A Handbook of Indian Art/Section 1/Chapter 8

by Ernest Binfield Havell

CHAPTER VIII

THE MONASTERY, MANDAPAM, AND PALACE

Though we first meet with the monastery in the dwellings of the Buddha's fraternity called the Sangha—the Community—after the name of the Aryan clan organisation, monasticism was an institution deeply rooted in Indian life, even in Vedic times, though Sākya-Mūni, perhaps, was the first to put it on a fully organised footing. And just as he ordered the deliberations of the Sangha after the traditions of the Aryan popular assembly, so the plan of the monastery, the Sangharāma, or abode of the Sangha, followed the simple but eminently practical arrangement of the Aryan joint-family house, which down to the present day has remained the typical plan of a well-to-do Indian home. It consists of three or more sets of apartments grouped round a central courtyard, square or oblong in shape, with a verandah in front, on either side of the entrance, and others round three sides of the courtyard. In the front verandah, facing the road, the men of the household can sit and transact business or pass round the hookah to their male friends, while the inner courtyard gives the necessary privacy, fresh air, and protection from the glaring sun which are essential for the comfort and health of the family. In the Indian village the courtyard serves as a shelter for the ryot's cattle by night, as it also did in the primitive

Plate XXXIa

GAUTAMA PUTRA MONASTERY, NĀSIK

Plate XXXIb

MONASTERY AT AURANGABAD

life of Vedic times, when it was sacrificial ground. Here the head of the household lit the sacred fire, undisturbed by unclean intruders, and conducted the religious ceremonies at which the services of a Brahman priest are now indispensable.

None of the early Buddhist structural monasteries now exist, no doubt because they were generally built of wood and thatch; but the splendid rock-cut monastery at Nāsik, dating about the second century a.d., has exactly the same plan as the typical Indian house of to-day, when it is not planned after European models. Pl. XXXI, a, shows the verandah with its sculptured pillars of nearly the same design as those of the Kārlē chapter-house, and the entrance doorway richly carved, as is usual in all Indian homes of the better class.

Inside the courtyard stone benches running round the three sides in front of the cells take the place of the inner verandahs, which are superfluous in a rock-cut monastery. The same plan is followed at Ajantā, Ellora, and elsewhere, only in the Mahāyāna monasteries a shrine for the sacred image is added on the side facing the entrance. When the size of the courtyard, or assembly-hall, was increased, it became necessary to leave massive piers to support the rock above, and these were then as lavishly sculptured as the verandah pillars outside. The noble hall of the rock-cut monasteries at Aurangabad which is shown in Pl. XXXI, b, though it lacks the fresco paintings on the ceilings and walls which have made the Ajantā monasteries famous, in the exquisite design of its sculptured decoration it is unsurpassed by other work of the Ajantā school to which it belongs. It is dated about the seventh century a.d.

The monasteries were the universities of ancient and mediaeval India, which attracted students from all civilised Asia, and spread Buddhist and Hindu learning far and wide, both in the East and West. The rockcut monuments of Ajantā, Ellora, Aurangabad, and other places enable us to understand the splendour to which Indian universities, such as Taksasilā, Benares, and Nālanda, attained when Mahāyana Buddhism relaxed the ascetic rules of its great Teacher and their Abbots were the Lords Spiritual, whose authority the War-lords of the Five Indies did not dare to dispute. The excavations now in progress on the site of Nālanda^[1] will surely bring in a rich harvest of archæological treasures and show the detailed planning of the great monastery, which is described in outline by Hiuen Tsang; but they will not restore its lofty towers, which, in Hiuen Tsang's flowery language, seemed "like pointed hill-tops, lost in the mists of the morning," nor its shady groves and gardens, with lotus pools and mango orchards, where the ten thousand monks and scholars took their recreation. The viharas of five stories, with "soaring domes and pinnacles," seem to have been like the pyramidal towers of which a sculptured monolithic model exists at Māmallapuram (Pl. XXXII, b). It is arranged on the same principle as the tower of the Siva temple. Four pillared pavilions gradually diminishing in size are piled one over the other, the three upper ones being surrounded by rows of monastic cells, the cubical ones for meditation and study in the day-time, the oblong ones used as dormitories. The topmost pavilion is octagonal and is crowned by the stūpa-dome. This was no doubt "the upper room" which was accorded to scholars of distinction. This type of college building, which

Plate XXXIIa

MONASTERY, UNDAVALLI

Plate XXXIIb

MODEL OF MONASTERY, MĀMALLAPURAM

seems to have been common in India in the seventh century, fits in with the classification of the scholars at Nālanda given by Hiuen Tsang: first, those who were proficient in ten philosophical works, who were naturally the most numerous; second, those who had graduated in thirty; third, a select number, including the Master of the Law himself, who knew fifty works; and lastly the learned Abbot, Sīlabhadra, who was reputed master of every work which had any bearing on knowledge of the Right Law.

A sixth-century sculptured monastery of a similar type is shown in Pl. XXXII, a. It is at Undavalli, on the right bank of the Krishnā river, not far from Guntur. Structural edifices of the same kind are found in Ceylon and Cambodia. Fergusson suggests a connection between them and the seven-storied temples of Assyria, a conjecture to which much weight has been added by the recently discovered evidences of Aryan rule in the Euphrates valley.

Akbar, the Great Mogul, who revived many Indo-Aryan court traditions in the sixteenth century, built a five-storied pavilion, the Panch Mahall, at Fatehpur Sikri, which is still intact. It was probably intended as a meeting-place for the Dīn Ilāhī, the imperial Order he instituted, which, like the Buddhist Sangha, had four grades or degrees. Akbar, as Grand Master of the Order, would have taken his seat in the "upper room" under the canopy.

Of Nālanda's lofty walled enclosure, 1,600 feet long, divided into eight courts, one may find the modern counterpart in the walls and gopurams and quadrangles of South Indian temples. The dragon-pillared pavilions, "painted red and richly chiselled," where the scholars exercised their wits in philosophical disputations, one can see in many temple mandapams, the durbar-halls of the gods, and in Indian palaces. Discussions on philosophical and religious questions have been from the earliest times so much a part of Indian social and religious life that every village had its debating-hall, if only a temporary pandal of bambu and matting or a venerable "tree of wisdom"—a banyan or a pipal—under whose branches the elders gathered in the evening to listen to wandering sādhus defending their theories of the universe, or to disciples of a great teacher travelling from toll to toll, and from court to court, to win converts for their master's cause—for even the common people took an intelligent interest in the great problems of life which occupied all the thoughts of the monk and scholar. In the towns and at the royal courts a contest between philosophical champions was as much an entertainment for a great wedding feast or for a state ceremonial as it was a recreation for the scholars of a Sanskrit toll or university. And the quinquennial parliament of religions, when under royal auspices thousands of representatives of different schools from all the universities of the land met with high solemnity to adjust disputes or to listen to the thesis of some famous master of philosophy—a Sankarāchārya or Rāmanūja, who had already won his spurs in a hundred fights—was an event in Indian public life like the grandest tournaments of European chivalry, which roused the greatest excitement and became a landmark in history. Such great combats might last for days or weeks, and when finally the end came, and "letters of victory" were given to the successful disputant as a record of his triumph, his opponents would often be beside themselves with grief and rage, and the exultant victor sometimes so far forgot his philosophic dignity as to throw dust upon them in token of his contempt.

Plate XXXIIIa

VITTALASWĀMI TEMPLE, VIJAYANAGAR

Plate XXXIIIb

DIWĀN-I-KHĀS, DELHI

(Photo by Johnston & Hoffman)

When the assembly- or debating-hall took so great a part in civic life and state ceremonial, one can understand why the craftsmen spared no pains in its construction and ornamentation. The roof was generally very massive—sometimes with a hollow chamber to protect from the tropical sun. The deep curved cornices to which awnings were attached helped to screen from dust and glare. The designing and arrangement of the pillars and the ornamenting of the massive timber or stonework of the roof, always kept within the range of the old Vedic tradition, gave ample scope for the imagination and skill of the builders. The pillar always remained in the craftsman's mind as the mystic lotus-tree rooted in the depths of the cosmic ocean, blossoming in the highest heavens and keeping the balance of the universe. The roof was the dome of the world, Vishnu's blue lotus flower, with the sun as its golden pericarp; or Brahma's lotus, whose rosy petals were the robes of the dawn-maiden; or Siva's moon-lotus, which opens in the night, the aura of the Lord of Death as he sits absorbed in thought or dances the dance of the cosmic rhythm among the stars, the great serpent of eternity coiled round his arms.

Sometimes the temple mandapams, designed as meeting-places for crowds of pilgrims, were like forest groves, halls of a thousand pillars. Whatever might have been the use to which the mandapam was applied—a debating or royal audience hall, a town hall or parliament house, a pilgrim's hostel or place for religious ceremonies—the mystery of the primeval forest, in whose depths the Vedic Rishi, regardless of its fearsome demons and wild beasts, built his quiet retreat, seems to hang over it. The Indian craftsman's inexhaustible invention and boundless patience revelled in the task of giving artistic expression to the exuberant beauty of the tropical forest. The magnificent mandapam of the sixteenth century (Pl. XXXIII, a), built by the Kings of Vijayanagar for their royal chapel dedicated to Vishnu, perhaps indicates the highest point to which Indian genius attained in that direction.

This wonderful mandapam may give an idea of the earlier wooden pavilions of Nālanda, with their "pillars ornamented with dragons, beams resplendent with all the colours of the rainbow—rafters richly carved—columns ornamented with jade painted red and richly chiselled," as Hiuen Tsang described it. The later work of the same school in Southern India, however astonishing it may be technically, begins to run wild and often loses all artistic coherence. But in Northern India the reaction caused by the Muhammadan conquest and the restriction of sculptured ornamentation imposed by the law of Islam created a new school of Indian craftsmen—the so-called Indo-Saracenic—based upon Hindu technical traditions but more rationalistic and worldly in its ideals, though the mysticism of the East still clung to them.

The typical works of this school are the pillared pavilions of Fatehpur Sikri (Pl. XLIX, a) built for Akbar, and the famous private audience hall of Shah Jahān at Delhi (Pl. XXXIII, b), his Elysium on earth of white marble and precious inlay, the exquisite elegance of which is no less remarkable than the gorgeous sculptured beauty of the Vijayanagar temple mandapam built about a century earlier.

The typical plan of a monastery, as we have seen, reproduced that of the Indo-Aryan joint-family house—a series of chambers grouped round an open court.

Plate XXXIVa

"THE PALACE OF THE GODS,"
BHARHUT SCULPTURE

Plate XXXIVb

MODERN MANSION, BIKANIR

Of ancient and mediæval monasteries there are many rock-cut examples, and the ruins of Gandhāra present the exact details of their arrangement. The names and dates of many of the royal patrons or wealthy merchants who built and endowed them are recorded. The vast number of temples built or sculptured in successive centuries by Indian kings and princes is also evidenced by countless examples. But with the exception of Asoka's palace at Pātaliputra, the ruins of which have been brought to light recently, there is hardly anything left of architectural importance to show where the royal builders themselves and their retinue lived. The ancient monuments of India are rich in temples, monasteries, and memorials of Buddhist saints. We know fairly accurately the type of building in which the common people lived—it differed in no respect from the abode of the Indian villages of to-day. But one hardly finds a trace of a royal palace or mansion of a great nobleman before Muhammadan times. In early Indian painting and sculpture, when a king is shown in his own home, he is always seated under a mandapam, the Indian royal canopy and audience-hall; the inquisitive eye is not allowed to peer into the private life of the king and his ministers.

The Nītisāra of Sakrāchārya, however, in the first chapter dealing with the duties of princes, gives general directions for the planning of a royal palace. It was to be placed in the midst of the council buildings, to have sides of equal length, "be well adorned with spacious tanks, wells, and water-pumps," and surrounded by fortified walls with four beautiful gates at the cardinal points. The dining-rooms, chapels, baths, kitchens, and wash-houses were to be on the eastern side. Reception-rooms and sleeping apartments, "those for drinking and weeping,"^[2] servants' rooms, rooms for keeping and grinding corn, and latrines were to be on the southern side. The armoury, guard-house, gymnasium, storeroom, and study were to be on the north. The court-house and record-room on the north, and the stables on the south.

The council-house should be built of two or three stories, with pavilions on the roof. It should be beautiful and accessible from all directions, with a central hall double the width of the side-rooms, be provided with fountains, musical instruments, clocks, ventilating apparatus, mirrors and pictures. Dwelling-houses for the Ministers, Members of Council, and officials were to be built separately on the north and east.

There are many circumstances which may account for the complete disappearance of the buildings where the great kings of ancient and mediæval India lived and held their court besides the fact that religious sentiment did not protect the deserted palace of an extinct dynasty from spoliation, either by Hindu or Musalman. Unlike the temples and monasteries which were carved in the living rock or built of imperishable materials to consecrate the holy place where they stood, the sites of royal cities were frequently changed owing to political disturbances or the exigencies of warfare. Kings and dynasties disappeared, but the immortal gods remained for ever. There was a certain fitness in the unwritten laws of the king's craftsmen

Plate XXXVa

PALACE OF BIR SINGH, DATIYĀ

Plate XXXVb

FRONT OF PALACE OF BIR SINGH, DATIYĀ

which ordained that none but the palaces of the gods should be built of marble or stone—though it is strange that the saintly Asoka's disregard of the rule was not apparently imitated by any of his successors. But it must be remembered that the temple itself was an important adjunct of the royal palace—probably in Vedic times it was the palace itself and the citadel which the Aryan warriors used as their inner line of defence. The cella was the sacrificial chamber of the king, and the mandapam his durbar-hall. Its walls, as we see in the Kailāsa at Ellora, were battlemented and surrounded by chambers which might have been used by the king and his retinue before priestly tradition converted them into monasteries. Its gateways were the guard-rooms for the royal sentinels. The sun-windows which pierced the sides of the temple tower suggest loopholes for the archers of the royal bodyguard. This use of the temples as royal fortresses may partly account for the ruthlessness with which they were destroyed by the Muhammadan invaders. It would also explain why, until gunpowder was generally used in warfare, Indian builders did not find it necessary to use stone for the innumerable accessory buildings of a royal palace—wood and brick sufficed for all practical purposes, and were much more convenient materials. When, however, about the fourteenth century, they began to follow the Muhammadan custom of building the royal residence and the royal chapel separately, the one was built as solidly as the other; and from that time the palaces of Hindu kings provide a distinct and brilliant chapter in Indian architectural history. They are of far greater artistic interest than those of the Great Moguls, which were planned on similar lines and built by the same class of builders, the royal craftsmen of India, though great political events have made the Mogul buildings more famous.

And just as the modern Indian mansion in Rajputana retains the principal features of the building described as the Palace of the Gods in the Bharhut sculptures, so it is clear that the sixteenth and seventeenth century palaces of the Rajput princes were built according to a traditional Hindu plan, and were not mere imitations of the fashions of their foreign rulers.

Perhaps the finest of them is the old palace at Datiyā with its noble exterior, an architectural masterpiece comparable with the Doge's Palace at Venice. It was built in the beginning of the seventeenth century by Rāja Bir Singh Deva of Urchā, who made himself infamous in the history of the time as the agent employed by Jahāngīr to waylay and kill his father's intimate friend and prime minister, Abul Fazl, when he passed through the Rāja's territories on his return to court from the Dekhan. The Rāja, when the plot succeeded too well, was hunted into the jungle by the imperial troops, but escaped capture, and on Jahāngīr's accession to the throne was richly rewarded by his employer. Jahāngīr's enmity to Abul Fazl was due to the fear that the latter might persuade his father to set aside his succession to the throne on account of his unruly temper and drunken habits.

Built very solidly of granite and "well adorned with spacious tanks," the palace follows very closely Sukrachārya's directions for the planning of a royal residence. The Rāja's private apartments are in a square tower of four stories about 140 feet in height, "standing in the midst of the council buildings"—i.e., in the centre of the quadrangle formed by a great block of buildings, "of equal length in all

Plate XXXVIa

DATIYĀ PALACE, WATER FRONT

Plate XXXVIb

JAHĀNGĪRI MAHALL, AGRA

directions," which contains the durbar-hall, offices, and apartments for the Rāja's retinue, etc. The exterior of the block measures over 300 feet on each side: it is like the Rāja's tower, four stories high; but the two lowest, serving as public reception-halls, form a vaulted basement about 40 feet high covering the whole area. The two highest stories of the tower therefore rise above the roofs of the surrounding buildings. The outer walls of this great fortress palace are shown in Pl. XXXVI, a, which gives the side overlooking the lake. It forms a perfect architectural unity, most finely conceived and much more stately in its massive grandeur than the palaces at Fatehpur Sikri and Agra, which were built in the preceding century by the Rajput master-masons employed by Akbar, or that built by his grandson, Shah Jahān, at Delhi. The fine courtyard of the Jahāngīri Mahall at Agra (Pl. XXXVI, b), probably built by Akbar, is a good example of the same style, modified in decorative detail in accordance with Muhammadan rules.

It will be noticed that the general scheme of the Indian palace, like that of the monastery, was based upon the traditional plan of the joint-family house described above. The Mogul palaces were planned on the same principle, combining the Indian dwelling-house with the garden pavilion, or pleasure-house, of which accounts are given in the oldest Buddhist literature. The nucleus of the great monastery at Nālanda was said to have been a garden-house where the Buddha himself had lived and taught for three months. Judging by the descriptions of Hiuen Tsang, it would seem that the monks of Nālanda, like those of Europe, were great gardeners. The administration of the Indian village community had its garden and park committee as well as its tank or water committee, and Bābur's complaint that Indians knew nothing about pleasure-gardens, and had neither baths nor colleges, must be ascribed to his extreme ignorance of the country, though doubtless many of the finest gardens of Northern India were devastated in the long series of marauding invasions which occurred before his time.

Bābur's gardens at Agra and elsewhere were after the Persian model, divided crosswise with paved terraces and water-channels, a platform—"the mount of Felicity"—in the centre providing a place for recreation and entertainment. The plan was therefore the same as that of the Indo-Aryan village plan, repeated in the planning of the temple court. The pleasure-gardens of the Muhammadan dynasties had the religious character which runs through all Indian art, for one of them was always chosen as the owner's last resting-place. He usually took great pains in ordering the building which should eventually cover his tomb, and the garden itself was a symbol of the Elysian fields in which he hoped to wander after death.

While many of the Hindu princes who became tributaries of the Mogul conquerors imitated the luxurious habits of the imperial court in the more spacious and sumptuous designing of their palaces and garden-mansions, they departed very little from the earlier traditions of the Indian master-builder. Nor were their pleasure-gardens ever used as private cemeteries. The most beautiful of the garden-palaces of India now existing is that which was built by the Rāja Surāj-Mall of Bharatpur at Dīg, about the middle of the eighteenth century, and ornamented with some of the loot from the palace at Agra which

Plate XXXVIIa

PALACE OF SURĀJ MALL, DĪG, GARDEN FRONT

Plate XXXVIIb

PALACE OF SURĀJ MALL, DĪG, WATER FRONT

he sacked. This fairy creation, as Fergusson justly styles it—for it seems like an Aladdin's palace in its dainty, dreamlike beauty—is a great contrast to the massive granite fortress of Datiyā. Still, it is easy to see that it belongs to the same school of building. In it the Hindu master-builder has combined exquisite taste with sound common sense, so admirably is it designed for coolness and comfort and for the satisfaction of the sense of beauty.

Of the double cornice (Pl. XXXVIII) which crowns the whole building with wonderful effect, the upper part provides an extension of the terraced roof, much used as a promenade or resting-place after sunset; the lower part, with its deep shadow, screens the outer walls from the heat and glare of the sun. The arched openings are spaced with a fine sense of rhythm and proportion: in construction they follow the Hindu bracket system, each arch being made of two slabs of red sandstone meeting at the crown.

Pl. XXXVIII, b, shows the front facing the garden, which is laid out in the formal Indian fashion with stone terraces, water-courses, and fountains. The combined scheme of palace and garden is co-ordinated with rare skill, and if the cunning of the Hindu gardener equalled that of the master-builder, this garden-palace in the days of Surāj-Mall must have been as enchanting as any of those in which that prince of gardeners, Bābur, held his jovial wine parties.

The Grand Canal of Venice can show nothing more festively harmonious than the water-front of the palace, facing the artificial lake, with its elegant balconies and arcaded verandahs and bathing pavilions. The stone roofs of the latter are borrowed from the thatched roofs of Bengal, which, with their pointed eaves, are scientifically adapted for throwing off the torrential monsoon rain. In Asoka's time the builders of Magadha were in demand all over India, and their traditions were incorporated with those of Rajputana, where the local red sandstone provided a building material almost as easily worked as wood and much more durable. In this excellent material slabs and beams of almost any dimensions can be obtained without difficulty, and wherever this was the case Indian stone construction naturally retained a good deal of the technique of timber-work; for only the modern paper architect, working pedantically according to an archæological "style," would design an arch of numerous small pieces jointed together when it could be constructed more easily and effectually with one or two.

1. The modern Barāgāon, close to Rājagriha, which was the capital of Magadha in the days of the Buddha, and thirty-four miles from Pātaliputra, the modern Patna.
2. According to an excellent Indian tradition a royal palace should have a special chamber—a grumbling or mourning room—to which the lady of the zanāna should retire when she had a grievance or was in distress of mind, so that the harmony of the rest of the household should not be disturbed. The king then, if he wished, could visit the lady in her retreat and redress her grievance or try to bring her consolation.