and Afghanistan in the northwest.  These were the regions of weakest Brahmanical culture.  It is as important to recognize the records of the region, secular and Brahmanical, saw this as an invasion of Turkish and Afghan speaking warriors.  They refer to these new rulers a Turks not as Muslims.  Over the years as Islamic culture grew in India there was a growing understanding among all the different Brahmanical cults that a new religious culture, with international roots, stretching far away was growing in importance, but was seldom seen by the indigenous population as Hindu versus Muslim until many centuries had passed.  For one thing there was no such thing as a unity calling themselves Hindus.  The myriad peoples following Brahmanical religious patterns didnıt see themselves as having a common creed. 

 

The significant religious impact of the coming of the Turks was the destruction of Buddhism.  Buddhism as a popular religion was waning in India from the Gupta period on.  The creation of Buddhist monuments in south India comes to a halt in the sixth and seventh century.  In north India Buddhism seems to be supported more as a royally patronized monastic cult than as a popular religion.  It lasts the longest in the far east and the far west.  The warrior invasion at the end of the twelfth centuries included a plundering and burning of the great Buddhist monasteries and disbursal of the monks to the bordering states.  Buddhism continued to flourish in the Himalayan regions and beyond on the east, but in India itself it disappeared. i

 

 

L  Quwwat al-Islam mosque,  1197-   , Delhi,

 

The first mosque known in India was constructed by the Arab seafaring of the west coast in the first generation of Islam.  The first monumental Islamic structures came with the Turkish warlord conquest the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate (1190-1526).  The first mosques were created in acts of warlord aggression out of the cannibalized ruins of Jain and Brahmanical temples.   The inscription on the Quwwat al-Islam mosque lists the numbers of temples destroyed to construct it.  

 

The qibla wall of the first mosque was constructed in stone in the Iranian fashion of a regular pier arcade with a larger, mihrab arch at the center.  The sahn courtyard was surrounded on the other three sides by a pillared cloister.  The mosque faced due west, toward Mecca.  The pillars and domes of the cloister were constructed entirely out of cannibalized temple parts, their figures scrapped off or covered with plaster.  The qibla arch, however was handsomely finished in trabeate masonry.  Its pointed arches were decorated by low relief imagery of quotes from the Quran in fine calligraphy and panels of floral vines. 

 

The vine patterns and some decorative details were precise equivalents of the decorative patterns on the stone Jain and Brahmanical temples of the period in this region.  They were clearly the work of local artisans.  The design of the mosque, with curving arches and the calligraphy were just as clearly the work of designers from Afghanistan or Iran.  Like the texts from the Quran, the Arabic calligraphy was unknown to these craftsmen.  But stone construction and even relief sculpture was unknown in Afghanistan and further north and west.  Thus we see the work as designed by imported craftsmen and executed by locals.  This is most clear in the arches of the wall, which simulate the radiating arches of their Iranian models in the corbelled engineering of their Indian builders.

 

 

M    Tomb of Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq,  ca. 1325 CE, Delhi,

 

Indians, like the Romans, have traditionally cremated the dead, but with the Turkish conquest came the West Asian canopy tomb.  The tomb of Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq is a fine example.  It shows us the form as it was adapted from the brick structures of the Iranian plateau and translated into a South Asian, Indian, stone variation. 

 

Possibly in response to the still antagonistic or unsettled nature of the conquest, and certainly in response to the local landscape, Tughluqıs tomb was constructed in a fortified enclosure, anchored at the end of a causeway in an artificial lake.  The tomb is constructed in deep-reddish stone, with white marble used to pick out major details.  A horizontal line divides the cube into lower and upper stories.  Strikingly, the walls are battered and the upper edge of the wall fringed with battlements.  Characteristic of the early Sultanate is the fringe of fleur-de-lis on the undersides of the main arches. 

 

The white marble dome, sailing above, was constructed of radiating voussoirs, indicating that the engineering of West Asia had followed the design.  The work, was still essentially Indian, in stone.  The crowning finial of the dome includes two traditional Indian stone elements: a cogged wheel and vase.  The architectural structures of Afghanistan and Iran, which were the basis of the first monuments designs to be brought to India for these West Asian conquerors, were constructed in brick.  Stone was the technique of the Ganga region and south.  The two media met in the Indus region.  Brick continued to be the major fabric of the Indus valley with some stone coming north, while stone remained the fabric favored south and east.  The colorful ceramic texture and painted tile traditions of the Iranian plateau, the Helmand and Indus regions never made much impact further east and south.

 

 

*   Tomb of Adham Khan,  Delhi, 1561

 

The tradition of domed cubes, seen in the tomb of Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq, was spread across India with the extension of Islam.  Another, distinct, royal tradition of octagonal tombs based on the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, grew up in the region of Delhi from the fourteenth century.[3]  The fact that there is nothing similar in the regions in between, either geographically or chronologically, seems to indicate the rare case a direct response of this Indian tradition to a particular monument.  The importance of the Dome of the Rock, explains the interest. 

 

The tomb of Adham Khan, at Delhi shows the form it took at first.  There is a broad octagonal base, established as a bastioned arcade.  Above this rises the round dome on a sixteen sided drum. Typical of Indian domes this one has a floral corolla marking its peak, below the finial.  It is the broad geometry of the round dome rising over a broad octagonal base that connects the Indian design with its prestigeous model.

 

 

N Tomb of Sher Shah Sur,  Sasaram, 1530

 

The form was developed in the royal mausoleums of Delhi rulers, and reached its apogee in the tomb of the Afghan, Sher Shah Sur, the last major ruler of north India to precede the Mughals.  Sher Shahs tombs shows the sort of variation by elaboration that characterizes Indian style over the years.  The years following Adham Khanıs tomb saw chattri ‹miniature domes raised on columns‹ added to the design, over the octagonal base, to surround the central dome smaller repetitions of its form, and to graduate the rise between the flat roof of the arcade and the dome.  Sher Shahıs tomb takes this elaboration a step further, raising a second octagonal story of chattri above the first. 

 

This builds on the logic of a hierarchy pavilions we have seen in the Hindu temple as a standard principal in Indian architectural design.  We see the expansion of the same principle in the addition of a pair outlying chattri on piers beside the tomb.  The entire design is set off by it location on a fortified podium, anchored, in the fashion of Tughluqıs tomb, in a great tank.

 

 

 

O  Tomb of Humayun Mughal, India, 1565 CE ,                     Delhi,

 

The Mughal dynasty were Chaghtai Turkish speakers from the region of what is now Uzbekistan in Central Asia, descendants of the Mongol equivalents of Alexander, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane (Timur).  Driven out of the Samarkand region by competing clans, they moved west then south, assembling an artillery and cavalry based force that conquered the Delhi Sultanate in 1526, under their first emperor, Babur.  Baburıs son, Humayun, was driven out of the region into Persia by Sher Shah Sur, and lived at the court of the Shah of Persia for fifteen years before he could regain his empire.  On his return, in 1555, Humayun brought court of his own, speaking Persian and permeated with the culture of Persia.   

 

Humayunıs tomb was constructed under the supervision of his wife during the reign of his son, Akbar, by an international mixture of designers and artisans.  It is a structure of interest to us in part because it the major step between the canopy tombs of the past and the Taj Mahal of his great grandson.  The tomb of Humayun combines the canopy tomb of Persia and South Asia with a number features not seen anywhere outside South Asia. 

 

To begin with the Mughal designers placed the tomb into a garden.  This had been done earlier in India, but not on this scale.  Persians and Central Asians had developed pleasure gardens but not as setting for their tombs.  The garden at Humayunıs tomb was a char bagh (four square) affair, symbolizing paradise.  Then, in the manner of the Hindu temple, the tomb was raised on a high podium.  Following Timurid models, that trace back to their dynastic source in the region of Samarkand, the body of the tomb itself was composed a complex combination of four Baghdadi octagons (cubes with chamfered corners).  The structures dome has a cusped outline and no corolla at the peak, in the Persian  fashion.  It is surrounded, in the Indian fashion, by large chattri on the Baghdadi octagons and smaller chattri over the entrance facades.  And finally, in a particularly Indian fashion, it was given great stone gateways in the center of two of its four sides. 

 

The construction was entirely Indian and mostly local.  No one else built in stone on this scale.  The platform is 156 feet on a side, the stone dome rises to 140 feet above the ground.  The style of polychrome stone encrustation was a development of the Delhi region.  The monumentıs structure was finished in the regionıs characteristic red sandstone and detailed throughout with white marble and an buff sandstone paneling. 

 

Like the Adinatha temple at Ranakpur, Humayunıs tomb takes the Indian system of hierarchically arranged, central planned radiating domes to yet another level of complexity.

 

 

P  Baswan & Chatar, Akbar Riding a Demented Elephant, Akbar Nama, c 1590,  15²

 

The Mughal style in painting was as international and Indian as their architectural style.  It mixed the Persian court style, Humayun brought with him on his return from exile, with contemporaneous Indian miniature styles and an added new interest, the European naturalism of works imported by the missionaries and commercial travelers that were arrived via the seagoing trade of the fifteenth and sixteenth century.    

 

Akbar Riding a Demented Elephant onto a Bridge of Boats at Agra maintains a good deal of the decorative verve and brilliance of the earlier Indian style, with bright colors and elegant detail in every corner of the page.  But it shifts ground distinctly from a conceptual toward an optical depiction of the world, by the elimination of repeated decorative patterns and a new emphasis on graduations of scale between nearer and further subjects and a rendering of mass in perspective.  Though it is difficult to see this in a small reproduction of such an elaborate work,[4] it does so through the particularization of individual elements and the modeling of mass. 

 

Baswan was the most highly respected painter of Akbarıs workshop.  The work this comes from is an elaborately illustrated history of the emperorıs reign, written by one of his chief courtiers.   

 

 

Q  Great Mosque,  Fatehpur Sikri, 1568-78

 

The qibla sanctuary of the Great Mosque at Fatehpur Sikri  is marked by a great pishtaq arch at its center, flanked by a pair of widely spaced, somewhat lower, domes, which are themselves flanked by even lower, more modest chatris. 

 

On the inside of the sanctuary we find the forest of stilted columns and the contrasting openings and walls that characterized the interior of the Sultanate mosques of Gujarat in western India.  The domes are constructed as distinctive Gujarati rib vaults.  They rise over elegantly simple, rhythmically-ribbed squinches.  As one approaches the mihrab, which‹here as in most every mosque‹draws the casual observer as effectively as it does the worshipper, we are led through a stunningly elegant interior of handsome pillars.  A glance at the base of these pillars reveals their two millenium indigenous heritage of miniature chandrasala arches. 

 

 

One last swing at the ³East² and the ³West²

 

One of my hopes in ending our survey of ancient and medieval art with the art of India, with which I am most familiar, has been to reveal how widely and richly of the worldıs traditions have become shared, particularly as we move toward the present.  Another is to reveal how artificial the stereotypical survey contrast between a peculiarly opposed ³East² and ³West.²  When I have said, there is no ³East² or  ³West,² my point has not been that our cultural world is not divided into distinguishable regions, but that there is no great binary, but only a vast mosaic of distinctive styles sharing a myriad features, more with the cultures near by and less with those further away.   We find Greek features in Italy than in England,  and more Arabic features in Mesopotamia than in India.  At the same time we do find Arabic features spreading as far as Western Europe in one direction and India in the other and European features traveling as far as India as well. 

 

Aside from sharing greatly with each other, all these traditions are creative in their own ways, based on local habits and interests.  The same elements of cultural development we see in the survey of European art we find in Asian art.  The conservatism of cultural traditions, that gives each tradition its continuity, noted particularly in Egypt by our text and in the classical world by me, is found as significantly in India.  As is the continual creativity and development.  The hierarchies and crescendos we have seen in the temple, mosques and tombs of India are found in the church architecture of Western Europe.  These different cases donıt depend upon one culture taking the idea from another but on the independent creativity of all human activity, by which new variations are constantly being found for existing patterns.

 

If the figure style of the ancient and medieval temple traditions here seem amazingly unchanging, we need only look at their shift from trabeate to arcuate engineering and from the humanistically populated plasticity of the Brahmanical temple to the abstract, flat surfaces and geometric patterns of their Muslim-inspired architecture to see striking innovation.  There is hardly a characteristic we see one place that doesnıt not have its equivalent in some other place. 

 

You might find it as interesting as I do that my colleagues around the world point to the United States and India as the two places where people attend formal religious ceremonies most.  Not that they are necessarily correct.  What they are referring to is probably the lack of interest in religious observance in Western Europe and China.  I doubt they any more about what is going on in sub-Saharan African than I do or that they are taking into account the striking public religiosity of the Arab world.   

 

But now to close, I will turn for a last time to that large white wedding cake of a building we saw previously in terns of Islamic art and consider the Taj Mahal from the point of view of its embeddedness in Indian culture.  Islamic as most of its designers were and its patron was, it is an essentially Indian structure and an essentially multicultural structure as well.

 

 

13-27  Taj Mahal, Ustad Ahmad, Agra, 1632-1647, Agra

 

Our survey myopia may have gotten carried away when the text explains the Tajıs canopy tomb shape as ³descended from that of the Samanid mausoleum at Bukhara (13-11)² and ³reflect[ing] the basic form of the mausoleum of Sultan Hasan in Cairo (13-19), floating magically above the tree-lined reflecting pools that punctuate the garden leading to it...suspended above the water...by the absence of any visible means of ascent to the upper platform.²  Or when it says ³The Taj Mahal follows the plan of Iranian garden pavilions, except the building is placed at one end rather than in the center of the formal garden.²  (378-9)

 

I would not say that the shape isnıt ³descended from the Samanid mausoleum² as it is at great distance, or following the ³plan of the Iranian garden pavilions,² As in important ways it does.  But in a survey of the arts of many nations it is as important indicate the roots of designs in their own cultures as well.  The Iranian canopy tomb design reached India in the early 13th century,  and had over three centuries of development before the Taj.  Indianıs had been putting tombs into gardens, as Iranians never did, for nearly as long.  The value of the survey is that we can talk usefully about developments over long periods and wide extents.  The difficulty is that our interpretation of the vast pool of data allows wide room for choosing the points any one interpreter wishes to make. 

 

The hegemonic survey tends to stress continually the major impact of the major cultural centers, the famous individuals, the most familiar designs and the success of the culture to which its writers hope to satisfy.  Thus our authors have given their Anglo North American audience their idea of the how successful its  ³west² has been, and who has contributed to that success.  And that is why I, with my multicultural bias and training in Indian culture have sought to make the accomplishments of India stand out more clearly.  I want Indiaıs cultural success to shine through.  And I am fearful of the long Anglo-American tradition, tracing to Englandıs imperial conquest and colonization of a vast extent of the Asia and Africa, has left us a dangerous legacy of that brilliant imperialist Kiplingıs fantasy that ³East is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet.²  The fact is we have met continually and shared extensively and both profited by it as much as we have lost, if not more.

 

In terms of its Indian heritage, Islamic culture aside for the moment, the Tajıs char bagh garden setting, its magnificent gateway, its vast supporting platform, its white marble fabric, its colorful inlays of semi-precious stones, unique use of the Baghdadi octagon, the corolla crowning its domes, its centralized hierarchy of radiating domes, and the spectacular minars that expand its size so memorably are all peculiarly Indian.  The combination of vast scale, muscular masses and extremely fine detail is peculiarly Mughal.  It could have been created nowhere else or at any other moment in history, as us true of nearly every other monument we have seen throughout our survey. 

 

Since its basic forms are so well known I will confine my remarks here to a few details that will be most enjoyable as well as enlightening. 

 

 

Dado panels of the Taj Mahal,

 

A close up on the dado panels that ring the Taj at its base will show the quality of detail in the workıs finishing surface.  What one cannot tell from the long distance shot, wide enough to include the minars, is that the surface is not white marble alone, but thoroughly saturated with beautiful arabesques, inscriptions and floral details.  The dado panels are about four feet high and of varying lengths.  They are bordered in rich encrustation of arabesque patterns in carnelians, marbles and other semi-precious stones.  At their centers are a variety of heraldic flower forms in a swave bas-relief. 

 

In a reminder that tulips are flowers cultivated and disbursed to the world by the Turks of Central Asia, a good number of the flowers here are tulips, which the Mughals cultivated with the avidity of the Dutch, and which here are actually largely based delineated in a style based upon Dutch botanical steel engravings.  You may have already notice the bits of pictorial perspective planned into the settings below the vases and the diagrammatic symmetry of the displays.

 

 

Long view of the Taj Mahal,

 

The view from the distance brings out the scope of the architectural program in a way even a view of the full platform cannot.  Set at the end of the long garden, overlooking the river Jamuna so that it has no other structures to compete or interfere with the view of its facades, the Taj is framed by a pair of comparably handsome subsidiary structures.  Three domed structure on the west is a mosque finished in red sandstone and proportioned to the Taj.  The matching jawab (echo) structure on the east has no purpose at all but to add symmetry to the program as a balanced whole.  It is possibly the largest most lavish piece of pure estheticism we have witnessed in the course of our survey.   

 

Many people worked to create the Taj.  We know from the account books that have survived that they were Hindus of several different sects as well as Muslims and Christians.  Two Italian jewelers are recorded.  A pair of dome builders were brought from and Istanbul, which in that day was still called Rum.  And yet those who built the dome were undoubtedly Indians, since no one else in that day built domes in stone.  We know the name of the head designer, which was left out of the official chronicle of the building, possibly because Shah Jahan himself was involved at some level.  He is Ustad Ahmad, who was also one of the  major designers of the Mughal palace of Shahjahanabad. 

 


[1] The city that the British named Bombay, after their misunderstanding of the local name, which they then refused to acknowledged, is now known internationally by its local name, Mumbai.

[2]  Formerly known by another wilful British misunderstanding or renaming, as Madras.

[3]  The earliest seems to be that of Khan-e-Jahan Tilangani, Alfieri. 

[4] Particularly difficult in a flickering picksel computer moniter.