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the-south-asian.com October 2000 |
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Page 1 of 3 Temples Along the Indus by
Michael W. Meister, the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor in the History of Art Department, at the University of Pennsylvania, is a specialist in the art of South Asia. His research focuses on temple architecture, the morphology of meaning, and other aspects of the art of the Indian sub-continent. This article first appeared in Expedition, the magazine of University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
High above the mighty Indus, on hills commonly called the Salt Range, stand important remains of forts with citadels and temples. Built from the 6th to the 11th centuries AD, these structures lie in what was ancient India's far northwest, now in the Punjab and North West Frontier provinces of Pakistan. Largely ignored by scholars in this century, and orphaned from the main stream of architectural scholarship since the partition of India in 1947, these remains form an important link in the history of South Asian architecture. Remarkably, this region preserves an almost continuous record of temples that can define the evolution of a distinctive school of Gandhara-Nagara architecture. An integrated archaeological study of these sites, undertaken by the author with colleagues in Peshawar, has begun to reveal new aspects of this important period of South Asia's antiquity. What follows is a preliminary report and stylistic analysis of the region's temples. Archaeologically, the area is best known for the massive numbers of Buddhist sculptural and structural remains associated with the region of Gandhara from the 1st century BC to the 5th century AD. These Gandharan remains already show a local visual vocabulary in which architectural traditions from India, Central Asia, and the classical world appear side by side. This mélange of traditions is evident on many Gandharan Buddhist narrative steles, as well as monuments such as the famous shrine of the double-headed eagle and the Dharmarajika stupa at Taxila. The Chinese pilgrim, Hsüan Tsang, visiting Gandhara in the 7th century AD, noted hundreds of Hindu structures along with many Buddhist sites then in decline (Watters 1904-05). If there is a Gandharan legacy in the Hindu temple architecture of subsequent centuries, it takes two paths: one, a unique tradition of temples with pyramidal roofs built in Kashmir from before the reign of Lalitaditya in the 8th century AD, the other an independent tradition in Gandhara itself. Our project focuses on the consequences of this second tradition. We find perhaps the earliest example of the Kashmir tradition in two small 8th-century (or earlier) temples at Laduv and of temples related to the second tradition in several 6th-century masonry sub-shrines at the Hindu pilgrimage site of Katas in the Salt Range. The square Laduv shrine has a circular interior space and had a hemispherical dome under a peaked roof, for which a Gandharan prototype-a masonry structure at Guniar in Swat-is sometimes cited. The whole was once covered by a pyramidal roof, as indicated by the frame surrounding its doorway. Gandharan antecedents for this type can be seen in the "classical" niche pediments represented on the 1st century BC shrine of the double-headed eagle at Taxila, or the split pyramidal pediments in Gandharan sculpture and on certain Stupas. This distinctive gabled pent roof became the signature for Lalitaditya's powerful Kashmir dynasty in the 8th century. Well-preserved examples, from the 8th to 10th centuries, survive on temples at Narastan, Pandrethan, and Payar. The type of temple found at Katas, while sharing with Laduv the formula of a simple square plan, plain masonry walls, and cantoned corner pilasters, formed its superstructure by quite different means. The Katas sub-shrine's elevation can be reconstructed as a series of cornices with tiny intermediate rows of pillars and a crowning ribbed stone (amalaka). This early type of simply storied structure has parallels in coastal western India at Sarnath (Saurashtra) and elsewhere across northern India and the Deccan in the 6th century AD (see Meister 1986; EITA). With its representation of many multiple stories, the Katas sub-shrine can be considered a type of proto-Nagara tower. However, local experimentation with the full Nagara formula-the typical curved temple form of northern India-had already begun at Kafirkot ("foreigners' fortress" in local parlance) west of the Indus in the North West Frontier Province . The two earliest temples in this fort can most closely be related to early Garulaka or Maitraka dynasty temples in Saurashtra at sites like Bhanasara and Dhank, from the 6th and early 7th centuries AD, and Saindhava dynasty temples from the same region in the 8th century (see EITA: plates). Even the name of the little understood Saindhava dynasty seems to indicate a link with the Indus (Sindhu is an ancient name for the river).
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