Cultural History of Early South Asia by Shonaleeka Kaul

Author:Shonaleeka Kaul
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9788125056010
Publisher: Orient Blackswan Private Ltd.
Published: 2018-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

THE DISCOVERY

The architectural ruins of Aihole and Pattadakal were first noticed and photographed in the middle of the nineteenth century by Colonel Briggs.6 Meadows Taylor and James Fergusson published these photographs, but at this time all that could be said about the temples was that these were pre-tenth century CE structures.7 The connection with the dynasty of the Chalukyas had yet to be established. In 1874, James Burgess visited Badami and reported the story narrated to him by the villagers that the Jina image in one of the caves was that of the raja, who had built the tank at the site.8 He made an estampage of the inscription in Cave III and dated the record to 578 CE. Even though the caves and the temples at Badami were no longer places of worship, Burgess records the annual pilgrimage at Banashankari, a short distance to the south of Badami. A prominent structure at the spot was a tank about 400 feet square, surrounded on all sides except the west by a colonnade or covered walk.9

At Pattadakal, opposite the village of Katapur, Burgess mentions brisk iron-smelting activity carried out by villagers as well as the continuation of worship in the largest temple at the site. He also describes several megalithic monuments termed ‘dolmens’ in the region, especially south-east of the village of Aihole on a rocky hill, which we now know to be Meguti hill (Fig.7.1). To the west of Aihole on rocky rising ground on the banks of the Malaprabha, he refers to more such structures: ‘among a group of very old temples in the same place is one raised on four unhewn pillars—but this may have been the shelter of some bygone devotee’.10 This structure is in the Galaganatha group of temples, which date stylistically to the second quarter of tenth century CE.11 At the time of their discovery, however, the temples had long been abandoned.

Henry Cousens visited Aihole and several other Chalukyan temples in Dharwar district and focused his discussion largely on the Dravidian style of architecture of these temples following Fergusson’s racial-religious categorisation of architecture.12 Nevertheless, Cousens identified numerous features that provided a unitary style to the temples, such as the use of massive blocks of locally available sandstone, ‘an exuberance of lace-like carving’, profusely decorated doorways, and the adoption of domical ceilings. He suggested that the size of the temples was governed by the size of the pillar, which was made of the most convenient length of block available in the quarries.13 The temples were erected with no cementing material and no clamps. Another significant observation related to the sculpted panels was the fact that while the earlier temples carried narratives from the epics, this practice was given up in the later tenth-eleventh century structures, where the walls were decorated entirely with images of deities.14

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.