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the-south-asian.com October 2000 |
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Page 2 of 3 Temples Along the Indus (cntd) by
STYLISTIC SOURCES FOR THE SALT RANGE TEMPLES Scholars have tended to date this whole group of temples now in Pakistan to "post Islamic contact," that is, after the 7th to 8th century AD, because of their use of mortar, rubble-fill between masonry walls, arches, and squinched interior domes (Archaeological Survey of India Annual Report 1920-21:6-7). They have also tended to locate them as a branch of Kashmiri architecture, because of one aberrant temple. Both Percy Brown (1942) and James Harle (1986), for example, in their volumes on Indian architecture, place the Salt Range temples in chapters on the Kashmiri tradition. Nineteenth and early 20th century scholars, including Aurel Stein (1937), Alexander Cunningham (1872-73), and Ananda Coomaraswamy (1927), focused their attention on the 10th-century temple at Malot in the Salt Range and its formal links to the architecture of Kashmir, thus setting the direction for later scholarship. The temple at Malot does indeed mimic pent-roofed temples in Kashmir at a time of marital alliance between the Utpalas of Kashmir and the Hindu Shahi kings of Hund in Gandhara (Rehman 1979). It differs from the Kashmir temples, however, in placing the curvilinear Nagara shrine models on its walls (see box on Shrine Models). These shrine models mimic local Gandhara-Nagara temples at other 10th-century Hindu Shahi sites, such as a pair of temples in a second important fortress, Bilot (south Kafirkot), near Dera Ismail Khan . The Kashmiri form found at Malot, however, is an exception. Better sources for this Indus group of temples can be found in the Gandharan substrata and in the ferment of Nagara formation in other areas of north and western India (Meister 1981) than in Kashmir. Whether in the domed Buddhist compounds at Takht-i-bahi or the 5th-century moldings facing the Dharmarajika stupa at Taxila, Gandharan antecedents are close at hand. Certainly the basic molding sequence of Gandhara-Nagara temples begins as early as Taxila. The typical slender pseudo-Corinthian pilasters at Kafirkot as well as true arches can be seen also on the 2nd/4th-century Buddhist stupa at Guldhara in Afghanistan (Harle 1986:73).The characteristic sloping batter of niches and doorways (and sometimes walls) on these temples has clear antecedents in Gandharan conventions. Much of the architectural ornament in these temples is familiar to the Gandhara region and even the use of interior squinches and masonry domes is not new. What is new to the region is the Nagara modality of superstructure as it had developed in north India for the first time in the 5th and 6th centuries AD (Meister 1986, 1989). The shrine model on the wall of temple at Bilot bears close resemblance to the much better known proto-Nagara shrine model represented on the early 6th-century doorway to the "Gupta" temple at Deogarh in central India, for example, or one on a brick stupa base at Nalanda in eastern India (Meister 1986:46-47).
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