Dr. V.K.Maheshwari M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Mrs Sudha Rani Maheshwari, M.Sc (Zoology), B.Ed.

Former Principal. A.K.P.I.College, Roorkee, India

Human beings will be happier – not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia.

Kurt Vonnegut

The first and foremost is to define the concept of beauty. From the lay-man point of view ,beauty is the effect one  feel after receiving or perceiving any stimulus, concrete or abstract. This effect can be pleasing or repulsive. We shall answer, briefly and precariously, that beauty is any quality by which an object or a form pleases a beholder. Primarily and originally the object does not please the beholder because it is beautiful, but rather he calls it beautiful because it pleases him.

Any object that satisfies desire will seem beautiful. The pleasing object may as like as not be the beholder himself; in our secret hearts no other form is quite so fair as ours, and art begins with the adornment of one’s own exquisite body. Or the pleasing object may be the desired mate; and then the aesthetic beauty-feeling sense takes on the intensity and creativeness of sex, and spreads the aura of beauty to everything that concerns the beloved one to all forms that resemble her, all colours that adorn her, please her or speak of her, all ornaments and garments that become her, all shapes and motions that recall her symmetry and grace. Or the pleasing form may be a desired male; and out of the attraction that here draws frailty to worship strength comes that sense of sublimate satisfaction in the presence of power which creates the loftiest art of all.

Finally nature herself with our cooperation may become both sublime and beautiful; not only because it simulates and suggests all the tenderness of women and all the strength of men, but because we project into it our own feelings and fortunes, our love of others and of ourselves relishing in it the scenes of our youth, enjoying its quiet solitude as an escape from the storm of life.

Actually the above point refers only about the effect of beauty, but” what” aspect of the basic question is still unanswered. Actually beauty is nothing but an equilibrium among the various inherent  components in anything, may it be music. Painting, literary work , a thought in philosophy or anything in nature including biological structure or social and cultural impact factors.

Another problem area is determining the nature of beauty, is it subjective or object oriented/ objective? The supporters of subjective nature give some significant arguments like,” for the mother, her child is the  most beautiful child” or  “ why we feel attracted towards one person in one situation and for the same person we may feel the opposite in different situation”

The supporters of the object oriented view argue like, “The sculptures of Ajanta cave , paintings of Leonardo ,  classical music, or poetry of Rabindra Nath Tagore are beautiful ,if you fail to appreciate them , it is due to your ignorance . So the fault lies in you not in the object.

Both types of arguments carry weight. So it can be concluded that the nature of beauty is both subjective as well as object- centred/ objective.

The primitive sense of beauty

Primitive man seldom thinks of selecting women because of what we should call their beauty; he thinks rather of their usefulness, and never dreams of rejecting a strong-armed bride because of her ugliness. The Red Indian chief, being asked which of his wives was loveliest, apologized for never having thought of the matter. “Their faces,” he said, with the mature wisdom of a Franklin, “might be more or less handsome, but in other respects women are all the same.” Where a sense of beauty is present in primitive man it sometimes eludes us by being so different from our own.

“All Negro races that I know,” says Reichard, “account a woman beautiful who is not constricted at the waist, and when the body from the arm-pits to the hips is the same breadth ‘like a ladder,’ says the Coast Negro.” Elephantine ears and an overhanging stomach are feminine charms to some African males; and throughout Africa it is the fat woman who is accounted loveliest.

“Most savages says Briffault, “have a preference for what we should regard as one of the most unsightly features in a woman’s form, namely, long, hanging breasts.” “It is well known,” says Darwin, “that with many Hottentot women the posterior part of the body projects in a wonderful manner . . .; and Sir Andrew Smith is certain that this peculiarity is greatly admired by the men. He once saw a woman who was considered a beauty, and she was so immensely developed behind that when seated on level ground she could not rise, and had to push herself along until she came to a slope. . . .According to Burton the Somali men are said to choose their wives by ranging them in a line, and by picking her out who projects furthest a tergo. Nothing can be more hateful to a Negro than the opposite form.” 88 In Nigeria, says Mungo Park, “corpulence and beauty seem to be terms nearly synonymous. A woman of even moderate pretensions must be one who cannot walk without a slave under each arm to support her; and a perfect beauty is a load for a camel.”If the sense of beauty is not strong in primitive society it may be because the lack of delay between sexual desire and fulfilment gives no time for that imaginative enhancement of the object.

Clothing

Clothing was apparently, in its origins, a form of ornament, a sexual deterrent or charm rather than an article of use against cold or shame.  The Cimbri were in the habit of tobogganing naked over the snow.  When Darwin, pitying the nakedness of the Fuegians, gave one of them a red cloth as a protection against the cold, the native tore it into strips, which he and his companions then used as ornaments; as Cook had said of them, timelessly, they were “content to be naked, but ambitious to be fine.”" In like manner the ladies of the Orinoco cut into shreds the materials given them by the Jesuit Fathers for clothing; they wore the ribbons so made around their necks, but insisted that “they would be ashamed to wear clothing’” An old author describes the Brazilian natives as usually naked, and adds: “Now alreadie some doe weare apparell, but esteem it so little that they weare it rather for fashion than for honesties sake, and because they are commanded to weare it; … as is well scene by some that sometimes come abroad with certaine garments no further than the navell, without any other thing, or others only a cap on their heads, and leave the other garments at home.”" When clothing became something more than an adornment it served partly to indicate the married status of a loyal wife, partly to accentuate the form and beauty of woman. For the most part primitive women asked of clothing precisely what later women have asked not that it should quite cover their nakedness, but that it should enhance or suggest their charms. Everything changes, except woman and man.

The Cosmetic painting of the body-

Body painting is a form of art that followed us from the ancient prehistoric times when human race was born, to the modern times where artist use human body as a innovative canvas that can showcase human beauty like no art style before it. Many believe that body painting was the first form of art that was used by humans, and archaeological evidence is close to support it.

Records of various ancient and modern tribes from Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia show clear records of their body painting heritage. By using natural pigments from plants and fruits, ancient people decorated themselves with ritual paintings, tattoos, piercings, plugs and even scarring. According to many historians, body painting was the important part of the daily and spiritual lives, often showcasing their inner qualities, wishes for future, images of gods, and many natural or war themes. There, body paint was often applied for weddings, preparations for war, death or funerals, showcasing of position and rank, and rituals of adulthood. In addition to temporary body paints, many cultures used face paint or permanent tattooing that could showcase much larger details than paintings made from natural pigments.

Indeed it is highly probable that the natural male thinks of beauty in terms of himself rather than in terms of woman; art begins at home. Primitive men equalled modern men in vanity, incredible as this will seem to women. Among simple peoples, as among animals, it is the male rather than the female that puts on ornament and mutilates his body for beauty’s sake. In Australia, says Bonwick, “adornments are almost entirely monopolized by men”; so too in Melanesia, New Guinea, New Caledonia, New Britain, New Hanover, and among the North American Indians.  In some tribes more time is given to the adornment of the body than to any other business of the day.

Apparently the first form of art is the artificial colouring of the body sometimes to attract women, sometimes to frighten foes. The Australian native, like the latest American belle, always carried with him a provision of white, red, and yellow paint for touching up his beauty now and then; and when the supply threatened to run out he undertook expeditions of some distance and danger to renew it. On ordinary days he contented himself with a few spots of colour on his cheeks, his shoulders and his breast; but on festive occasions he felt shamefully nude unless his entire body was painted.

In some tribes the men reserved to themselves the right to paint the body; in others the married women were forbidden to paint their necks.  But women were not long in acquiring the oldest of the arts cosmetics. When Captain Cook dallied in New Zealand he noticed that his sailors, when they returned from their adventures on shore, had artificially red or yellow noses; the paint of the native Helens had stuck to them.” The Fellatah ladies of Central Africa spent several hours a day over their toilette: they made their fingers and toes purple by keeping them wrapped all night in henna leaves; they stained their teeth alternately with blue, yellow, and purple dyes; they colour their hair with indigo, and pencilled their eyelids with sulphuret of antimony.” Every Bongo lady carried in her dressing- case tweezers for pulling out eyelashes and eyebrows, lancet-shaped hair- pins, rings and bells, buttons and clasps.

Tattooing, scarification

Scarification is a permanent procedure meant to decorate and beautify the body.Artists used the body as their canvas and the results became socially valuable. The operation of cutting and raising scars was common, as ‘tattooing’ was not an effective way to decorate dark pigmented skins.The process of African scarification involved puncturing ‘or cutting’ patterns and motifs into the epidermis of the skin. Different tools produced different types of scars, some subtle, others profound. Scarification served as a symbol of strength, fortitude and courage in both men and women. Scars were used to enhance beauty and society’s admiration .Ash and certain organic saps might be added to a wound to make the scarring more prominent and or embellished. Climate and custom permitted negligible clothing – which intern promoted body art.

The primitives invented tattooing, scarification and clothing as more permanent adornments. The women as well as the men, in many tribes, submitted to the colouring needle, and bore without flinching even the tattooing of their lips.

In Greenland the mothers tattooed their daughters early, the sooner to get them married off.” Most often, however, tattooing itself was considered insufficiently visible or impressive, and a number of tribes on every continent produced deep scars on their flesh to make them- selves lovelier to their fellows, or more discouraging to their enemies. As Theophile Gautier put it, “having no clothes to embroider, they embroidered their skins.”  Flints or mussel shells cut the flesh, and often a ball of earth was placed within the wound to enlarge the scar. The Torres Straits natives wore huge scars like epaulets; the Abcokuta cut themselves to pro- duce scars imitative of lizards, alligators or tortoises.  “There is,” says Georg, “no part of the body that has not been perfected, decorated, dis figured, painted, bleached, tattooed, reformed, stretched or squeezed, out of vanity or desire for ornament.”" The Botocudos derived their name from a plug (botoque) which they inserted into the lower lip and the ears in the eighth year of life, and repeatedly replaced with a larger plug until the opening was as much as four inches in diameter.  Hottentot women trained the labia mlnora to assume enoromous lengths, so producing at last the “Hottentot apron” so greatly admired by their men.  Ear-rings and nose-rings were de rigueur; the natives of Gippsland believed that one who died without a nose-ring would suffer horrible torments in the next life.

It is all very barbarous, says the modern lady, as she bores her ears for rings, paints her lips and her cheeks, tweezes her eyebrows, reforms her eyelashes, powders her face, her neck and her arms, and compresses her feet. The tattooed sailor speaks with superior sympathy of the “savages” he has known; and the Continental student, horrified by primitive mutilations, sports his honorific scars.

Ornaments

From the beginning both sexes preferred ornaments to clothing. Primitive trade seldom deals in necessities; it is usually confined to articles of adornment or play.” Jewelry is one of the most ancient elements of civilization; in tombs twenty thousand years old, shells and teeth have been found strung into necklaces.” From simple beginnings such embellishments soon reached impressive proportions, and played a lofty role in life. The Galla women wore rings to the weight of six pounds, and some Dinka women carried half a hundred weight of decoration. One African belle wore cop- per rings which became hot under the sun, so that she had to employ an attendant to shade or fan her. The Queen of the Wabunias on the Congo wore a brass collar weighing twenty pounds; she had to lie down every now and then to rest. Poor women who were so unfortunate as to have only light jewellery imitated carefully the steps of those who carried great burdens of bedizenment.”

Sculpture

Sculpture is a fine arts discipline that produces artwork in three dimensional forms. Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions and one of the plastic arts. Durable sculptural processes originally used carving (the removal of material) and modelling (the addition of material, as clay), in stone, metal, ceramics, wood and other materials but, since modernism, shifts in sculptural process led to an almost complete freedom of materials and process. A wide variety of materials may be worked by removal such as carving, assembled by welding or modelling.

Sculpture has been central in religious devotion in many cultures, and until recent centuries large sculptures, too expensive for private individuals to create, were usually an expression of religion or politics.Sculpture, like painting, probably owed its origin to pottery: the potter found that he could mold not only articles of use, but imitative figures that might serve as magic amulets, and then as things of beauty in themselves. The Eskimos carved caribou antlers and walrus ivory into figurines of animals and men.  Again, primitive man sought to mark his hut, or a totem-pole, or a grave with some image that would indicate the object worshiped, or the person deceased; at first he carved merely a face upon a post, then a head, then the whole post; and through this filial marking of graves sculpture became an art. So the ancient dwellers on Easter Island topped with enormous monolithic statues the vaults of their dead; scores of such statues, many of them twenty feet high, have been found there; some, now prostrate in ruins, were apparently sixty feet tall.

Pottery

For archaeologists, anthropologists and historians the study of pottery can help to provide an insight into past cultures. The study of pottery may also allow inferences to be drawn about a culture’s daily life, religion, social relationships, attitudes towards neighbours, attitudes to their own world and even the way the culture understood the universe.

The first source of art, then, is akin to the display of colors and plumage on the male animal in mating time; it lies in the desire to adorn and beautify the body. And just as self-love and mate-love, overflowing, pour out their surplus of affection upon nature, so the impulse to beautify passes from the personal to the external world. The soul seeks to express its feeling in objective ways, through color and form; art really begins when men undertake to beautify things. Perhaps its first external medium was pottery. The potter’s wheel, like writing and the state, belongs to the historic civilizations; but even without it primitive men or rather women lifted this ancient industry to an art, and achieved merely with clay, water and deft fingers an astonishing symmetry of form; witness the pottery fashioned by the Baronga of South Africa,  or by the Pueblo Indians.

When the potter applied colour designs to the surface of the vessel he had formed, he was creating the art of painting. In primitive hands painting is not yet an independent art; it exists as an adjunct to pottery and statuary. Nature men made colours out of clay, and the Andamanese made oil colours by mixing ochre with oils or fats.  Such colours were used to ornament weapons, implements, vases, clothing, and buildings. Many hunting tribes of Africa and Oceania painted upon the walls of their caves or upon neighbouring rocks vivid representations of the animals that they sought in the chase.

The Dance

Primitive dance was done mostly for worship. The people worshiped elements of nature or some gods. Another reason why they danced was to keep themselves warm. They didn’t have heated homes, of course and it was pretty cold then as it is now.  Another characteristic of primitive dance was that they imitated their daily activities, like fishing or hunting. Their entire life evolved around these activities so of course that would show in the dances they did. The dances were also wild like another person said in here. They had jerky and animal like movements. They also imitated the sounds and movements made by animals and birds. The primitive dance was not done for social interaction and it was performed by men alone. They had a leader who would give the calls. The leader was called a shaman and he was respected by everyone in the tribe.

Even in early days, and probably long before he thought of carving objects or building tombs, man found pleasure in rhythm, and began to develop the crying and warbling, the prancing and preening, of the animal into song and dance. Perhaps, like the animal, he sang before he learned to talk,” and danced as early as he sang. Indeed no art so characterized or expressed primitive man as the dance. He developed it from primordial simplicity to a complexity unrivalled in civilization, and varied it into a thousand forms. The great festivals of the tribes were celebrated chiefly with communal and in-

dividual dancing; great wars were opened with martial steps and chants; the great ceremonies of religion were a mingling of song, drama and dance. What seems to us now to be forms of play were probably serious matters to early men; they danced not merely to express themselves, but to offer suggestions to nature or the gods; for example, the periodic incitation to abundant reproduction was accomplished chiefly through the hypnotism of the dance.

Spencer derived the dance from the ritual of welcoming a victorious chief home from the wars; Freud derived it from the natural expression of sensual desire, and the group technique of erotic stimulation; if one should assert, with similar narrowness, that the dance was born of sacred rites and mummeries, and then merge the three theories into one, there might result as definite a conception of the origin of the dance as can be attained by us today.

Music

Prehistoric music, sometimes called primitive music, covers the first cultural periods of the human species particularly the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras, from its birth to the Ancient Music era that started around 2000-3000 BC, generally considered to coincide with the first appearance of written materials. These eras cover the birth of human cultures comprising chants and instrumental music.

The music probably started with vocal sound experimentation and playing (basic voice playing ie. primitive singing, shouting, crying, murmuring…) that were then structured and used for children’s lullabies, rituals, funerals, celebrations and other kinds of ceremonies. The first wind instruments and percussion instruments appeared during the Paleolithic eras. Some of them were discovered and have been reconstructed. They consist of: bone flutes, ivory flutes, wooden and bamboo flutes; bone whistles like whistling phalanx; bone or wooden rhombus, also named bullroarer, a weighted aerofoil consisting of a rectangular thin slat of bone or wood attached to a cord that is rotated vigorously above self; primitive string instruments like musical bows; primitive percussion instruments like wooden or bone scraper artefacts used with a wooden stick or small bone, seeds, shells, primitive drums with recipients, and other kind of wooden or bone tools hit or knocked over different stones, shells, bones, horns or wood pieces.

From the dance, we may believe, came instrumental music and the drama. The making of such music appears to arise out of a desire to mark and accentuate with sound the rhythm of the dance, and to intensify with shrill or rhythmic notes the excitement necessary to patriotism or procreation. The instruments were limited in range and accomplishment, but almost endless in variety: native ingenuity exhausted itself in fashioning horns, trumpets, gongs, tamtams, clappers, rattles, castanets, flutes and drums from horns, skins, shells, ivory, brass, copper, bamboo and wood; and it ornamented them with elaborate carving and colouring. The taut string of the bow became the origin of a hundred instruments from the primitive lyre to the Stradivarius violin and the modern pianoforte. Professional singers, like professional dancers, arose among the tribes; and vague scales, predominantly minor in tone, were developed.”

With music, song and dance combined, the “savage” created for us the drama and the opera. For the primitive dance was frequently devoted to mimicry; it imitated, most simply, the movements of animals and men, and passed to the mimetic performance of actions and events. So some Australian tribes staged a sexual dance around a pit ornamented with shrubbery to represent the vulva, and, after ecstatic and erotic gestures and prancing, cast their spears symbolically into the pit. The northwestern tribes of the same island played a drama of death and resurrection differing only in simplicity from the medieval mystery and modern Passion plays: the dancers slowly sank to the ground, hid their heads under the boughs they carried, and simulated death; then, at a sign from their leader, they rose abruptly in a wild triumphal chant and dance announcing the resurrection of the soul.  In like manner a thousand forms of pantomime described events significant to the history of the tribe, or actions important in the individual life. When rhythm disappeared from these performances the dance passed into the drama, and one of the greatest of art-forms was born.

Art is the creation of beauty; it is the expression of thought or feeling in a form that seems beautiful or sublime, and therefore arouses in us some reverberation of that primordial delight which woman gives to man, or man to woman. The thought may be any capture of life’s significance, the feeling may be any arousal or release of life’s tensions. The form may satisfy us through rhythm, which falls in pleasantly with the alternations of our breath, the pulsation of our blood, and the majestic oscillations of winter and summer, ebb and flow, night and day; or the form may please us through symmetry, which is a static rhythm, standing for strength and recalling to us the ordered proportions of plants and animals, of women and men; or it may please us through colour, which brightens the spirit or intensifies life; or finally the form may please us through veracity because its lucid and transparent imitation of nature or reality catches some mortal loveliness of plant or animal, or some transient meaning of circumstance, and holds it still for our lingering enjoyment or leisurely under- standing. From these many sources come those noble superfluities of life song and dance, music and drama, pottery and painting, sculpture and architecture, literature and philosophy. For what is philosophy but an art one more attempt to give “significant form” to the chaos of experience?

REFERENCE:

BRIFFAULT, ROBERT: The Mothers. 3V. New York, 1927

GEORG, EUGEN: The Adventure of Mankind. New York, 1931

GROSSE, ERNST: Beginnings of Art. New York, 1897.

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LOWIE,R. H.: Are We Civilized? New York, 1929.

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MASON, O. T.: Origins of Invention. New York, 1899.

MASON, W. A.: History of the Art of Writing. New York, 1920.

MULLER-LYER,F.: Evolution of Modern Marriage. New York, 1930.

MULLER-LYER,F.: History of Social Development. New York, 1921.

MULLKR-LYER,F.: The Family. New York, 1931.

PI JOAN, JOS.: History of Art. 3V. New York, 1927

PRATT, W. S.: The History of Music. New York, 1927.

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SPENCER, HERBERT: Principles of Sociology. 3V. New York, 1910.

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Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Mrs Sudha Rani Maheshwari, M.Sc (Zoology), B.Ed.

Former Principal. A.K.P.I.College, Roorkee, India

Shankara came, a great philosopher, and showed that the real essence of Buddhism and that of the Vedanta are not very different, but that the disciples did not understand the Master and have degraded themselves, denied the existence of the soul and of God, and have become atheists. That was what Shankara showed, and all the Buddhists began to come back to the old religion.- Swami Vevekananda

The existence of Vedic Dharma in India today is due to Sankara. The forces opposed to Vedic religion were more numerous and powerful at the time of Sankara than they are today. Chaos pervaded all through India in the matter of religion and philosophy. Sect after sect, such as Charvakas,  Kapalikas, Shaktas, Sankhyas, Buddhas and Madhyamikas sprang up. The number of sects rose as high as seventy-two and there was constant conflict between sects. At the time of Adi Shankara’s life, Hinduism was increasing in influence in India at the expense of Buddhism and Jainism.Hinduism was divided into innumerable sects, each quarrelling with the others. The followers of Mimamsa and Sankhya philosophy were atheists, insomuch that they did not believe in God as a unified being. Besides these atheists there were numerous theistic sects. There were also those who rejected the Vedas, like the Charvakas.

There was superstition and bigotry. Darkness prevailed over the once happy land of Rishis, sages and Yogins. Such was the state of the country at the time which just preceded the Avatara (incarnation) of Sankaracharya. Still, single-handed, within a very short time, Sankara overpowered them all and restored the Vedic Dharrna and Advaita Vedanta to its pristine purity in the land.

Shankara was born in Kaladi in present day central Kerala during the days of Keralite Chera Kingdom, to a Nambudiri Brahmin couple. His father’s house name was Kaipilly Mana/Illam and his mother’s house name Melpazhoor ManaIllam . He was named Shankara (Sanskrit, “bestower of happiness”), in honour of Shiva (one of whose epithets is Shankara). His father died when Sankara was seven years old. Sankara had none to look after his education. His mother was an extraordinary woman. She took special care to educate her son in all the Shastras. Sankara’s Upanayana or thread ceremony was performed in his seventh year, after the death of his father. Sankara exhibited extraordinary intelligence in his boyhood. As a child, Shankara showed remarkable scholarship, mastering the four Vedas by the age of eight. Shankara was a prodigious child and was hailed as ‘Eka-Sruti-Dara’, one who can retain anything that has been read just once. Shankara mastered all the Vedas and the six Vedangas from the local gurukul and recited extensively from the epics and Puranas. Shankara also studied the philosophies of diverse sects and was a storehouse of philosophical knowledge.

Sannyasa

At the age of 8, Shankara was inclined towards sannyasa, but it was only after much persuasion that his mother finally gave her consent. Shankara then left Kerala and travelled towards North India in search of a guru. On the banks of the Narmada River, he met Govinda Bhagavatpada the disciple of Gaudapada at Omkareshwar. When Govinda Bhagavatpada asked Shankara’s identity, he replied with an extempore verse that brought out the Advaita Vedantaphilosophy. Govinda Bhagavatapada was impressed and took Shankara as his disciple.

The guru instructed Shankara to write a commentary on the Brahma Sutras and propagate the Advaita philosophy. Shankara travelled to Kashi, where a young man named Sanandana, hailing from Chola territory in South India, became his first disciple.

When he was only sixteen, he became a master of all the philosophies and theologies. He began to write commentaries on the Gita, the Upanishads and the Brahma Sutras when he was only sixteen years old. Traditionally, his works are classified under Bhāṣya (“commentary”), Prakaraṇa grantha (“philosophical treatise”) and Stotra (“devotional hymn”). The commentaries serve to provide a consistent interpretation of the scriptural texts from the perspective of Advaita Vedanta. The philosophical treatises provide various methodologies to the student to understand the doctrine. The devotional hymns are rich in poetry and piety, serving to highlight the relationship between the devotee and the deity.

Shankara wrote Bhashyas on the ten major Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita. In his works, he quotes from Shveshvatara, Kaushitakai, Mahanarayana and Jabala Upanishads, among others. Bhashyas on Kaushitaki, Nrisimhatapani and Shveshvatara Upanishads are extant but the authenticity is doubtful  Shankara’s is the earliest extant commentary on the Brahma Sutras. However, he mentions older commentaries like those of Dravida, Bhartrprapancha and others. Shankara also wrote commentaries on other scriptural works, such as the Vishnu sahasranāma and the Sānatsujātiya. Like the Bhagavad Gita, both of these are contained in the Mahabhārata.

Arriving in the north as a delegate of the south, he won such popularity at the University of Benares that it crowned him with its highest honors, and sent him forth, with a retinue of disciples, to champion Brahmanism in all the debating halls of India. At Benares, probably, he wrote his famous commentaries on the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita, in which he attacked with theological ardor and scholastic subtlety all the heretics of India, and restored Brahmanism to that position of intellectual leadership from which Buddha and Kapila had deposed it.

Sankara’s philosophical conquests are unique in the world. He had his triumphant tour all over India. Adi Shankara held discourses and debates with the leading scholars of all these sects and schools of philosophy to controvert their doctrines. He unified the theistic sects into a common framework of Shanmata system. In his works, Adi Shankara stressed the importance of the Vedas, and his efforts helped Hinduism regain strength and popularity. He travelled on foot to various parts of India to restore the study of the Vedas.

He reintroduced a purer form of Vedic thought. His teachings and tradition form the basis of Smartism and have influenced Sant Mat lineages. He is the main figure in the tradition of Advaita Vedanta. He was the founder of the Daśanāmi Sampradāya of Hindumonasticism and Ṣaṇmata of Smarta tradition. He introduced the Pañcāyatana form of worship.

He met the leaders of different schools of thought. He convinced them by arguments and established the supremacy and truth of the religion that he expounded in his commentaries. He went to all the celebrated seats of learning. He challenged the learned men to discussion, argued with them and converted them to his opinions and views. He defeated Bhatta Bhaskara and condemned his Bhashya (commentary) on the Vedanta Sutras. He then met Dandi and Mayura and taught them his philosophy. He then defeated in argument Harsha, author of Khandana Khanda Kadya, Abhinavagupta, Murari Misra, Udayanacharya, Dharmagupta, Kumarila and Prabhakara.

In the north-west of the State of Mysore, nestling in the beautiful foot-hills of the Western Ghats, surrounded by virgin forests, lies the village of Sringeri and here Sankara established his first Mutt.

The Sringeri Peetha is one of the oldest monasteries of the world flourishing for over twelve centuries now. It is the first of the four seats of learning established by Sankaracharya, the other three being Puri, Dwaraka and Joshi Mutt, each one of them representing one of the four Vedas of the Hindus.

Sankara placed his four eminent disciples (Sureswara Acharya, Padmapada, Hastamalaka and Trotakacharya) in charge of the Sringeri Mutt, Jagannath Mutt, Dwaraka Mutt and Joshi Mutt respectively.

According to Nakamura, these mathas contributed to the influence of Shankara, which was “due to institutional factors”.The mathas which he built exist until today, and preserve the teachings and influence of Shankara, The table below gives an overview of the four Amnaya Mathas founded by Adi Shankara, and their details^:::

According to the tradition in Kerala, after Sankara’s samadhi at Vadakkunnathan Temple, his disciples founded four mathas in Thrissur, namely Naduvil Madhom, Thekke Madhom, Idayil Madhom and Vadakke Madhom.

Sankara organized ten definite orders of Sannyasins under the name ‘Dasanamis’ who add, at the end of their names, any one of the following ten suffixes: Sarasvati, Bharati, Puri (Sringeri Mutt); Tirtha, Asrama (Dwaraka Mutt); Giri, Parvata and Sagar (Joshi Mutt); Vana and Aranya (Govardhana Mutt).

The Paramahamsa represents the highest of these grades. It is possible to become a Paramahamsa by a long course of Vedantic study, meditation and Self- realisation. The Ativarnashramis are beyond caste and order of life. They dine with all classes of people. Sankara’s Sannyasins are to be found all over India.

Sankara proceeded to Kamarup-the present Guwahati-in Assam and held a controversy with Abhinava Gupta, the Shakta commentator, and won victory over him. He went to the Himalayas, built a Mutt at Joshi and a temple at Badri. He then proceeded to Kedarnath higher up in the Himalayas. He became one with the Linga in 820 A.D. in his thirty-second year.

In his short life of thirty-two years Shankara achieved that union of sage and saint, of wisdom and kindliness, which characterizes the loftiest type of man produced in India. It seemed to him that the profoundest religion and the profoundest philosophy were those of the Upanishads. He could pardon the polytheism of the people, but not the atheism of Sankhya or the agnosticism of Buddha.

The word Vedanta meant originally the end of the Vedas that is, the Upanishads. Today India applies it to that system of philosophy which sought to give logical structure and support to the essential doctrine of the Upanishads the organ-point that sounds throughout Indian thought that God (Brahman) and the soul (Atman) arc one. The doctrine of advaita holds, the unity of the ātman and nirgunabrahman, brahman without attributes. Advaita Vedānta is one version of Vedānta. Vedānta is nominally a school of Indian philosophy, although in reality it is a label for any hermeneutics that attempts to provide a consistent interpretation of the philosophy of the Upaniṣads or, more formally, the canonical summary of the Upaniṣads, Bādarāyaņa’s Brahma Sūtra. Advaita is often translated as “non-dualism” though it literally means “non-secondness.”

The oldest known form of this most widely accepted of all Hindu philosophies is the Brahma-sutra of Badarayana (ca. 200 B.C.) 555 aphorisms, of which the first announces the purpose of all: “Now, then, a desire to know Brahman” Almost a thousand years later Gaudapada wrote a commentary on these sutras, and taught the esoteric doctrine of the system to Govinda, who taught it to Shankara, who composed the most famous of Vedanta commentaries, and made himself the greatest of Indian philosophers. His works elaborate on ideas found in the Upanishads. He wrote copious commentaries on the Vedic canon (Brahma Sutra, principalupanishads and Bhagavad Gita) in support of his thesis.

There is much metaphysical wind in these discourses, and arid deserts of textual exposition; but  Shankara accepts the full authority of his country’s Scriptures as a divine revelation, and then sallies forth to find proofs in experience and reason for all Scriptural teachings. He does not believe that reason can suffice for such a task; on the contrary he wonders have we not exaggerated the power and role, the clarity and reliability, of reason.  Jaimini was right: reason is a lawyer, and will prove anything we wish; for every argument it can find an equal and opposite argument, and its upshot is a scepticism that weakens all force of character and undermines all values of life. It is not logic that we need, says Shankara, it is insight, the faculty (akin to art) of grasping at once the essential out of the irrelevant, the eternal out of the temporal, the whole out of the part: this is the first prerequisite to philosophy.

The second is a willingness to observe, inquire and think for understanding’s sake, not for the sake of invention, wealth or power; it is a withdrawal of the spirit from all the excitement, bias and fruits of action.

Thirdly, the philosopher must acquire self-restraint, patience, and tranquillity; he must learn to live above physical temptation or material concerns. Finally there must burn, deep in his soul, the desire for moksha, for liberation from ignorance, for an end to all consciousness of a separate self, for a blissful absorption in the Brahman of complete understanding and infinite unity. 118 In a word, the student needs not the logic of reason so much as a cleansing and deepening discipline of the soul. This, perhaps, has been the secret of all profound education.

Shankara establishes the source of his philosophy at a remote and subtle Point. Apparently, all our knowledge comes from the senses, and reveals not the external reality itself, but our sensory adaptation perhaps transformation of that reality. By sense, then, we can never quite know the “real”; we can know it only in that garb of space, time and cause which may be a web created by our organs of sense and under- standing, designed or evolved to catch and hold that fluent and elusive reality whose existence we can surmise, but whose character we can never objectively describe; our way of perceiving will forever be inextricably mingled with the thing perceived.

This is not the airy subjectivism of the solipsist who thinks that he can destroy the world by going to sleep. The world exists, but it is Maya not delusion, but phenomenon, an appearance created partly by our thought. Our incapacity to perceive things except through the film of space and time, or to think of them except in terms of cause and change, is an innate limitation, an Avidya, or ignorance, which is bound up with our very mode of perception, and to which, therefore, all flesh is heir. Maya and Avidya are the subjective and objective sides of the great illusion by which the intellect supposes that it knows the real; it is through Maya and Avidya, through our birthright of ignorance, that we see a multiplicity of objects and a flux of change; in truth there is only one Being, and change is “a mere name” for the superficial fluctuations of forms. Behind the Maya or Veil of change and things, to be reached not by sensation or intellect but only by the insight and intuition of the trained spirit, is the one universal reality, Brahman.

This natural obscuration of sense and intellect by the organs and forms of sensation and understanding bars us likewise from perceiving the one unchanging Soul that stands beneath all individual souls and minds. Our separate selves, visible to perception and thought, are as unreal as the phantasmagoria of space and time; individual differences and distinct personalities are bound up with body and matter, they belong to the kaleidoscopic world of change; and these merely phenomenal selves will pass away with the material conditions of which they are a part. But the underlying life which we feel in ourselves when we forget space and time, cause and change, is the very essence and reality of us, that Atman which we share with all selves and things, and which, undivided and omnipresent, is identical with Brahman, God.

But what is God? Just as there are two selves the ego and Atman and two worlds the phenomenal so there are two deities: an Ishvara or Creator worshiped by the people through the patterns of space, cause, time and change; and a Brahman or Pure Being worshiped by that philosophical piety which seeks and finds, behind all separate things and selves, one universal reality, unchanging amid all changes, indivisible amid all divisions, eternal despite all vicissitudes of form, all birth and death. Polytheism, even theism, belongs to the world of Maya and Avidya; they are forms of worship that correspond to the forms of perception and thought; they are as necessary to our moral life as space, time and cause are necessary to our intellectual life, but they have no absolute validity or objective truth.

To Shankara the existence of God is no problem, for he defines God as existence, and identifies all real being with God. But of the existence of a personal God, creator or redeemer, there may, he thinks, be some question; such a deity, says this pre-plagiarist of Kant, cannot be proved by reason, he can only be postulated as a practical necessity,  ” offering peace to our limited intellects, and encouragement to our fragile morality. The philosopher, though he may worship in every temple and bow to every god, will pass beyond these forgivable forms of popular faith; feeling the illusoriness of plurality, and the monistic unity of all things, he will adore, as the Supreme Being, Being itself indescribable, limitless, spaceless, timeless, causeless, changeless Being, the source and substance of all reality.  We may apply the adjectives “conscious,” “intelligent,” even “happy” to Brahman, since Brahman includes all selves, and these may have such qualities;  but all other adjectives would be applicable to Brahman equally, since It includes all qualities of all things. Essentially Brahman is neuter, raised above personality and gender, beyond good and evil, above all moral distinctions, all differences and attributes, all desires and ends. Brahman is the cause and effect, the timeless and secret essence, of the world.

The goal of philosophy is to find that secret, and to lose the seeker in the secret found. To be one with God means, for Shankara, to rise above or to sink beneath the separatencss and brevity of the self, with all its narrow purposes and interests; to become unconscious of all parts, divisions, things; to be placidly at one, in a desireless Nirvana, with that great ocean of Being in which there are no warring purposes, no competing selves, parts, no change, no space, and no time. To find this blissful peace (Ananda) a man must renounce not merely the world but himself; he must care nothing for possessions or goods, even for good or evil; he must look upon suffering and death as Maya, surface incidents of body and matter, time and change; and he must not think of his own personal quality and fate; a single moment of self-interest or pride can destroy all his liberation

Good works cannot give a man salvation, for good works have no validity or meaning except in the Maya world of space and time; only the knowledge of the saintly seer can bring that salvation which is the recognition of the identity of self and the universe, Atman and Brahman, soul and God, and the absorption of the part in the whole.  Only when this absorption is complete does the wheel of reincarnation stop; for then it is seen that the separate self and personality, to which reincarnation comes, is an illusion.  It is Ishvara, the Maya god, that gives rebirth to the self in punishment and reward; but “when the identity” of Atman and Brahman “has become known, then,” says Shankara, “the soul’s existence as wanderer, and Brahmarfs existence as creator” (i.e., as Ishvara) “have vanished away.”  Ishvara and Karma, like things and selves, belong to the exoteric doctrine of Vedanta as adapted to the needs of the common man; in the esoteric or secret doctrine soul and Brahman are one, never wandering, never dying, never changed.

It was thoughtful of Shankara to confine his esoteric doctrine to philosophers; for as Voltaire believed that only a society of philosophers could survive without laws, so only a society of supermen could live beyond good and evil. Critics have complained that if good and evil are Maya, part of the unreal world, then all moral distinctions fall away, and devils are as good as saints. But these moral distinctions, Shankara cleverly replies, are real ‘within the world of space and time, and are binding for those who live in the world. They are not binding upon the soul that has united itself with Brahman; such a soul can do no wrong, since wrong implies desire and action, and the liberated soul, by definition, does not move in the sphere of desire and (self-considering) action. Whoever consciously injures another lives on the plane of Maya, and is subject to its distinctions, its morals and its laws. Only the philosopher is free, only wisdom is liberty.

It was a subtle and profound philosophy to be written by a lad in his twenties. Shankara not only elaborated it in writing and defended it successfully in debate, but he expressed snatches of it in some of the most sensitive religious poetry of India. When all challenges had been met he retired to a hermitage in the Himalayas, and, according to Hindu tradition, died at the age of thirty-two.  ” Ten religious orders were founded in his name, and many disciples accepted and developed his philosophy. One of them some say Shankara himself wrote for the people a popular exposition of the Vedanta the Mohamudgara, or “Hammer of Folly” in which the essentials of the system were summed up with clarity and force:

Fool! give up thy thirst for wealth, banish all desires from thy heart. Let thy mind be satisfied with what is gained by thy Karma. . . . Do not be proud of wealth, of friends, or of youth; time takes all away in a moment. Leaving quickly all this, which is full of illusion, enter into the place of Brahman. . . . Life is tremulous, like a water-drop on a lotus-leaf. . . . Time is playing, life is waning yet the breath of hope never ceases. The body is wrinkled, the hair grey, the mouth has become toothless, the stick in the hand shakes, yet man leaves not the anchor of hope. . . . Preserve equa- nimity always. … In thee, in me and in others there dwells Vishnu alone; it is useless to be angry with me, or impatient. See every self in Self, and give up all thought of difference.

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

“There are some parts of the world that, once visited, get into your heart and won’t go. For me, India is such a place. When I first visited, I was stunned by the richness of the land, by its lush beauty and exotic architecture, by its ability to overload the senses with the pure, concentrated intensity of its colours, smells, tastes, and sounds… I had been seeing the world in black & white and, when brought face-to-face with India, experienced everything re-rendered in brilliant Technicolor.” Keith Bellows, National Geographic Society :

Indian architecture can be traced to the Indus Valley civilization. This mysterious culture emerged nearly 4,600 years ago and thrived for a thousand years, profiting from the highly fertile lands of the Indus River floodplain and trade with the civilizations of nearby Mesopotamia.

The city lacks ostentatious palaces, temples, or monuments. There’s no obvious central seat of government or evidence of a king or queen. Modesty, order, and cleanliness were apparently preferred. Pottery and tools of copper and stone were standardized. Seals and weights suggest a system of tightly controlled trade. The great Bath at Mohenjodaro is finely built brick structure with a layer of bitumen as waterproofing, and adjoining well that supplied water and an outlet that led to a large drain. Surrounding the bath are porticoes and set of rooms, while as stairway led to an upper level. The well planned residential areas were laid out on a grid pattern ,with main thoroughfares aligned north-south. The people lived in multi-roomed houses, with a bathing room which were connected to a street drain. An estimated 700 wells supplied Mohenjodaro residents with water and even the smallest house was connected to a drainage system. The impressive infrastructure of the Indus cities suggests an effective central authority. The Indus people adorned themselves with beads and ornaments of shell and terracotta, as well as silver and gold necklaces.

We have the brick ruins of Mohanjo-daro, but apparently the buildings of Vedic and Buddhist India were of wood, and Ashoka seems to have been the first to use stone for architectural purposes.  We hear, in the literature, of seven- storied structures,  and of palaces of some magnificence, but not a trace of them survives. Megasthencs describes the imperial residences of Chandragupta as superior to anything in Persia except Persepolis, on whose model they seem to have been designed. This Persian influence persisted till Ashoka’s time; it appears in the ground-plan of his palace, which corresponded with the “Hall of a Hundred Columns” at Persepolis;  and it shows again in the fine pillar of Ashoka at Lauriya, crowned with a lion-capital.  

With the conversion of Ashoka to Buddhism, Indian architecture began to throw off this alien influence, and to take its inspiration and it symbols from the new religion. The transition is evident in the great capital which is all that now remains of another Ashokan pillar, at Sarnath; ( The pillar is not located in it’s original location as it is broken during Turk and Islamic invasions. Now the Lion capital (National Emblem of Govt. of India) is displayed at the Archeological museum at Sarnath,  km from Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh.) here, in a composition of astonishing perfection, ranked by Sir John Marshall as equal to “any thing of its kind in the ancient world,”  The pillar is a symbol of the axis mundi (cosmic axis) and of the column that rises everyday at noon from the legendary Lake Anavatapta (the lake at the center of the universe according to Buddhist cosmology) to touch the sun.The top of the column—the capital—has three parts.

First, a base of a lotus flower, the most ubiquitous symbol of Buddhism.Then, a drum on which four animals are carved representing the four cardinal directions: a horse (west), an ox (east), an elephant (south), and a lion (north). They also represent the four rivers that leave Lake Anavatapta and enter the world as the four major rivers. Each of the animals can also be identified by each of the four perils of samsara. The moving animals follow one another endlessly turning the wheel of existence.

Four lions stand atop the drum, each facing in the four cardinal directions. Their mouths are open roaring or spreading the dharma, the Four Noble Truths, across the land. A cakra was originally mounted above the lions.Some of the lion capitals that survive have a row of geese carved below the lions. The goose is an ancient Vedic symbol. The flight of the goose is thought of as a link between the earthly and heavenly spheres.

The lotus or water-lily symbol migrated with Buddhism, and permeated the art of China and Japan. A like form, used as a design for windows and doors, became the “horseshoe arch” of Ashokan vaults and domes, originally derived from the “covered wagon” curvature of Bengali thatched roofs supported by rods of bent bamboo.  

The religious architecture of Buddhist days has left us a few ruined temples and a large number -of “topes” and “rails.” The “tope” or “stupa” was in early days a burial mound; under Buddhism it became a memorial shrine, usually housing the relics of a Buddhist saint. Most often the tope took the form of a dome of brick, crowned with a spire, and surrounded with a stone rail carved with bas-reliefs. One of the oldest topes is at Bharhut; but the reliefs there are primitively coarse. The stupa of Bharhut is between Allahabad and Jabalpur situated in the erstwhile Nagod state of Madhya Pradesh. It was probably built around 150 B.C. The site was discovered by sir Alexander Cunningham in 1873. there are hardly any remains at the site now. Some of the remains of this stupa are kept in the Indian Museum in Calcutta.

The railings of the stupa are carved. These posts, railing, capping stones and gateways, all fashioned in deep red sandstone, once surrounded a stupa. The remarkable precision of the carvings and liveliness of the figures, narrative scenes and decorative themes testify to the vitality of India’s early artistic traditions. Many of the Bharhut posts are carved with yakshis which protrude in past relief; they stand in attitudes of devotion upon ganas or clutch branches of the tree. Here too are royal devotees, riders on horses and elephants, and even one example of a figure in foreign dress.

Other carved panels depict Buddhist narratives, among them the dream of Maya; celestials celebrating Buddha’s enlightenment, the worship of Buddha’s throne and the Bodhi tree; elephants paying homage to the Buddha throne; Naga king worshipping the throne and adoration of the wheel; and stupa in worship. Railing medallions display a variety of lotus design, sometimes incorporating in yaksha busts; other themes include Lakshmi bathed by elephants, scenes of everyday village life, deer, elephants and peacocks.

The most ornate of the extant rails is at Amaravati; The Great Stupa at Amaravati was a large Buddhist monument built in south-eastern India between the second century B.C. and the third century A.D. It was a centre for religious activity and worship for hundreds of years.. Here 17,000 square feet were covered with minute reliefs of a workmanship so excellent that Fergusson judged this rail to be “probably the most remarkable monument in India.”

The best known of the stupas is the Sanchi  Stupe, one of a group at Bhilsa in Bhopal. The ‘Great Stupa’ at Sanchi is the oldest stone structure in India and was originally commissioned by the emperor Ashoka the Great in the 3rd century BCE. Its nucleus was a simple hemispherical brick structure built over the relics of the Buddha. It was crowned by the chatra, a parasol-like structure symbolising high rank, which was intended to honour and shelter the relics. The construction work of this stupa was overseen by Ashoka’s wife, Devi herself, who was the daughter of a merchant of Vidisha. Sanchi was also her birthplace as well as the venue of her and Ashoka’s wedding. In the 1st century BCE, four profusely carved toranas or ornamental gateways and a balustrade encircling the whole structure was added The stone gates apparently imitate ancient wooden forms, and anticipate the pailus or torus that usually mark the approach to the temples of the Far East. Every foot of space on pillars, capitals, crosspieces and supports is cut into a wilderness of plant, animal, human and divine forms. On a pillar of the eastern gateway is a delicate carving of a perennial Buddhist symbol the Bodhi-tree, scene of the Master’s enlightenment; on the same gateway, gracefully spanning a bracket, is a sensuous goddess (a Yakshi) with heavy limbs, full hips, slim waist, and abounding breasts.

While the dead saints slept in the topes, the living monks cut into the mountain rocks temples where they might live in isolation, sloth and peace, secure from the elements and from the glare and heat of the sun. We may judge the strength of the religious impulse in India by noting that over twelve hundred of these cave-temples remain of the many thousands that were built in the early centuries of our era, partly for Jains and Brahmans, but mostly for Buddhist communities. Often the entrance of these viharas (monasteries) was a simple portal in the form of a “horseshoe” or lotus arch; sometimes, as at Nasik, it was an ornate facade of strong columns, animal capitals, and patiently carved architrave; often it was adorned with pillars, stone screens or porticoes of admirable design.  The interior included a chaitya or assembly hall, with colonnades dividing nave from aisles, cells for the monks on either side, and an altar, bearing relics, at the inner end. One of the oldest of these cave-temples, and perhaps the finest now surviving, is at Karle, between Poona and Bombay; here Hinayana Buddhism achieved its chef-d’oeuvre.

During the Gupta period, the Golden Age of India, the caves of Ellora and Ajanta   were dug out and frescoes painted. The caves are cut into the volcanic lava of the Deccan in the forest ravines of the Sahyadri Hills and are set in beautiful sylvan surroundings. These magnificent caves containing carvings that depict the life of Buddha, and their carvings and sculptures are considered to be the beginning of classical Indian art. 

The 29 caves were excavated beginning around 200 BC, but they were abandoned in AD 650 in favour of Ellora. Five of the caves were temples and 24 were monasteries, thought to have been occupied by some 200 monks and artisans. The Ajanta Caves were gradually forgotten until their ‘rediscovery’ by a British tiger-hunting party in 1819.

The Ajanta site comprises thirty caves cut into the side of a cliff which rises above a meander in the Waghora River. Today the caves are reached by a road which runs along a terrace mid-way up the cliff, but each cave was once linked by a stairway to the edge of the water. This is a Buddhist community, comprising five sanctuaries or Chaitya-grihas (caves 9, 10, 19, 26 and 29) and monastic complex sangharamas or viharas.The Mighty caves of Ellora were carve out of solid rock with the stupendous Kailasa temple in the center; it is difficult to imagine how human beings conceived this or having conceived it, gave body and shape to their conception. The caves of Elephanta, with the powerful and subtle Trimurti, date also to this period.

“Stupendous work,” wrote British artist James Wales in 1792 of his first view of the Buddhist rock cave temple at Karli. Carved in the face of the Western Ghats, the steep hills separating the coastal plain and the central plateau southeast of Bombay, the temple dated from the first century A.D. Unlike anything Wales had ever seen before, Karli, along with other cave complex in the area, had been hollowed out of the rock by Hindus, Buddhists and Jains as places of worship and monastic residence through the ages.

The caves at Ajanta, besides being the hiding-place of the greatest of Buddhist paintings, rank with Karle as examples of that composite art, half architecture and half sculpture, which characterizes the temples of India. Caves I and II have spacious assembly halls whose ceilings, cut and painted in sober yet elegant designs, are held up by powerful fluted pillars square at the base, round at the top, ornamented with flowery bands, and crowned with majestic capitals;  Cave XIX is distinguished by a fagade richly decorated with adipose statuary and complex bas-relief s;  in Cave XXVI gigantic columns rise to a frieze crowded with figures which only the greatest religious and artistic zeal could have carved in such detail.  Ajanta can hardly be refused the title of one of the major works in the history of art.  The Ajanta frescoes are very beautiful. They take one back to some distant dream-like and yet very real world.

Of other Buddhist temples still existing in India the most impressive is the great tower at Bodh-gaya, significant for its thoroughly Gothic arches, and yet dating, apparently, back to the first century A.D.  All in all, the remains of Buddhist architecture arc fragmentary, and their glory is more sculptural than structural; a lingering Puritanism, perhaps, kept them externally forbidding and bare. The Jains gave a more concentrated devotion to architecture, and during the eleventh and twelfth centuries their temples were the finest in India. They did not create a style of their own, being content to copy at first (as at Elura) the Buddhist plan of excavating temples in the mountain rocks, then the Vishnu or Shiva type of temples rising usually in a walled group upon a hill. These, too, were externally simple, out inwardly complex and rich a happy symbol of the modest life. Piety placed statue after statue of Jain heroes in these shrines, until in the group at Shatrunjaya Fergusson counted 6449 figures.   

The Jain temple at Aihole is built almost in Greek style, with rectangular form, external colonnades, a portico, and a cell or central chamber within.  Aihole is considered the cradle of Hindu and Jain temple architecture. During the 5th Century A.D., this place was a great centre of trade, education and religion.

The architectural range seen in the temples of Aihole, is reflective of the early experimental phase of development of the Hindu & Jain style of temple architecture, as it evolved from simple rock cut shrines to large and complicated structures.

The Jain & Hindu temples of Badami, Patadakal & Aihole shows the unique architectural style of that period. Aihole is dotted with more than one hundred structures, testimonials to the experiments undertaken by the Chalukyan architects towards the evolution of the Hindu & Jain style of temple architecture. The fully evolved temples are manifestations of the embryonic stages of the South Indian (Dravidian) style of temple architecture that fully developed later on. Each of the early temples at Aihole has its own architectural feature.

There are almost 125 stone temples and two cave temples, divided into 22 groups scattered around the village out of which the Durga Temple, Lad Khan Temple & Meguti Temple are the most impressive. The Meguti Jain Temple is prominently located on top of the highest hill in Aihole and was built in the year 634 AD. The Meguti temple, situated on the hillock, is built on an elevated platform. It has two sanctums, a court hall and a portico. A stone ladder carved out at the portico provides access to the roof. This flight of stairs leads to another shrine on the roof, directly above the main shrine. From the roof, one can have a panoramic view of the hundred temples of Aihole. A pillared corridor runs around the temple, enveloping the shrine. Its beautiful motifs and richly carved images on stone reflect the earliest development of Jain a art and architecture.

At Khajuraho Jains, Vaishnavites and Shivaites, as if to illustrate Hindu tolerance, built in close proximity some twenty-eight temples; among them the almost perfect Temple of Parshwanath  rises in cone upon cone to a majestic height, and shelters on its carved surfaces a veritable city of Jain saints.

On Mt. Abu, lifted four thousand feet above the desert, the Jains built many temples, of which two survivors, the temples of Vimala and Tejahpala, are the greatest achievement of this sect in the field of art. The dome of the Tejahpala shrine is one of those overwhelming experiences which doom all writing about art to impotence and futility. The Temple of Vimala, built entirely of white marble, is a maze of irregular pillars, joined with fanciful brackets to a more simple carved entablature; above is a marble dome too opulent in statuary, but carved into a stone lacework of moving magnificence, “finished,” says Fergusson, “with a delicacy of detail and appropriateness of ornament which is probably unsurpassed by any similar example to be found anywhere else.

In these Jain temples, and their contemporaries, we see the transition from the circular form of the Buddhist shrine to the tower style of medieval India. The nave, or pillar-enclosed interior, of the assembly hall is taken outdoors, and made into a mandapam or porch; behind this is the cell; and above the cell rises, in successively receding levels, the carved and complicated tower. It was on this plan that the Hindu temples of the north were built. The most impressive of these is the group at Bhuvaneshwara, in the province of Orissa; and the finest of the group is the Rajarani Temple erected to Vishnu in the eleventh century A.D. It is a gigantic tower formed of juxtaposed semi- circular pillars covered with statuary and surmounted by receding layers of stone, the whole inward-curving tower ending in a great circular crown and a spire. Nearby is the Lingaraja Temple, larger than the Rajarani, but not so beautiful; nevertheless every inch of the surface has felt the sculptor’s chisel, so that the cost of the carving has been reckoned at three times the cost of the structure.  The Hindu expressed his piety not merely by the imposing grandeur of his temples, but by their patiently worked detail; nothing was too good for the god.

The Nelliyappar temple chronicle, Thirukovil Varalaaru, says the nadaththai ezhuppum kal thoongal — stone pillars that produce music — were set in place in the 7th century during the reign of Pandyan king Nindraseer Nedumaran. Archaeologists date the temple before 7th century and say it was built by successive rulers of the Pandyan dynasty that ruled over the southern parts of Tamil Nadu from Madurai. Tirunelveli, about 150 km south of Madurai, served as their subsidiary capital

Shiva is the Destroyer and Lord of Rhythm in the Hindu trinity. But here he is Lord Nellaiyappar, the Protector of Paddy, as the name of the town itself testifies — nel meaning paddy and veli meaning fence in Tamil. Prefixed to nelveli is tiru, which signifies something special — like the exceptional role of the Lord of Rhythm or the unique musical stone pillars in the temple.In the Nellaiyappar temple, gentle taps on the cluster of columns hewn out of a single piece of rock can produce the keynotes of Indian classical music. “Hardly anybody knows the intricacies of how these were constructed to resonate a certain frequency. The more aesthetically inclined with some musical knowledge can bring out the rudiments of some rare ragas from these pillars.”

In Shiva’s temple, stone pillars make music – an architectural rarity Each huge musical pillar carved from one piece of rock comprises a cluster of smaller columns and stands testimony to a unique understanding of the “physics and mathematics of sound.” Well-known music researcher and scholar Prof. Sambamurthy Shastry, the “marvellous musical stone pillars” are “without a parallel” in any other part of the country. “What is unique about the musical stone pillars in the Tiruelveli Nellaiyappar temple is the fact you have a cluster as large as 48 musical pillars carved from one piece of stone, a delight to both the ears and the eyes,” The pillars at the Nellaiyappar temple are a combination of the Shruti and Laya types.

It would be dull to list, without specific description and photographic representation, the other masterpieces of Hindu building in the north. And yet no record of Indian civilization could leave unnoticed the temples of Surya at Kanarak and Mudhera, the tower of Jagannath Puri, the lovely gateway at Vadnagar,  the massive temples of Sas-Bahu and Teli-ka-Mandir at Gwalior,  the palace of Rajah Man Sing, also at Gwalior,  and the Tower of Victory at Chitor.  Standing out from the mass are the Shivaite temples at Khajuraho, while in the same city the dome of the porch of the Khanwar Math Temple shows again the masculine strength of Indian architecture, and the richness and patience of Indian carving.  Even in its ruins the Temple of Shiva at Elephanta, with its massive fluted columns, its “mushroom” capitals, its un- surpassed reliefs, and its powerful statuary,  suggests to us an age of national vigour and artistic skill of which hardly the memory lives today.

We shall never be able to do justice to Indian art, for ignorance and fanaticism have destroyed its greatest achievements, and have half ruined the rest. At Elephanta the Portuguese certified their piety by smashing statuary and bas-reliefs in unrestrained barbarity; and almost everywhere in the north the Moslems brought to the ground those triumphs of Indian architecture, of the fifth and sixth centuries, which tradition ranks as far superior to the later works that arouse our wonder and admiration today. The Moslems decapitated statues, and tore them limb from limb; they appropriated for their mosques, and in great measure imitated, the graceful pillars of the Jain temples.  Time and fanaticism joined in the destruction, for the orthodox Hindus abandoned and neglected temples that had been profaned by the touch of alien hands.

We may guess at the lost grandeur of north Indian architecture by the powerful edifices that still survive in the south, where Moslem rule entered only in minor degree, and after some habituation to India had softened Mohammedan hatred of Hindu ways. Further, the great age of temple architecture in the south came in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, after Akbar had tamed the Moslems and taught them some appreciation of Indian art. Consequently the south is rich in temples, usually superior to those that remain standing in the north, and more massive and impressive; Fergusson counted some thirty “Dravidian” or southern temples any one of which, in his estimate, must have cost as much as an English cathedral.  The south adapted the styles of the north by prefacing the mandapann or porch with a gopuram or gate, and supporting the porch with a lavish multiplicity of pillars. It played fondly with a hundred symbols, from the swastika emblem of the sun and the wheel of life, through a very menagerie of sacred animals. The snake, through its moulting, symbolized reincarnation; the bull was the enviable paragon of procreative power; the linga, or phallus, represented the generative excellence of Shiva, and often determined the form of the temple itself.

Three elements composed the structural plan of these southern temples: the gateway, the pillared porch, and the tower (vimand), which contained the main assembly hall or cell. With occasional exceptions like the palace of Tirumala Nayyak at Madura, all this south Indian architecture was ecclesiastical. Men did not bother to build magnificently for themselves, but gave their art to the priests and the gods; no circumstance could better show how spontaneously theocratic was the real government of India. Of the many buildings raised by the Chalukyan kings and their people, nothing remains but temples. Only a Hindu pietist rich in words could describe the lovely symmetry of the shrine at Ittagi, in Hyderabad;  or the temple at Somnathpur in Mysore,  in which gigantic masses of stone are carved with the delicacy of lace; or the Hoyshaleshwara Temple at Halebid,  also in Mysore “one of the buildings,” says Fergusson, “on which the advocate of Hindu architecture would desire to take his stand.” Here, he adds, “the artistic combination of horizontal with vertical lines, and the play of outline and of light and shade, far surpass anything in Gothic art. The effects are just what the medieval architects were often aiming at, but which they never attained so perfectly as was done at Halebid.”

Halebidu was the 12th century capital of the Hoysalas. The Hoysaleswara temple was built during this time by Ketamala and attributed to Vishnuvardhana, the Hoysala ruler. It enshrines Hoysaleswara and Shantaleswara, named after the temple builder Vishnuvardhana Hoysala and his wife, Queen Shantala.

Then it was sacked by the armies of Malik Kafur in the early 14th century, after which it fell into a state of disrepair and neglect.

The temple complex comprises two Hindu temples, the Hoysaleshawara and Kedareshwara temples and two Jain basadi. In front of these temples there is a big lake. The town gets its name from the lake, Dwara samudhra which means entrance from ocean[The two Nandi statues which are on the side of the Hoysaleshwara temple are monolithic. Soap stone or Chloritic Schist was used for the construction of these temples. However a number of sculptures in the temple are destroyed by invaders. So the temple is incomplete. Halebid means old abode. There is an archeological museum in the temple complex.

The Hoysaleswara temple, dating back to the 1121 C.E., is astounding for its wealth of sculptural details. The walls of the temple are covered with an endless variety of depictions from Hindu mythology, animals, birds and Shilabalikas or dancing figures. Yet no two sculptures of the temple are the same. This magnificent temple guarded by a Nandi Bull was never completed, despite 86 years of labour. The Jain basadi nearby are equally rich in sculptural detail.

If we marvel at the laborious piety that could carve eighteen hundred feet of frieze in the Halebid temple, and could portray in them two thousand elephants each different from all the rest,” what shall we say of the patience and courage that could undertake to cut a complete temple out of the solid rock? But this was a common achievement of the Hindu artisans. At Mamallapuram, on the east coast near Madras, they carved several rathas or pagodas, of which the fairest is the Dharma-raja-ratha, or monastery for the highest discipline. At Elura, a place of religious pilgrimage in Hyderabad, Buddhists, Jains and orthodox Hindus vied in excavating out of the mountain rock great monolithic temples of which the supreme example is the Hindu shrine of Kailasha  named after Shiva’s mythological paradise in the Himalayas. Here the tireless builders cut a hundred feet down into the stone to isolate the block 250 by 160 feet that was to be the temple; then they carved, the walls into powerful pillars, statues and bas-reliefs; then they chiseled out the interior, and lavished there the most amazing art: let the bold fresco of “The Lovers”  serve as a specimen. Finally, their architectural passion still unspent, they carved a series of chapels and monasteries deep into the rock on three sides of the quarry.  Some Hindus  consider the Kailasha Temple equal to any achievement in the history of art.

Such a structure, however, was a tour de force, like the Pyramids, and must have cost the sweat and blood of many men. Either the guilds or the masters never tired, for they scattered through every province of southern India gigantic shrines so numerous that the bewildered student or traveller loses their individual quality in the sum of their number and their power.

Here, says Meadows Taylor, “the carving on some of the pillars, and of the lintels and architraves of the doors, is quite beyond description. No chased work in silver or gold could possibly be finer. By what tools this very hard, tough stone could have been wrought and polished as it is, is not at all intelligible at the present day.”

At Pattadakal Queen Lokamahadevi, one of the wives of the Chalukyan King Vikramaditya II, dedicated to Shiva the Virupaksha Temple, which ranks high among the great fanes of India.  At Tan j ore, south of Madras, the Chola King Rajaraja the Great, after conquering all southern India and Ceylon, shared his spoils with Shiva by raising to him a stately temple designed to represent the generative symbol of the god. Near Trichinopoly, west of Tanjore, the devotees of Vishnu erected on a lofty hill the Shri Rangam Temple, whose distinctive feature was a many-pillared mandapam in the form of a “Hall of a Thousand Columns,” each column a single block of granite, elaborately carved; the Hindu artisans were yet at work completing the temple when they were scattered, and their labours ended, by the bullets of Frenchmen and Englishmen fighting for the possession of India. 108 Nearby, at Madura, the brothers Muttu and Tirumala Nayyak erected to Shiva a spacious shrine with another Hall of a Thousand Columns, a Sacred Tank, and ten gopurams or gateways, of which four rise to a great height and are carved into a wilderness of statuary. These structures form together one of the most impressive sights in India; we may judge from such fragmentary survivals the rich and spacious architecture of the Vijayanagar kings. Finally, at Rameshvaram, amid the archipelago of isles that pave “Adam’s Bridge” from India to Ceylon, the Brahmans of the south reared through five centuries  a temple whose perimeter was graced with the most imposing of all corridors or porticoes four thousand feet of double colonnades, exquisitely carved, and designed to give cool shade, and inspiring vistas of sun and sea, to the millions of pilgrims who to this day find their way from distant cities to lay their hopes and grieves  upon the knees of the  gods.

References

COOMARASAVAMY, ANANDAK.: History of Indian and Indonesian Art. New York, 1927.

CANDEE, HELEN: Angkor the Magnificent. New York, 1924

CHIROL, SIR VALENTINE: India. London, 1926.

GANGOLY, O. C.: Indian Architecture. Calcutta, n.d.

GANGOLY, O. C.: Art of Java. Calcutta, n.d.

HAVELL, E. B.: Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India. London, 1915.

HAVELL, E. B.: Ideals of Indian Art. New York, 1920.

HAVELL, E. B.: History of Aryan Rule in India. Harrap, London, n.d.

FRAZER, R. W.: Literary History of India. London, 1920.

FISCHER, OTTO: Die Kunst Indiens, Chinas und Japans. Berlin, 1928.

FERGUSON, J. G: Outlines of Chinese Art. University of Chicago, 1919.

FRGUSSON, JAS.: History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, 2V. London, 1910.

FERGUSSON, JAS.: History of Architecture in All Countries. 2V. London, 1874.

LORENZ, D. E.: The ‘Round the World Traveler. New York, 1927.

LOTI, PIERRE: India. London, 1929.

MACDONELL, A. A.: History of Sanskrit Literature. New York, 1900.

MACDONELL, A. A.: India’s Past. Oxford, 1927.

MUKERJI, D. G.: A Son of Mother India Answers. New York, 1928.

MUKERJI, D. G.: Visit India with Me. New York, 1929.

SMITH, G. ELLIOT: Human History. New York, 1929.

SMITH, W. ROBERTSON: The Religion of the Semites. New York, 1889.

SMITH,V. A.: Asoka. Oxford, 1920.

WILL DURANT: Our Oriental Heritage. Simon and Schuster. New York 1954

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

India’s architectural heritage constituted ‘the greatest galaxy monuments in the world

Dr. Ernest Binfield Havell (1861-1934)

Dr. Ernest Binfield Havell, insisted that the Islamic architecture in India was influenced by the Hindus. ” Albiruni, the Arab historian, expressed his astonishment at and admiration for the work of Hindu builders. “Our people, he said, “when they see them, wonder at them and are unable to describe them, much less to construct anything like them.”

As the first Islamic monarchy in India, the Slave Dynasty (1206-1290), and all of its successors, the Khalji (1290-1320), the Tughluq (1320-1413), the Sayyid (1414-51), and the Lodi (1451-1526), consistently fixed Delhi as the capital.

The Islamic rule in India saw the introduction of many new elements in the building style also. Art of Delhi Sultanate was the process of absorption and Indianization of the techniques of art and architecture.  This was very much distinct from the already prevailing building style adopted in the construction of temples and other secular architecture. The main elements in the Islamic architecture is the introduction of arches and beams, and it is the arcuate style of construction while the traditional Indian building style is tabulate, using pillars and beams and lintels.

Qutb al-Din Aybak , who had subjugated northern India as the general of Muhammad of Gori in Afghanistan, established the first Islamic political regime of the Delhi Sultanate, the Slave Dynasty. He took the fortified town of Qila Rai Pithora, which had been constructed by the Hindu king, Prithvi Raj, settling it as his capital. Aybak dismantled twenty-seven Hindu and Jain temples of to erect the Friday Mosque at the site of a Vishnu temple, reusing their components. The Qutab Mosque in Mehrauli district, which was at the starting point of development, was constructed from the components of dismantled Hindu and Jain temples using Indian traditional methods.

The mosque, later referred to as  Quwwat-al-Islam Mosque (meaning Might of Islam), had a narrow oblong worship room with five domes in a row and a large longitudinal courtyard surrounded by cloisters. The succeeding Sultan, Shams al-Din Iltutmish, enlarged it on the left and right sides, to four times its total extent, in 1230. Then, Khalji Sultan, Alah al-Din , enlarged it further to the right and on the opposite side of Kibla to the extent of ten times of the earliest stage.

What is peculiar in this mosque is that an enormous Screen of arches was later erected in front of the worship hall, the existing part of which reaches an impressive height of 15m with a thickness of 2.6m.  However, Indian masons did not know the structural system of true arches and domes and constructed the mosque with the pseudo manner of corbelled domes. As a result, a line of twenty domes, which added up to 225m, all collapsed in later years and were carried away as materials for new buildings. One of the earliest mausoleums, Iltutmish Tomb , has also lost its corbelled dome.

Beside the mosque stands a colossal intact Minaret called  Qutb Minar, the lower part of which was constructed by Aybak and the upper part by Iltutmish. It was part of a mosque begun at Old Delhi by Kutbu-d Din Aibak; it commemorated the victories of that bloody Sultan over the Hindus, and twenty-seven Hindu temples were dismembered to provide material for the mosque and the tower.  It remains the highest tower in India till this day, and its relief-carvings of foliage patterns and Arabic calligraphy are as excellent as those of the Iltutmish Tomb and the Screen of arches.

Ala al-Din commenced constructing the   Alai Minar on a twofold scale of the former Minaret in the largest courtyard in the course of the second expansion, but it was not completed, only leaving its basal part. At the new gate erected on this occasion, Alai Darwaza, Indian masons succeeded in erecting a true dome for the first time.

In the oldest courtyard stands an iron pillar 7.5m long (6.8m above ground), which is thought to have been produced by the king of Gupta Dynasty, Chandragupta II, in the 4th century. It was a Stambha (monumental pillar) dedicated to a Vishnu temple according to its inscription, and it seems to have been brought here before the Islamic conquest. This wrought iron pillar, with a Gupta-style capital on the top, is so highly refined that it has not suffered rust at all in spite of its exposure to the elements for 1,600 years.

The mosques from the Khalji onward, having acquired the techniques of Islamic architecture, were fundamentally of the arabian type with the plan of hypostyle oblong hall.  Mosques came to be surmounted symbolically with Persian-style domes as the main fashion, and it became the definitive form to arrange three domes continuously on a oblong worship hall, though still in an unrefined manner, such as with the Moth-ki Masjid from the Lodi Dynasty.In general the Sultans of Delhi were too busy with killing to have much time for architecture, and such buildings as they have left us are mostly the tombs that they raised during their own lifetime as reminders that even they would die. The best example of these is the mausoleum of Sher Shah at Sasseram, in Bihar.

It is true that the “Afghan” dynasty used Hindu artisans, copied Hindu themes, and even appropriated the pillars of Hindu temples, for their architectural purposes, and that many mosques were merely Hindu temples rebuilt for Moslem prayer; but this natural imitation passed quickly into a style.

The different religious beliefs are also reflected in the mode of construction and architectural styles. The Islamic style also incorporated many elements from the traditional Indian style and a compound style emanated. The introduction of decorative brackets, balconies, pendentive decorations, etc in the architecture is an example in this regard. The other distinguishing features of Indo-Islamic architecture are the utilisation of kiosks (chhatris), tall towers (minars) and half-domed double portals. As human worship and its representation are not allowed in Islam, the buildings and other edifices are generally decorated richly in geometrical and arabesque designs. These designs were carved on stone in low relief, cut on plaster, painted or inlaid. The use of lime as mortar was also a major element distinct from the traditional building style.

The final triumph of Indian architecture came under the Moguls. The tendency to unite the Mohammedan and the Hindu styles was fostered by the eclectic impartiality of Akbar; and the masterpieces that his artisans built for him wove Indian and Persian methods and motifs into an exquisite harmony symbolizing the frail merger of native and Moslem creeds in Akbar’s synthetic faith.

Islamic architecture was one of rapid capitulation to the superior indigenous art of India. Akbar was not the exception but the classic example. His wholesale adoption of Hindu styles and his patronage of Indian craftsmen marked the end of a brief experiment with non-Indian forms (Tughlak’s tomb for example), and the beginning of one of the greatest periods of purely Indian building.

The first monument of his reign, the tomb erected by him near Delhi for his father The Mausoleum of his father,  Humayun, was the first full-blown piece of Mughal architecture, which would determine the splendid style afterward, combining red sandstone and white marble. Its formation is such that in the center of a huge ‘Charbagh’ (four quartered garden) a large square platform is built, on which a mausoleum with identical facades for its four sides stands symbolically and is capped with a large dome of white marble. It was in India among the vast Islamic areas that this form of tomb architecture was especially loved and made great developments, there is a reason for that.

There is also evidence that the building known as Humayun’s Tomb is none other than a captured Lakshmi Temple. Abul Fazal says Humayun is buried in Sirhind. French writer G. Le Bon has published in his book The World of Ancient India (Publisher: Editions Minerva – Spain Date of Publication: 1974) a photo of marble footprints found in the building. He describes them as the footprints of Lord Vishnu. This is typical of a Vedic temple, to have the footprints of the main Divinity of the shrine. In this case, it is the husband of Lakshmi, Lord Vishnu.

As a reflection of this, for buildings in Fatehpur Sikri that he constructed as a new capital and his own mausoleum at Sikandra he seldom used arches and domes and deliberately used traditional posts and beams in spite of being Islamic architecture. A pavilion in Fatehpur Sikri protruding even stone slab eaves protecting against the rainy season looks as it were wooden structure. . A flight of steps leads up to an imposing portal in red sandstone, through whose lordly arch one passes into an enclosure filled with chef-d’oeuvres. The major building is a mosque, but the loveliest of the structures are the three pavilions for the Emperor’s favorite wives, and the marble tomb of his friend, Salim Chisti the sage; here the artists of India began to show that skill in embroidering stone. Historian Vincent Smith in his book Akbar the Great Moghul, says:

” It is surprising to find unmistakable Hindu features in the architecture of the tomb of a most zealous Musalman saint, but the whole structure suggests Hindu feeling and nobody can mistake the Hindu origin of the column and struts of the porch.”

He aggrandized the capital Agra, constructing the   Lal Qila (Red Fort) with red sandstone. He also promoted the union of Hindus and Muslims for the stabilization of the empire and applied this principle to architecture too.

As for Akbar’s mausoleum at Sikandra, it became an unprecedented unique Islamic building, posts and beams which were stacked up like a four-storied junglegym as ‘Framework architecture’ on a high-rise platform. Its components are ‘Chatri’ (its etymology is ‘Chatra’ meaning an umbrella in Sanskrit); a turret with an apparently heavy roof supported with four columns. This came to be used as an ornamental element for all sorts of buildings.

Jehangir contributed little to the architectural history of his people.Shah Jehan made his name almost as bright as Akbar’s by his passion for beautiful building. He scattered money as lavishly among his artists.. Like the kings of northern Europe, he imported the surplus artists of Italy, and had them instruct his own carvers in that art of pietra dura (i.e., of inlaying marble with a mosaic of precious stones) which became one of the char- acteristic elements of Indian adornment during his reign.

Shah  Jehan was not a very religious soul, but two of the fairest mosques in India rose under his patronage: the Juma Masjid or Friday Mosque at Delhi, and the Moti Masj id or Pearl Mosque at Agra. Both at Delhi and at Agra Jehan built “forts” i.e., groups of royal edifices surrounded by a protective wall. At Delhi he tore down with superior disdain the pink palaces of Akbar, and replaced them with structures which at their worst are a kind of marble confectionery, and at their best are the purest architectural beauty on the globe. Here is the luxurious Hall of Public Audience, with panels of Florentine mosaic on a black marble ground, and with ceilings, columns and arches carved into stone lacery of frail but incredible beauty. Here, too, is the Hall of Private Audience, whose ceiling is of silver and gold, whose columns are of filigree marble, whose arches are a pointed semicircle composed of smaller flowerlike semicircles, whose Peacock Throne became a legend for the world, and whose wall still bears in precious inlay the proud words of the Moslem poet: “If anywhere on earth there is a Paradise, it is here, it is here, it is here.”  The Delhi Fort originally contained fifty-two palaces, but only twenty-seven remain.

The Fort at Agra is in ruins, and we can only guess at its original magnificence. Here, amid many gardens, were the Pearl Mosque, the Gem Mosque, the halls of Public and Private Audience, the Throne Palace, the King’s Baths, the Hall of Mirrors, the palaces of Jehangir and of Shah Jehan, the Jasmine Palace of Nur Jehan, and that Jasmine Tower from which the captive emperor, Shah Jehan, looked over the Jumna upon the tomb that he had built for his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal.

All the world knows that tomb by her shortened name as the Taj Mahal. Many an architect has rated it as the most perfect of all buildings standing on the earth today.It is said that three artists designed it: a Persian, Ustad Isa; an Italian, Gieronimo Veroneo; and a Frenchman, Austin dc Bordeaux.

The building is a complex figure of twelve sides, four of which are portals; a slender minaret rises at each corner, and the roof is a massive spired dome. The main entrance, once guarded with solid silver gates, is a maze of marble embroidery; inlaid in the wall in jeweled script are quotations from the Koran, one of which invites the “pure in heart” to enter “the gardens of Paradise.” The interior is simple; and perhaps it is just as well that native and European thieves cooperated in despoiling the tomb of its superabundant jewels, and of the golden railing, encrusted with precious stones, that once enclosed the sarcophagi of Jehan and his Queen. For Aurangzeb replaced the railing with an octagonal screen of almost transparent marble, carved into a miracle of alabaster lace; and it has seemed to some visitors that of all the minor and partial products of human art nothing has ever surpassed the beauty of this screen.

It was a sad error of Shah Jehan’s to make a fortress of these lovely palaces. When the British besieged Agra (1803) they inevitably turned their guns upon the Fort. Seeing the cannon-balls strike the Khass Mahal, or Hall of Private Audience, the Indians  surrendered, thinking beauty more precious than victory. A little later Warren Hastings tore up the bath of the palace to present it to George IV; and other portions of the structure were sold by Lord William Bcntinck to help the revenues of India.

Lord William Bentinck, one of the kindliest of the British governoxs of India, once thought of selling the Taj for $150,000 to a Hindu contractor, who believed that better use could be made of the material.  Since Lord Curzon’s administration the British Government of India has taken excellent care of these Mogul monuments.

just as well that native and European thieves cooperated in despoiling the tomb of its superabundant jewels, and of the golden railing, encrusted with precious stones, that once enclosed the sarcophagi of Jehan and his Queen. For Aurangzeb replaced the railing with an octagonal screen of almost transparent marble, carved into a miracle of alabaster lace; and it has seemed to some visitors that of all the minor and partial products of human art nothing has ever surpassed the beauty of this screen.

The sixth emperor Aurangzeb was a misfortune for Mogul and Indian art. Dedicated fanatically to an exclusive religion, he saw in art nothing but idolatry and vanity. Already Shah Jehan had prohibited the erection of Hindu temples;”  Aurangzeb not only continued the ban, but gave so economical a support to Moslem building that it, too, languished under his reign. Indian art followed him to the grave.

Aurangzeb  did not like pomp; therefore his tomb  in Khurdabad is extremely simple without even a roof. The mighty  Badshahi Mosque(1674) in Lahore is the last one among the four great mosques of the Mughals. The mausoleum of Aurangzeb wife, Bibi-ka-Maqbara (1678), was modelled on the Taj Mahal but it can be seen that its size, proportion, and volition for ornamentation were diminishing.

After that, both state power and its art declined; there remains merely the mausoleum of Safdarjang in Delhi , and it would be gradually encroached upon by British colonial culture.

Hindu and Moslem architecture- A comparison

To evaluate Indian architecture in summary and retrospect we find in it two themes, masculine and feminine, Hindu and Mohammedan, about which the structural symphony revolves. As, in the most famous of symphonies, the startling hammer-strokes of the opening bars are shortly followed by a strain of infinite delicacy, so in Indian architecture the over- powering monuments of the Hindu genius at Bodh-Gaya, Bhuvaneshwara, Madura and Tanjore are followed by the grace and melody of the Mogul style at Fathpur-Sikri, Delhi and Agra; and the two themes mingle in a confused elaboration to the end.

It was said of the Moguls that they built like giants and finished liked jewellers; but this epigram might better have been applied to Indian architecture in general: the Hindus built like giants, and the Moguls ended like jewellers.

Hindu architecture impresses us in its mass, Mohammedan architecture in its detail; the first had the sublimity of strength, the other had the perfection of beauty; the Hindus had passion and fertility, the  Mohammedan had taste and self-restraint.

The Hindu covered his buildings with such exuberant statuary that one hesitates whether to class them as building or as sculpture; the Mohammedan abominated images, and confined himself to floral or geometrical decoration.

The Hindus were the Gothic sculptor-architects of India’s Middle Ages; the Moslems were the expatriated artists of the exotic Renaissance. All in all, the Hindu style reached greater heights, in proportion as sublimity excels loveliness; on second thought we perceive that Delhi Fort and the Taj Mahal, beside Angkor and Borobudur, are beautiful lyrics beside profound Dramas. One art is the graceful and partial expression of fortunate individuals, the other is the complete and powerful expression of a race.

Hence this little survey must conclude as it began, by confessing that none but a Hindu can quite appreciate the art of India, or write about it forgivably. To a European this popular art of profuse ornament and wild complexity will seem at times almost primitive and barbarous. Only a native believer can feel the majesty of the Hindu temples, for these were built to give not merely a form to beauty but a stimulus to piety and a pedestal to faith.

It is in these terms all Indian civilization as the expression of a “medieval” people to whom religion is profounder than science. In this piety lie the weakness and the strength of the Hindu: his superstition and his gentleness, his introversion and his insight, his backwardness and his depth, his weakness in war and his achievement in art. Doubtless his climate affected his religion, and cooperated with it to enfeeble him; therefore he yielded with fatalistic resignation to the Aryans, the Huns, the Moslems and the Europeans. History punished him for neglecting science. The old civilization of India is finished. It began to die when the British came.

References

• CANDEE, HELEN: Angkor the Magnificent. New York, 1924
• CHIROL, SIR VALENTINE: India. London, 1926.
• GANGOLY, O. C.: Indian Architecture. Calcutta, n.d.
• GANGOLY, O. C.: Art of Java. Calcutta, n.d.
• HAVELL, E. B.: Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India. London, 1915.
• HAVELL, E. B.: Ideals of Indian Art. New York, 1920.
• HAVELL, E. B.: History of Aryan Rule in India. Harrap, London, n.d.
• FRAZER, R. W.: Literary History of India. London, 1920.
• FISCHER, OTTO: Die Kunst Indiens, Chinas und Japans. Berlin, 1928.
• FERGUSON, J. G: Outlines of Chinese Art. University of Chicago, 1919.
• FRGUSSON, JAS.: History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, 2V. London, 1910.
• FERGUSSON, JAS.: History of Architecture in All Countries. 2V. London, 1874.
• LORENZ, D. E.: The ‘Round the World Traveler. New York, 1927.
• SMITH, A. H.: Chinese Characteristics. New York, 1894.
• SMITH, G. ELLIOT: Human History. New York, 1929.
• SMITH, W. ROBERTSON: The Religion of the Semites. New York, 1889.
• SMiTH,V. A.: Asoka. Oxford, 1920.
• Will Durant: Our Oriental Heritage. Simon and Schuster. New York 1954

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Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Mrs Sudha Rani Maheshwari, M.Sc (Zoology), B.Ed.

Former Principal. A.K.P.I.College, Roorkee, India

” Before Indian art, as before every phase of Indian civilization, we stand in humble wonder at its age and its continuity. Probably no other nation known to us has ever had so exuberant a variety of arts.” Will Durant, American historian

It is the magnificent art and architecture of the old Indian colonies that the Indian influence is most marked.  Indian art had accompanied Indian religion across straits and frontiers into Ceylon, Java, Cambodia, Siam, Burma. Actually in Asia all roads lead from India.”

Ceylon

Hindus from the Ganges valley settled Ceylon in the fifth century before Christ; Ashoka, two hundred years later, sent a son and a daughter to convert the population to Buddhism. Buddhism had a significant influence on Sri Lankan architecture, since it was introduced to the island in 3rd Century BC.The architecture of ancient Sri Lanka displays a rich variety of architectural forms and styles, varying in style and form from the Anuradhapura Kingdom to the Kingdom of Kandy.” Hindus from the Ganges valley settled Ceylon in the fifth century before Christ; Ashoka, two hundred years later, sent a son and a daughter to convert the population to Buddhism. Buddhism had a significant influence on Sri Lankan architecture, since it was introduced to the island in 3rd Century BC.The architecture of ancient Sri Lanka displays a rich variety of architectural forms and styles, varying in style and form from the Anuradhapura Kingdom to the Kingdom of Kandy.

Singhalese art began with dagobas domed relic shrines like the stupas of the Buddhist north; it passed to great temples like that whose ruins mark the ancient capital, Anuradhapura; it produced some of the finest of the Buddha statues, and a great variety of objets (Tart; and it came to an

end, for the time being, when the last great king of Ceylon, Kirti Shri Raja Singha, built the “Temple of the Tooth” at Kandy. The loss of independence has brought decadence to the upper classes, and the patron- age and taste that provide a necessary stimulus and restraint for the artist have disappeared from Ceylon.

Ancient Sri Lankan architecture mainly grew around religion, styles of Buddhist monasteries were in excess of  Significant architectural buildings include the stupas of Jetavanaramaya, Ruwanvelisaya in the Anuradhapura kingdom and further in the Polonnaruwa Kingdom, the palace of Sigiriya is considered as a masterpiece of ancient architecture and ingenuity, the fortress in Yapahuwa Monasteries were designed using the Manjusri Vasthu Vidya Sastra, a manuscript which outlines the layout of the structure. The text is in Sanskrit but written in Sinhala script. The script is believed to be from the 5th century, It is exclusively about Buddhist monasteries and is clearly from the Mahayana school. The text shows much originality and there is nothing similar in the existing Indian treatises, which deal only with Hindu temples.

Java

Strange to say, the greatest of Buddhist temples some students would call it the greatest of all temples anywhere is not in India but in Java. Historiansbelieve that Hinduism spread in Java in the fifth century  followed three centuries later by Buddhism.

At the time in which these monuments were built, Indian pilgrims had spread Buddhist and Hindu teachings spread across Java, Indonesia. The proud ruling dynasties of Central Java built a seemingly endless number of structures, of all scales.

Buddhist and Hindu religions lived harmoniously side by side across Java, and as families of different religions married, even mixed religion temples were built. Most Javanese are Islamic. But they’re generally not followers of the branches of Islam associated with the Near East. The Javanese have fused Islam with the island’s traditional mysticism, much like the Sufis of northern India

The adaption of Indian religion and customs with the local artistry and traditions bred its own unique style; “Hindu-Java Art” .

Just as some unearthed temples in east Java have a Hindu upper half and a Buddhist lower half, some early mosques had roofs in the shape of Hindu temples, said Timbul Haryono, a professor of archaeology at Gadjah Mada University here and an expert on Hinduism in Southeast Asia. Early mosques faced not in Mecca’s direction, but west or east in the manner of Hindu temples.

The great monuments of Java are either Hindu or Buddhist, or more likely combinations of both. Most of the sites were built in Java’s heroic age of temple construction, which lasted from the 8th to the 10th centuries. For mysterious reasons, many of these sites were abandoned soon after they were built.

Prambanan Plain

With this powerful Buddhist shrine, and the Brahmanical temples nearby at Prambanam, Javanese architecture reached its zenith, and quickly decayed. The island became for a time a maritime

power, rose to wealth and luxury, and supported many poets. But in 1479 the Moslems began to people this tropical Paradise, and from that time it produced no art of consequence. The Dutch pounced upon it in 1595, and consumed it, province by province during the following century, until their control was complete.

The most dramatic and important is the Loro Jonggrang complex, dedicated to the Hindu god Siva. The centerpiece of the complex is the central Siva temple, which stands 152 feet tall. It resembles a gothic spire cut off at the base — massive and impressive, with an emphasis on vertical lines similar to European Gothic cathedrals. The gaze is drawn up and making the structure appear awesomely tall.

But there’s a lot more to explore on Pramandan. Candi Sambisari, discovered in 1966 when a farmer hoeing his field hit a stone that turned out to be the top of the largest temple to be found buried intact in Java. Candi Sari is a beautiful Buddhist sanctury alive with decorations showing dancing goddesses and assorted other divine beings. Candi Sewu is noted for its large, well preserved guardian statues. The buildings of Ratu Boko have gone, but an evocative system of terraces, stairways and pools remain, with dramatic views of the plain and its encircling peaks.

Borobudur

In the eighth century the Shailendra dynasty of Sumatra conquered Java, established Buddhism as the official religion, and financed the building of the massive fane of Borobudur (i.e., “Many Buddhas”).  This is the world’s largest Buddhist monument. Laid out like a pyramidal mandala, it’s a cosmology framed and inscribed in stone, massive amounts of stone — 6,500 cubic yards of it.

Only one Hindu temple surpasses that of Borobudur, and it, too, is far from India lost, indeed, in a distant jungle that covered it for cen- turies. In 1858 a French explorer, picking his way through the upper valley of the Mekong River, caught a glimpse, through trees and brush, of a sight that seemed to him miraculous: an enormous temple, incredibly majestic in design, stood amid the forest, intertwined and almost covered with shrubbery and foliage. That day he saw many temples, some of them already overgrown or split apart by trees; it seemed that he had arrived just in time to forestall the triumph of the wilderness over these works of men. Other Europeans had to come and corroborate his tale before Henri Mouhot was believed; then scientific expeditions descended upon

the once silent retreat, and a whole school at Paris  devoted itself to charting and studying the find. Today Angkor Wat is one of the wonders of the world.

Javanese living in nearby Yogyakarta were aware of its existence when Borobudur was”discovered” by Europeans in 1815. At that time most of the monument was visible, even if large portions of it were filled in with soil sustaining overgrown trees and other plants. The temple proper is of moderate size, and of peculiar design a small domical stupa surrounded by seventy-two smaller topes arranged about it in concentric circles. If this were all, Borobudur would be nothing; what constitutes the grandeur of the structure is the pedestal, four hundred feet square, an immense mastaba in seven receding stages. At every turn there are niches for statuary; 436 times the sculptors of Borobudur thought fit to carve the figure of Buddha. Still discontent, they cut into the walls of the stages three miles of bas-reliefs, depicting the legendary birth, youth and enlightenment of the Master, and with such skill that these reliefs are among the finest in Asia. ”

The stupa, or tower at the top, has been destroyed by lightening. An unfinished statue Buddha that was found in the stupa has been moved a hundred yards away from the temple. But Borobudur stands as one of the great spiritual monuments of the world.

Dieng Plateau

The remains of the oldest Hindu temples in Java have been found here. And there is no doubt that Dieng was considered sacred in pre-Hindu times. But that didn’t stop at least 392 of the original 400 structures from disappearing since the beginning of the 19th century. Dieng has been ravished.

The Arjuna Group is the most impressive site still remaining. This a group of 5 blocky shrines, each dedicated to a different individual or group of Hindu deities. The whole complex, ironically, is dedicated to Siva, the destroyer.

Sukuh Temple is a perhaps the strangest temple on the slope. Built in the 15th century, it’s a post-Hindu, post-Buddhist, post-Islam construction that hearkens back to early prehistoric animist traditions

Before  the temple gates, there is  a large stone fertility figures — a lingam and a yoni. Inside the grounds  there are several odd sculptures telling stories that nobody has been able to figure out. But it seems to have something to do with fertility and war and turtles. Whatever mix of inspiration and legend came together to make this temple, it works.

Cambodia

At the beginning of the Christian era Indo-China, or Cambodia, was inhabited by a people essentially Chinese, partly Tibetan, called Kham- bujas or Khmers. When Kublai Khan’s ambassador, Tcheou-ta-Kouan, visited the Khmer capital, Angkor Thorn, he found a strong government ruling a nation that had drawn wealth out of its rice-paddies and its sweat. The king, Tchcou reported, had five wives: “one special, and four others for the cardinal points of the compass,” with some four thousand concubines for more precise readings.  Gold and jewellery abounded; pleasure- boats dotted the lake; the streets of the capital were filled with chariots, curtained palanquins, elephants in rich caparison, and a population of almost a million souls. Hospitals were attached to the temples, and each had its corps of nurses and physicians.

Though the people were Chinese, their culture was Hindu. Their religion was based upon a primitive worship of the serpent, Naga, whose fanlike head appears everywhere in Cambodian art; then the great gods of the Hindu triad Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva entered through Burma; almost at the same time Buddha came, and was joined with Vishnu and Shiva as a favourite divinity of the Khmers. Inscriptions tell of the enormous quantity of rice, butter and rare oils contributed daily by the people to the ministrants of the gods.

To Shiva the Khmers, toward the end of the ninth century, dedicated the oldest of their surviving temples the Bayon, now a forbidding ruin half overgrown with tenacious vegetation. The stones, laid without cement.

In 1604 a Portuguese missionary told of hunters reporting sonic ruins in the jungle, and another priest made a similar report in 1672; but no attention was paid to these statements. Cement; have drawn apart in the course of a thousand years, stretching into ungodly grins the great faces of Brahma and Shiva which almost constitute the towers. Three centuries later the slaves and war-captives of the kings built Angkor Wat,  a masterpiece equal to the finest architectural achievements of the Egyptians, the Greeks, or the cathedral builders of Europe. An enormous moat, twelve miles in length, surrounds the temple; over the moat runs a paved bridge guarded by dissua- sive Nagas in stone; then an ornate enclosing wall; then spacious galleries, whose reliefs tell again the tales of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana; then the stately edifice itself, rising upon a broad base, by level after level of a terraced pyramid, to the sanctuary of the god, two hundred feet high. Here magnitude does not detract from beauty, but helps it to an imposing magnificence that startles the Western mind into some weak realization of the ancient grandeur once possessed by Oriental civilization. One sees in imagination the crowded population of the capital: the regimented slaves cutting, pulling and raising the heavy stones; the artisans carving reliefs and statuary as if time would never fail them; the priests deceiving and consoling the people; the devadasis (still pictured on the granite) deceiving the people and consoling the priests; the lordly aristocracy building palaces like the Phinean-Akas, with its spacious Terrace of Honour; and, raised above all by the labour of all, the powerful and ruthless kings. The kings, needing many slaves, waged many wars. Often they won; but near the close of the thirteenth century “in the middle of the way” of Dante’s life the armies of Siam defeated the Khmers, sacked their cities, and left their resplendent temples and palaces in ruins.

Tcheou-ta-Kouan speaks of the many books that were written by the people of Angkor, but not a page of this literature remains; like our- selves they wrote perishable thoughts upon perishable tissue, and all their immortals are dead. The marvellous reliefs show men and women wearing veils and nets to guard against mosquitoes and slimy, crawling things. The men and women are gone, surviving only on the stones. The mosquitoes and the lizards remain.

Buddhism has two major schools, or traditions, Southern and Northern. Theravada (“The Doctrine of the Elders”), moved south from India to Sri Lanka and then to Southeast Asia. Mahayana (“The Greater Vehicle”), moved north through present-day Afghanistan and along the Silk Road to East Asia, splitting into multiple sects along the way. The majority of Thais today are Theravadin Buddists whose sacred belief also includes animism and Brahmanism, the precursor to modern Hinduism. So, while the majority of Thai temples belong to Theravada Buddhism, there are Mahayana Buddhist temples and Taoist temples, established by Chinese immigrants, a few Hindu temples, and a number of ruined Hindu temples left by the Khmer empire and subsequently converted for Buddhist use.

The term for most temples is wat. A few palace-like structures with multiple spires are known as prasat, which, in the case of Khmer-style buildings, means a sanctuary for the worship of Hindu deities. The word prang may be used for a structure which only has one or more Khmer-style spires remaining. Shrines dedicated to one specific spirit or non-Buddhist deity are known as san. The Srivijaya empire, based in Sumatra, stretched up the penninsula from the 7th to the 13th centuries. The Dvaravati kingdom of the Mon people flourished in the central region and parts of Burma until it came under the influence of the Khmer empire in the 10th century, and was invaded by the Khmer in the first half of the 12th century. Haripunjaya, another Mon kingdom, existed as far north as modern-day Lamphun (Hariphunchai) until the late 13th century. The earliest Tai group settled in the central region’s Chao Phraya River basin and further south. They came to be known as the Siamese (syam.

Although there are regional variations, the basic temple layout is an assembly hall (viharn) facing east (the direction the Buddha faced when he attained enlightenment), with a stupa (chedi) behind and an ordination hall (ubosot or boht) beside it. The ubosot is usually smaller because it is used mainly for monks’ activities, and it can be recognized by sacred boundary stones (bai sema) outside the building at the eight cardinal and sub-cardinal points. Beneath the bai sema are buried spherical stones about the size of canon balls known as luk nimit, with a ninth luk nimit beneath the center of the ubosot or its principal Buddha image. At some temples, the ubosot may also serve as a viharn.

There may be other small halls called viharn housing sacred images, a Buddha footprint, or a shrine to a former ruler or well-known hermit in the Indian tradition of rishi. They are known in Thai as reusee or lersi, and are often associated with the founding of temples. If the ubosot does not contain a famous Buddha image or murals, it may well be closed to the public. Other halls may be locked to prevent theft of historical artifacts.

The stupa, known as a chedi in Thailand (“pagoda” is the name given to stupas in the Far East), is both a memorial to the Buddha and a reliquary. It also represents Mount Meru, the mountain at the center of the mythical Hindu and Buddhist cosmos. Chedis vary a lot in style, from the classic bell shape to a cone or a pyramid. Another type of stupa is the Khmer-influenced stone “corn cob,” known as a prang.

Some temples have a scripture hall, known as a hor trai, and a few old ones are built on stilts in a pond to keep crawling insects away from the delicate palm-leaf scriptures.

Outside the main buildings a few temples have a “Hell Garden” with gory depictions of what existence in a hell-realm is like according to the Three Worlds Cosmology. Here  concrete human figures with animals’ heads, naked people forced to climb spiked trees, and people being boiled in a large vat with a variety of demons in attendance.

The most noticeable aspect of temple decoration is the guardians at the doors and windows. At a few famous temples, these may be the iconic yak, or giants. At others they may be Hindu deities, celestials, benign demons, and a variety of mythical creatues, especially lions (singh) and serpents (naga). Some temples are covered in pieces of glass in mosaic patterns that originated with an ancient belief that evil spirits would flee in they saw their own reflection.

Temple murals were originally a way of bringing the teachings of the Buddha to illiterate lay folk. Traditionally, the west (associated with death) wall of a viharn will feature scenes of beings in other realms as described in the Thai Buddhist textTraiphum Phra Ruang (Three Worlds Cosmology), the east wall will feature a mural of the Buddha subduing Mara prior to his enlightenment, and the lower side walls will be covered with scenes from the Jataka Tales (stories of the Buddha’s previous lives) while the upper walls will feature celestials and benign demons facing the principal Buddha image.

All temples have one or more Buddha image in the viharn and the ubosot, the purpose of which is to act as a reminder of the historical Buddha and his teachings The principal Buddha image in a hall will be placed facing east, the direction the Buddha was facing when he attained enlightenment.

In the ninth century, the Khmer established Angkor as the capital of their huge kingdom stretching from present-day Thailand to Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. For the next six centuries they ruled one of the largest empires in South East Asia. Angkor cultivated a power base of a mighty military and political force, and a rich and sophisticated civilization. The ruins seen today represent successive capitals constructed by a dozen Khmer kings, between the 9th and 13th Centuries. These were cities of massive stone temples, wide majestic causeways, thrusting towers and imposing gates.This Cambodian empire has left some of the greatest buildings and sandstone carvings depicting the religious figures of Vishnu, Shiva, Uma, Hanuman and their epic deeds one the one hand.

Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat is the largest religious temple in the world, with a volume of stone equalling that of the Cheops pyramid in Egypt. It is unlike all the other Khmer temples in that it faces west, and 12th Century Hinduism inspires it. Its symmetrical towers are stylized on the modern Cambodian flag.

Conceived by Suryavarman II, Angkor Wat took an estimated 30 years to build. It is generally believed to have been a funeral temple for the king. It has been occupied continuously by Buddhist monks and is well preserved.

Intricate bas-reliefs surround Angkor Wat on four sides. Each tells a story. The most celebrated of these is the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, which is located on the east wing. In it, the Naga serpent is twisted by demons and gods to produce the elixir of life.

The way the light glows on the ancient stones makes sunset the best time to wander through Angkor Wat’s two square kilometers, climb its towers and ponder its creators.

Angkor Thom

The ancient walled city of Angkor Thom, literally “Great city,” built in the 12th Century by Jayavarman VII, contains the famous Bayon temple with its more than 200 enormous mysterious faces. It also contains the 300 meter long Elephant Terrace with its large sculptured royal elephants and mythical Garudas, the half-man and half-bird figures. Also within the walled area is a massive terrace named after the 15th century sculpture of the “Leper King” that was thought to be atop the northern platform; it seems however it is replica of Yama.

Preah Khan

Preah Khan is an extensive monastic complex covering over 56 hectares built by the Khmer King Jayavarman VII as a monastery and teaching complex. It is located in the northern part of Angkor, a short distance beyond the northern gate of the Angkor Thom precinct. It is one of a group of temple complexes situated on a small ‘Baray’ or water tank including the temples of Neak Pean and the monastic complex of Ta Som. Together these structures constitute one of Angkor’s major axial arrangements and hydrological complexes.

Today Preah Khan is in a state of ruin resulting from a slow decline due to its loss of royal patronage in the middle of the 15th Century. There is evidence that some of the temples and shrines have remained in use probably through the 17th Century. It was not until the end of the 19th Century that Preah Khan, like many of the other Angkor sites, was ‘rediscovered’. During the 1940s the archaeological team of the Ecole Francaise d’Extreme Orient (EFEO) undertook some consolidation and reconstruction projects in Preah Khan all of which were carefully documented and were subsequently made available to the World Monument Fund (WMF) since the fund’s inception at Preah Khan in 1992.

Ta Prohm is the temple that has been left largely in its natural state since its “re-discovery” by French archeologists. Surrounded by jungle, its labyrinth of stone hallways is overgrown with the roots and limbs of massive silk cotton trees, which envelop the stone like tentacles. It is one of the largest temples at Angkor, dedicated in 1186 to the King’s mother. Historians have noted its mystical charm. Its close connection with nature makes it easy for the imagination to roam back to the days when it housed the Angkor kings in splendor.

Banteay Srei

The Citadel of Women, the most beautiful of the temples in Siem Reap, some 34 kilometres north of Siem Reap town. Remarkable for its total restoration, this small temple built by Brahmins for human use rather than for use by god-kings has the finest pink sandstone carving in Cambodia. These carvings can be seen at close quarter clearly telling extracts of the Ramayana. Incorporated in long stay tours in Siem Reap, Banteay Srei is an essential temple to visit.

Beng Mealea

“Lotus Pond” Temple from the early 11th Century built by Suryavarman II as a Hindu Temple.  If there is one temple to explore resplendent with jungle engulfing it, it is Beng Mealea. Clambering over large sandstone blocks to reach the inner sanctuary and eerie worship corridor is an exploration to remember. Situated 60 km east of Angkor Wat, through traditional countryside life, over bumpy roads, Beng Mealea is a temple hidden in a maze of jungle.

Architecturally, Beng Mealea is noted for its innovative, in its time, construction of hallways, it was a very large temple with wide galleries foreshadowing Angkor Wat. Garudas, hold up an outer platform, finer in detail than those to be found out in the elements of the Elephant Terrace at Angkor Thom. Surprises of fallen lintels with intricate carvings lay amongst the fallen wall and roofs.

Georges Groslier writes in 1916 of Beng Mealea “There emanates from Beng Mealea a harmony, powerful and sober, which permits to place this temple first amongst the first and to consider it the prototype, the classical and purified specimen of Khmer art”.

Roluos Group

Hariharalaya, the earliest capital in the Siem Reap area has left the Roluos group of Temples- Bakong, Preah Ko and Lo Lei. Sandstone was used rather than bricks in the construction of Bakong, fine carvings are to be found at both Preah Ko and Lo Lei.

Pre Rup

Situated amongst rice paddy fields and made of bricks rather than carved sandstone, Pre Rup’s depiction of Mount Meru is a classic example of early Hindu design.

Siam

Nearby, in Siam, a people half Tibetan and half Chinese had gradually expelled the conquering Khmers, and had developed a civilization based upon Hindu religion and art. After overcoming Cambodia the Siamese built a new capital, Ayuthia, on the site of an ancient city of the Khmers. From this scat they extended their sway until, about 1600, their empire included southern Burma, Cambodia, and the Malay Peninsula. Their trade reached to China on the east and to Europe on the west. Their artists made illuminated manu- scripts, painted with lacquer on wood, fired porcelain in the Chinese style, embroidered beautiful silks, and occasionally carved statues of unique excellence. Then, in the impartial rhythm of history, the Burmese captured Ayuthia, and destroyed it with all its art. In their new capital at Bangkok the Siamese built a great pagoda, whose excess of ornament cannot quite conceal the beauty of its design.

Burma

The Burmese were among the greatest builders in Asia. Coming down into these fertile fields from Mongolia and Tibet, they fell under Hindu influences, and from the fifth century onward produced an abundance of Buddhist, Vaishnavite and Shivaite statuary, and great stupas that culminated in the majestic temple of Ananda one of the five thousand pagodas of their ancient capital, Pagan. Pagan was sacked by Kublai Khan, and for five hundred years the Burmese government vacillated from capital to capital. For a time Manda- lay flourished as the center of Burma’s life, and the home of artists who achieved beauty in many fields from embroidery and jewelry to the royal palace which showed what they could do in the frail medium of wood.” 11 The English, displeased with the treatment of their missionaries and their merchants, adopted Burma in 1886, and moved the capital to Rangoon, a city amenable to the disciplinary influence of the Imperial Navy. There the Burmese had built one of their finest shrines, the famous Shwe Dagon, that Golden Pagoda which draws to its spire millions upon millions of Burmese Buddhist pilgrims every year. For doesnot this temple contain the very hairs of Shaky a-n ami’s head? Many religions are practised in Burma. Religious edifices and orders have been in existence for many years. 89% of the population embraces Buddhism (mostly Theravāda). Other religions are practiced largely without obstruction.

Although Hinduism is presently only practiced by 1% of the population, it was a major religion in Burma’s past. Several strains of Hinduism existed alongside both Theravada Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism in the Pyu period in the first millennium CE, and down to the Pagan period (9th to 13th centuries) when “Saivite and Vaishana elements enjoyed greater elite influence than they would later do.” Kodi Lingeswaran Temple. Thanlyin area. Original temple is said to be more than 100years, new temple shrine is located nearby. This is the only temple where Sivan and Paravati are together. Sree Ankala Eeswari Temple. Pelikha Village Kyauktan Township. This temple is located in the middle of a vast paddy field.

References

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CANDEE, HELEN: Angkor the Magnificent. New York, 1924

CHIROL, SIR VALENTINE: India. London, 1926.

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HAVELL, E. B.: Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India. London, 1915.

HAVELL, E. B.: Ideals of Indian Art. New York, 1920.

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FRAZER, R. W.: Literary History of India. London, 1920.

FISCHER, OTTO: Die Kunst Indiens, Chinas und Japans. Berlin, 1928.

FERGUSON, J. G: Outlines of Chinese Art. University of Chicago, 1919.

FRGUSSON, JAS.: History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, 2V. London, 1910.

FERGUSSON, JAS.: History of Architecture in All Countries. 2V. London, 1874.

LORENZ, D. E.: The ‘Round the World Traveller. New York, 1927.

SMITH, A. H.: Chinese Characteristics. New York, 1894.

SMITH, G. ELLIOT: Human History. New York, 1929.

SMITH, W. ROBERTSON: The Religion of the Semites. New York, 1889.

SMiTH,V. A.: Asoka. Oxford, 1920.

Will Durant: Our Oriental Heritage. Simon and Schuster. New York 1954

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

-laureate of the emperor:

Seated on the throne, a god amongst men,

Thou, the Emperor of Delhi.

Blessed was the hour, the minute, the second,

When thou ascendest the throne,

O God amongst men,

Thou, the Lord of Delhi.

Long live thy crown, thy sceptre, thy throne,

O God amongst men,

Thou, Emperor of Delhi.

Live long, and remain awakened always,

O son of Humayoon,

Joy of the sun, God amongst men,

Thou, the Emperor of Delhi!

Tânsen, the poet-laureate of the emperor:

It is in the nature of governments to degenerate; for power, as Shelley said, poisons every hand that touches it.(1) The excesses of the Delhi Sultans lost them the support not only of the Hindu population, but of their Moslem followers. When fresh invasions came from the north these Sultans were defeated with the same ease with which they them-selves had won India.

Their first conqueror was Tamerlane himself more properly Timur-i- lang a Turk who had had given himself a pedigree going back to Genghis Khan, in order to win the support of his Mongol horde.

Timur crossed the Indus (1398), massacred or enslaved such of the inhabitants as could not flee from him, defeated the forces of Sultan Mahmud Tughlak, occupied Delhi, slew a hundred thousand prisoners in cold blood, plundered the city of all the wealth that the Afghan dynasty had gathered there, and carried it off to Samarkand with a multitude of women and slaves, leaving anarchy, famine and pestilence in his wake.”

The Delhi Sultans remounted their throne, and taxed India for another century before the real conqueror came. Babur, founder of the great Mogul Dynasty, ( Mogul is another form of Mongol. The Moguls were really Turks; but the Hindus called and still call all northern Moslems (except the Afghans) Moguls.( 2) “Babur” was a Mongol nickname, meaning lion; the real name of the first Mogul Emperor of India was Zahiru-d din Muhammad  ”( 3), was a man every whit as Drave and fascinating as Alexander. Descended from both Timur and Genghis Khan, he inherited all the ability of these scourges of Asia without their brutality. He suffered from a surplus of energy in body and mind; he fought, hunted and traveled insatiably; it was nothing for him, single-handed, to kill five enemies in five minutes. (4) In two days he rode one hundred and sixty miles on horse- back, and swam the Ganges twice in the bargain; and in his last years he remarked that not since the age of eleven had he kept the fast of Ramadan twice in the same place. (5)

He took Kabul in his twenty-second year; overwhelmed the one hundred thousand soldiers of Sultan Ibrahim at Panipat with twelve thousand men and some fine horses, killed prisoners by the thousands, captured Delhi, established there the greatest and most beneficent of the foreign dynasties that have ruled India, enjoyed four years of peace, composed excellent poems and memoirs, and died at the age of forty- seven after living, in action and experience, a century.

His son, Humayun, was too weak and vacillating, and too addicted to opium, to carry on Babur’s work. Sher Shah, an Afghan chief, defeated him in two bloody battles, and restored for a time the Afghan power in India. Two minor Shahs held the power for a decade; then Humayun, after twelve years of hardship and wandering, organized a force in Persia, re-entered India, and recaptured the throne. Eight months later Humayun fell from the terrace of his library, and died.

During his exile and poverty Humayun’s wife Hamida Banu  had borne him a son on October 15, 1542 in Umarkot,  whom he had piously called Muhammad, but whom India was to call Akbar that is, “Very Great.

The kingdom Akbar inherited was little more than a collection of frail fiefs. Under the regency of Bairam Khan, however, Akbar achieved relative stability in the region. Most notably, Khan won control of northern India from the Afghans and successfully led the army against the Hindu king Hemu at the Second Battle of Panipat. In spite of this loyal service, when Akbar came of age in March of 1560, he dismissed Bairam Khan and took full control of the government.At the age of eighteen he took over from the Regent the full direction of affairs.

His Administration

Akbar was a cunning general, and he continued his military expansion throughout his reign. The army was supplied with the best ordnance yet seen in India, but inferior to that then in use in Europe. Akbar’s efforts to secure better guns failed; and this inferiority in the instruments of slaughter cooperated with the degeneration of his descendants in determining the European conquest of India.

By the time he died, his empire extended to Afghanistan in the north, Sindh in the west, Bengal in the east, and the Godavari River in the south. His dominion then extended over an eighth of India a belt of territory some three hundred miles broad, running from the north- west frontier at Multan to Benares in the East. He set out with the zeal and voracity of his grandfather to extend these borders; and by a series of ruthless wars he made himself ruler of all Hindustan except for the little Rajput kingdom of Mewar.

Akbar’s success in creating his empire was as much a result of his ability to earn the loyalty of his conquered people as it was of his ability to conquer them. He allied himself with the defeated Rajput rulers, and rather than demanding a high “tribute tax” and leaving them to rule their territories unsupervised, he created a system of central government, integrating them into his administration. Akbar was known for rewarding talent, loyalty, and intellect, regardless of ethnic background or religious practice. In addition to compiling an able administration, this practice brought stability to his dynasty by establishing a base of loyalty to Akbar that was greater than that of any one religion.

Beyond military conciliation, he appealed to the Rajput people by ruling in a spirit of cooperation and tolerance. He did not force India’s majority Hindu population to convert to Islam; he accommodated them instead, abolishing the poll tax on non-Muslims, translating Hindu literature and participating in Hindu festivals.

Akbar also formed powerful matrimonial alliances. When he married Hindu princesses—including Jodha Bai, the eldest daughter of the house of Jaipur, as well princesses of Bikaner and Jaisalmer—their fathers and brothers became members of his court and were elevated to the same status as his Muslim fathers- and brothers-in-law. While marrying off the daughters of conquered Hindu leaders to Muslim royalty was not a new practice, it had always been viewed as a humiliation. By elevating the status of the princesses’ families, Akbar removed this stigma among all but the most orthodox Hindu sects.

Returning to Delhi he put aside his armor, and devoted himself to re-organizing the administration of his realm. The Mansabdari system in particular has been acclaimed for its role in upholding Mughal power in the time of Akbar. The system persisted with few changes down to the end of the Mughal Empire, but was progressively weakened under his successors. In 1574 Akbar revised his tax system, separating revenue collection from military administration. Each subah, or governor, was responsible for maintaining order in his region, while a separate tax collector collected property taxes and sent them to the capital. This created checks and balances in each region, since the individuals with the money had no troops, and the troops had no money, and all were dependent on the central government. The central government then doled out fixed salaries to both military and civilian personnel according to rank.

His power was absolute, and all important offices, even in distant provinces, were filled by his appointment. His principal aides were four: a Prime Minister or Vakir; a Finance Minister, called sometimes Vazir (Vizier), sometimes Divan; a Master of the Court, or Bakhshi; and a Primate or Sadr, who was head of the Mohammedan religion in India. Some of Akbar’s more well-known courtiers are his navaratna, or “nine gems.” They served to both advise and entertain Akbar, and included Abul Fazl, Akbar’s biographer, who chronicled his reign in the three-volume book “Akbarnama”; Abul Faizi, a poet and scholar as well as Abul Fazl’s brother; Miyan Tansen, a singer and musician; Raja Birbal, the court jester; Raja Todar Mal, Akbar’s  minister of finance; Raja Man Singh, a celebrated lieutenant; Abdul Rahim Khan-I-Khana, a poet; and Fagir Aziao-Din and Mullah Do Piaza, who were both advisors As his rule acquired tradition and prestige he depended less and less upon military power, and contented himself with a standing army of some twenty-five thousand men. In time of war this modest force was augmented with troops recruited by the provincial military governors a precarious arrangement which had something to do with the fall of the Mogul Empire under Aurangzeb. Bribery and embezzlement throve among these governors and their subordinates, so that much of Akbar’s time was spent in checking corruption. He regulated with strict economy the expenses of his court and household, fixing the prices of food and materials bought for them, and the wages of labor engaged by the state. When he died he left the equivalent of a billion dollars in the treasury, and his empire was the most powerful on earth.

Both law and taxation were severe, but far less than before. From one-sixth to one-third of the gross produce of the soil was taken from the peasants, amounting to some $100,000,000 a year in land tax. The Emperor was legislator, executive and judge; as supreme court he spent many hours in giving audience to important litigants. His law forbade child marriage and compulsory suttee, sanctioned the remarriage of widows, abolished the slavery of captives and the slaughter of animals for sacrifice, gave freedom to all religions, opened career to every talent of whatever creed or race, and removed the head-tax that the Afghan rulers had placed upon all Hindus unconverted to Islam. (6) At the beginning of his reign the law included such punishments as mutilation; at the end it was probably the most enlightened code of any sixteenth-century government. Every state begins with violence, and (if it becomes secure) mellows into liberty.

But the strength of a ruler is often the weakness of his government. The system depended so much upon Akbar’s superior qualities of mind and character that obviously it would threaten to disintegrate at his death.

His Personality

.” No effort was spared to make him great; even his ancestry had taken every precaution, for in his veins ran the blood of Babur, Timur and Genghis Khan. Tutors were supplied him in abundance, but he rejected them, and refused to learn how to read.  Later he came to recognize the value of books, and being still unable to read listened for hours while others read to him, often from abstruse and difficult volumes. In the end he became an illiterate scholar, loving letters and art, and supporting them with royal largesse.

He educated himself for kingship by incessant and dangerous sport; he became a perfect horseman, played polo royally, he liked polo so much that he invented a luminous ball in order that the game might be played at night.  He knew the art of controlling the most ferocious elephants; he was always ready to set out on a lion or tiger hunt, to undergo any fatigue, and to face all dangers in the first person. He had, of course, most of the virtues, since he engaged most of the historians: he was the best athlete, the best horseman, the best swords- man, one of the greatest architects, and by all odds the handsomest man in the kingdom. Actually he had long arms, bow legs, narrow Mongoloid eyes, a head drooping leftward, and a wart on his nose. (7) He made him- self presentable by neatness, dignity, serenity, and brilliant eyes that could sparkle (says a contemporary) “like the sea in sunshine,” or flare up in a way to make the offender tremble with terror, like Vandamme before Napoleon. He dressed simply, in brocaded cap, blouse and trousers, jewels and bare feet. He cared little for meat, and gave it up almost entirely in his later years, saying that “it is not right that a man should make his stomach the grave of animals.” Nevertheless he was strong in body and will, excelled in many active sports, and thought nothing of walking thirty-six miles in a day.

He inherited the violent impulses of his family, and in his youth (like his Christian contemporaries) he was capable of solving problems by assassination. Like a good Turk he had no effeminate distaste for human blood; when, at the age of fourteen, he was invited to win the title of Ghazi Slayer of the Infidel by killing a Hindu prisoner, he cut off the man’s head at once with one stroke of his scimitar. These were the barbarous beginnings of a man destined to become one of the wisest, most humane and most cultured of all the kings known to history.

His Character

Gradually he learned, in Woodrow Wilson’s phrase, to sit upon his own volcano; and he rose far above his time in that spirit of fair play which does not always distinguish Oriental rulers. “His clemency,” says Firishta, “was without bounds; this virtue he often carried beyond the line of prudence.” He was generous, expending vast sums in alms; he was affable to all, but especially to the lowly; “their little offerings,” says a Jesuit missionary, “he used to accept with such a pleased look, handling them and putting them in his bosom, as he did not do with the most lavish gifts of the nobles.” One of his contemporaries described him as an epileptic; many said that melancholy possessed him to a morbid degree. Perhaps to put a brighter color on reality, he drank liquor and took opium, in moderation; his father and his children had similar habits, with- out similar self-control. (Two of his children died in youth of chronic alcoholism.) (8) He had a harem suitable to the size of his empire; one gossip tells us that “the King hath in Agra and Fathpur-Sikri, as they do credibly report, one thousand elephants, thirty horses, fourteen hundred tame deer, eight hundred concubines.” But he does not seem to have had sensual ambitions or tastes. He married widely, but politically; he pleased the Rajput princes by espousing their daughters, and thereby bound them to the support of his throne; and from that time the Mogul Dynasty was half native in blood. A Rajput became his leading general, and a raja rose to be his greatest minister. His dream was a

united India.(9)

His mind was not quite as realistic and coldly accurate as Caesar’s or Napoleon’s; he had a passion for metaphysics, and might, if deposed, have become a mystic recluse. He thought constantly, and was forever making inventions and suggesting improvements. (10) Like Haroun-al-Rashid he took nocturnal rambles in disguise, and came back bursting with reforms. In the midst of his complex activity he made time to collect a great library, composed entirely of manuscripts beautifully written and engraved by those skilful penmen whom he esteemed as artists fully equal to the painters and architects that adorned his reign. He despised print as a mechanical and impersonal thing, and soon disposed of the choice specimens of European typography presented to him by his Jesuit friends. The volumes in his library numbered only twenty-four thousand, but they were valued at $3,500,000″ by those who thought that such hoards of the spirit could be estimated in material terms. He patronized poets without stint, and loved one of them the Hindu Birbal so much that he made him a court favourite, and finally a general (11)

Akbar had his literary aides render into Persian which was the language of his court the masterpieces of Hindu literature, history and science, and himself supervised the translation of the interminable Mahabharata. Every art flourished under his patronage and stimulation. Hindu music and poetry had now one of their greatest periods; and painting, both Persian and Hindu, reached its second zenith through his encouragement. (12) ‘ At Agra he directed the building of the famous Fort, and within its walls erected (by proxy) five hundred buildings that his contemporaries considered to be among the most beautiful in the world. They were torn down by the impetuous Shah Jehan, and can be judged only by such remnants of Akbar’s architecture as the tomb of Humayun at Delhi, and the remains at Fathpur-Sikri, where the mausoleum of Akbar’s beloved friend, the ascetic Shaik Salim Chisti, is among the fairest structures in India.

His passion for philosophy

Deeper than these interests was his penchant for speculation. This well-nigh omnipotent emperor secretly yearned to be a philosopher- much as philosophers long to be emperors, and cannot comprehend the stupidity of Providence in withholding from them their rightful thrones. After conquering the world, Akbar was unhappy because he could not understand it. “Although,” he said, “I am the master of so vast a kingdom, and all the appliances of government are at my hand, yet since true greatness consists in doing the will of God, my mind is not at ease in this diversity of sects and creeds; and apart from this outward pomp of circumstance, with what satisfaction, in this despondency, can I undertake the sway of empire? I await the coming of some discreet man of principle who will resolve the difficulties of my conscience. . . . Discourses in philosophy have such a charm for me that they distract me from all else, and I forcibly restrain myself from listening to them lest the necessary duties of the hour should be neglected.”(13) “Crowds of learned men from all nations,” says Badaoni, “and sages of various religions and sects, came to the court and were honoured with private conversations. After inquiries and investigations, which were their only business and occupation day and night, they would talk about profound points of science, the subtleties of revelation, the curiosities of history, and the wonders of nature.”  ”The superiority of man,” said Akbar, “rests on the jewel of reason.” (14)

As became a philosopher, he was profoundly interested in religion. His careful reading of the Mahabharatta, and his intimacy with Hindu poets and sages, lured him into the study of Indian faiths. For a time, at least, he accepted the theory of transmigration, and scandalized his Moslem followers by appearing in public with Hindu religious marks on his forehead. He had a flair for humouring all the creeds: he pleased the Zoroastrians by wearing their sacred shirt and girdle under his clothes, and allowed the Jains to persuade him to abandon hunting, and to prohibit, on certain days, the killing of animals. When he learned of the new religion called Christianity, which had come into India with the Portuguese occupation of Goa, he despatched a message to the Paulist missionaries there, inviting them to send two of their learned men to him. Later some Jesuits came to Delhi and so interested him in Christ that he ordered his scribes to translate the New Testament. 100(15) He gave the Jesuits full freedom to make converts, and allowed them to bring up one of his sons. While Catholics were murdering Protestants in France, and Protestants, under Elizabeth, were murdering Catholics in England, and the Inquisition was killing and robbing Jews in Spain, and Bruno was being burned at the stake in Italy, Akbar invited the representatives of all the religions in his empire to a conference, pledged them to peace, issued edicts of toleration for every cult and creed, and, as evidence of his own neutrality, married wives from the Brahman, Buddhist, and Mohammedan faiths.

His greatest pleasure, after the fires of youth had cooled, was in the free discussion of religious beliefs. He had quite discarded the dogmas of Islam, and to such an extent that his Moslem subjects fretted under his impartial rule. “This king,” St. Francis Xavicr reported with some exaggeration, “has destroyed the false sect of Mohammed, and wholly discredited it. In this city there is neither a mosque nor a Koran the book of their law; and the mosques that were there have been made stables for horses, and storehouses.” The King took no stock in revelations, and would accept nothing that could not justify itself with science and philosophy. It was not unusual for him to gather friends and prelates of various sects together, and discuss religion with them from Thursday evening to Friday noon. When the Moslem mullahs and the Christian priests quarrelled he reproved them both, saying that God should be worshiped through the intellect, and not by a blind adherence to supposed revelations. “Each person,” he said, in the spirit and perhaps through the influence of the Upanishads and Kabir, “according to his condition gives the Supreme Being a name; but in reality to name the Unknowable is vain.” Certain Moslems suggested an ordeal by fire as a test of Christianity vs. Islam: a mullah holding the Koran and a priest holding one of the Gospels were to enter a fire, and he who should come out unhurt would be adjudged the teacher of truth. Akbar, who did not like the mullah who was proposed for this experiment, warmly seconded the suggestion, but the Jesuit rejected it as blasphemous and impious, not to say dangerous. Gradually the rival groups of theologians shunned these conferences, and left them to Akbar and his rationalist intimates.( 16)

His new religion

Akbar decreed that Hindus who had been forced to convert to Islam could reconvert to Hinduism without facing the death penalty. Akbar practiced several Hindu customs. He celebrated Diwali. He allowed Brahman priests to tie jewelled strings round his wrists by way of blessing and, following his lead, many of the nobles took to wearing rakhi (protection charms).(17) He had renounced beef, and forbade the sale of all meats on certain days .He ban cow slaughter, having only vegetarian dishes on certain days of the week, and drink only Ganges water. Even as he was in the Punjab, 200 miles away from the Ganges, the water was sealed in large jars and transported to him. He referred to the Ganges water as the “water of immortality.”

Akbar regularly held discussions with Jain scholars and was also greatly impacted by some of their teachings. He invited  spiritual teacher Acharya Hiravijaya Suri to Fatehpur Sikri.Akbar was impressed by the scholastic qualities and character of the Acharya. He held several debates and discussions on religion and philosophy in his courts. Arguing with Jains, Akbar remained sceptical of their atheistic views on God and creation, and yet became convinced by their philosophy of non-violence and vegetarianism and ended up deploring the eating of all flesh.Akbar also issued many imperial orders that were favorable for Jain interests, such as banning animal slaughter.(18) Jain authors also wrote about their experience at the Mughal court in Sanskrit texts that are still largely unknown to Mughal historians.(19)

During the early part of his reign, Akbar adopted an attitude of suppression towards Muslim sects that were condemned by the orthodoxy as heretical. He suppressed Mahdavism in 1573 during his campaign in Gujarat, in the course of which the Mahdavi leader Bandagi Miyan Sheik Mustafa was arrested and brought in chains to the court for debate and released after eighteen months. However, as Akbar increasingly came under the influence of pantheistic Sufi mysticism from the early 1570s, it caused a great shift in his outlook and culminated in his shift from orthodox Islam as traditionally professed, in favour of a new concept of Islam transcending the limits of religion.

Harassed by the religious divisions in his kingdom, and disturbed by the thought that they might disrupt it after his death, Akbar finally decided to promulgate a new religion, containing in simple form the essentials of the warring faiths. In 1579, a mazhar, or declaration, was issued that granted Akbar the authority to interpret religious law, superseding the authority of the mullahs. This became known as the “Infallibility Decree,” and it furthered Akbar’s ability to create an interreligious and multicultural state. In 1580, a rebellion broke out in the eastern part of Akbar’s empire, and a number of fatwas, declaring Akbar to be a heretic, were issued by Qazis. Akbar suppressed the rebellion and handed out severe punishments to the Qazis. In order to further strengthen his position in dealing with the Qazis, Akbar issued a mazhar or declaration that was signed by all major ulemas in 1579.(20) The mahzar asserted that Akbar was the Khalifa of the age, the rank of the Khalifa was higher than that of a Mujtahid, in case of a difference of opinion among the Mujtahids, Akbar could select any one opinion and could also issue decrees which did not go against the nass. (21)

In 1582 he established a new cult, the Din-i-Ilahi (“divine faith”), which combined elements of many religions, including Islam, Hinduism and Zoroastrianism. The purported Din-i-Ilahi was more of an ethical system and is said to have prohibited lust, sensuality, slander and pride, considering them sins. Piety, prudence, abstinence and kindness are the core virtues. The soul is encouraged to purify itself through yearning of God. Celibacy was respected, chastity enforced, the slaughter of animals was forbidden and there were no sacred scriptures or a priestly hierarchy. The faith centred around Akbar as a prophet or spiritual leader, but it did not procure many converts and died with Akbar.

The Jesuit missionary Bartoli records the matter thus:

He summoned a General Council, and invited to it all the masters of learning and the military commandants of the cities round about, excluding only Father Ridolfo, whom it was vain to expect to be other than hostile to his sacrilegious purpose. When he had them all assembled in front of him, he spoke in a spirit of astute and knavish policy, saying: “For an empire ruled by one head it was a bad thing to have the members divided among themselves and at variance one with the other; . . . whence it came about that there are as many factions as religions. We ought, therefore, to bring them all into one, but in such fashion that they should be both ‘one’ and ‘all’; with the great advantage of not losing what is good in any one religion, while gaining whatever is better in another. In that way honour would be rendered to God, peace would be given to the people, and security to the empire.” (22)

The Council perforce consenting, he issued a decree proclaiming him the infallible head of the church; this was the chief contribution of Christianity to the new religion. The creed was a pantheistic monotheism in the best Hindu tradition, with a spark of sun and fire worship from the Zoroastrians, and a semi-Jain recommendation to abstain from meat. The slaughter of cows was made a capital offense: nothing could have pleased the Hindus more, or the Moslems less. A later edict made vegetarianism compulsory on the entire population for at least a hundred days in the year; and in further consideration of native ideas, garlic and onions were prohibited. The building of mosques, the fast of Ramadan, the pilgrimage to Mecca, and other Mohammedan customs were banned. Many Moslems who resisted the edicts were exiled. (23) In the centre of the Peace Court at Fathpur-Sikri a Temple of United Religion was built (and still stands there) as a symbol of the Emperor’s fond hope that now all the inhabitants of India might be brothers, worshiping the same God.

As a religion the Din Ilahi never succeeded; Akbar found tradition too strong for his infallibility. A few thousand rallied to the new cult, largely as a means of securing official favour; the vast majority adhered to their inherited gods. Politically the stroke had some beneficent results. The abolition of the head-tax and the pilgrim-tax on the Hindus, the freedom granted to all religions,( With the exception of the transient persecution of Islam (1582-5 )   the weakening of racial and religious fanaticism, dogmatism and division, far outweighed the egotism and excesses of Akbar’s novel revelation. And it won him such loyalty from even the Hindus who did not accept his creed that his prime purpose political unity was largely achieved.

The last days of Akbar

With his own fellow Moslems, however, the Din llahi was a source of bitter resentment, leading at one time to open revolt, and stirring Prince Jehangir into treacherous machinations against his father. The Prince complained that Akbar had reigned forty years, and had so strong a constitution that there was no prospect of his early death. Jehangir organized an army of thirty thousand horsemen, killed Abu-l Fazl, the King’s court historian and dearest friend, and proclaimed himself emperor. Akbar persuaded the youth to submit, and forgave him after a day; but the disloyalty of his son, added to the death of his mother and his friend, broke his spirit, and left him an easy prey for the Great Enemy. In his last days his children ignored him, and gave their energies to quarrelling for his throne. Only a few intimates were with him when he died presumably of dysentery, perhaps of poisoning by Jehangir, on October 27, 1605, Fatehpur Sikri, India Mullahs came to his deathbed to reconvert him to Islam, but they failed; the King “passed away without the benefit of the prayers of any church or sect.” (24) No crowd followed his simple funeral; and the sons and courtiers who had worn mourning for the event discarded it the same evening, and rejoiced that they had inherited his kingdom. It was a bitter death for the justest and wisest ruler that Asia has ever known.

The great Akbar, the Mogul Emperor,
was practically a Hindu.

—Swami Vivekananda( 16 August 1898, Place: Srinagar, Kashmir )

Referances

1-     Havell, History, 368

2-     Smith,Ox,H.,321

3-     Enc. Brit xii 212

4-     Firishtah, Muhammad Qasim, History of Hindustan, ii, 188.

5-     Elphinstone, 430.

6-      Smith, Akbar, 226, 379, 383; Bcsant, 23.

7-     Smith, Akbar, 333

8-     Ibid, 235-7

9-     Arrian, Indica,x

10-  Ibid

11-   Smith, Akbar 235-7

12-   Arrian, Indica,x

13-  Smith, Akbar 494

14-  Ibid 493

15-  Havell, History, 499

16-  Smith, Akbar, 133, 176, 181, 257, 350; Havell, History, 493, 510.

17-   Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors By Lizzie Collingham P. 30

18-  Truschke, Audrey. “Jains and the Mughals”. JAINpedia.

19-  Truschke, Audrey. “Setting the Record Wrong: A Sanskrit Vision of Mughal Conquests

20-   Chandra 2007, p. 254,

21-   Ali 2006,p 159

22-  Smith, Akbar 212

23-   Ibid,  216-21

24-  Ibid, 301, 323, 325.

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Mrs Sudha Rani Maheshwari, M.Sc (Zoology), B.Ed.

Former Principal. A.K.P.I.College, Roorkee, India

❝Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.❞

‒Rita Mae Brown

It’s hard to imagine a cultural phenomenon that’s more important than the development of language. And yet no human attribute offers less conclusive evidence regarding its origins. The absence of such evidence certainly hasn’t discouraged speculation about the origins of language.       Regardless of the origin of language, the fact remains that there are over 5,000 mutually unintelligible forms of human speech used on Earth today. And, although many are radically different from one another in structure–the differences are superficial since each and every one of these languages can be used creatively.

Concerning the origin of the first language, there are two main hypotheses, or beliefs.  Neither can be proven or disproved given present knowledge.

1) Belief in divine creation.  Many societies throughout history believed that language is the gift of the gods to humans.  The most familiar is found in Genesis 2:20, which tells us that Adam gave names to all living creatures.  This belief predicates that humans were created from the start with an innate capacity to use language.

2) Natural evolution hypothesis. At some point in their evolutionary development humans acquired a more sophisticated brain which made language invention and learning possible.  In other words, at some point in time humans evolved a language acquisition device, whatever this may be in real physical terms.  The simple vocalizations and gestures inherited from our primate ancestors then quickly gave way to a creative system of language–perhaps within a single generation or two.

In the beginning was the word, for with it man became man. Without those strange noises called common nouns, thought was limited to individual objects or experiences sensorial – for the most part visually- remembered or conceived; presumably it could not think of classes as distinct from individual things, nor of qualities as distinct from objects, nor of objects as distinct from their qualities. Without words as class names one might think of this man, or that man; one could not think of Man, for the eye sees not Man but only men, not classes but particular things. Since all origins are guesses, the imagination has free play in picturing the beginnings of speech. Perhaps the first form of language- which may be defined as communication through signs- was the love call of one animal to another. In this sense the jungle, the woods and the prairie are alive with speech. Cries of warning or of terror, the call of the mother to the brood, the cluck and cackles of euphoric or reproductive ecstasy, the parliament of chatter from tree to tree, indicate the busy preparations made by animal kingdom for the august speech of man. A wild girl found living among animals in a forest near Chalons,France, had no other speech than hideous screeches and howls.

Language- Its animal background

The beginning of humanity came when some freak or crank, half animal and half man, squatted in a cave or in a tree, cracking his brain to invent the first common noun, the first sound-sign that would signify a group of like objects: houses that would mean all houses, man that would mean all men, light that would mean every light that ever shone on land or sea. From that moment the mental development of the race opened upon a new and endless road. For words are to thought what tools are to work; the product depends largely on the growth of the tools.(1) These living noises of the woods seem meaningless to our provincial ear; we are like the philosophical poodle Riquet, who says of M. Bergret: “Everything uttered by my voice means something; but from my master’s mouth comes much nonsense.” Whiteman and Craig discovered a strange correlation between the actions and the exclamations of pigeons; Dupont learned to distinguish twelve specific sounds used by fowl and doves, fifteen by dogs, and twenty-two by horned cattle; Garner found that the apes carried on their endless gossip with at least twenty different sounds, plus a repertory of gesture; and from these modest vocabularies a few steps bring us to the three hundred words that suffice some unpretentious men.(2)

Language-Its human origins

Gesture seems primary, speech secondary, in the earlier transmission of thought; and when speech fails, gesture comes again to the fore. Among the North American Indians, who had countless dialects, married couples were often derived from different tribes, and maintained communication and accord by gestures rather than speech; one couple known to Lewis Morgan used silent signs for three years. Gestures was so important in some Indian languages that the Arapahos, like some modern peoples, could hardly converse in the dark.(3) Perhaps the first human words were interjections, expressions of emotion as among animals; then demonstrative words accompanying gestures of direction; and imitative sounds that came in time to be the names of the objects or actions that they simulated. Even after indefinite millenniums of linguistic changes and complications every language still contains hundreds of imitative words- roar, rush, murmur, tremor, giggle, groan, hiss, heave, hum, cackle, etc. (4)The Tecuna tribe, of ancient Brazil, had a perfect verb for sneeze: haitschu.(5)Out of such beginning, perhaps, came the root-words of every language.Renan reduced all Hebrew words to five hundred roots, and Skeat nearly all European words to some four hundred stems.E.g.,divine is from Latin divus, which is from dues, Greek theos, Sanskrit deva, meaning god; in the Gypsy tongue the word for god, by a strange prank, becomes devel. Historically goes back to the Sanskrit root vid, to know; Greek oida, Latin video (see), French voir (see) German wissen (know), English to wit;  plus the suffixes tor(as in autyor , prector, rhetor), ic, al, and ly (=like ). Again, the Sanskrit root ar, to plough, gives the Latin arare, Russian orati, English to ear the land, arable, art, oar, and perhaps the word Aryan- the ploughers.(6)

The languages of nature peoples are not necessarily primitive in any sense of simplicity; many of them are simple in vocabulary and structure, but some of them are as complex and wordy as our own, and more highly organized than Chinese.(7) Nearly all primitive tongues, however, limit themselves to the sensual and particular, and are uniformly poor in general or abstract terms. So the Australian natives had a name for a dog’s tail, and another name for a cow’s tail; but they had no name for tail in general.(8). The Tasmanians had separate names for specific trees, but no general name for tree; the Choctaw Indians had names for the black oak, the white oak and the red oak, but no name for oak, much less for tree. Doubtless many generations passed before the proper noun ended in the common noun. In many tribes there are no separate words for the colour as distinct from the colour object; no words for such abstractions as tone, sex, species, space, spirit, instinct, reason, quantity, hope, fear, matter, consciousness, etc.(9) Such abstract terms seem to grow in a reciprocal relation of cause and effect with the development of thought; they become the tools of subtlety and the symbols of civilization.

Bearing so many gifts to men, words seemed to them a divine boon and a sacred thing; they became the matter of magic formulas, more reverenced when most meaningless; and they still survive as sacred in mysteries where,e,g., the Word becomes Flesh. They made not only the clearer thinking, but for better social organization; they cemented the generations mentally, by providing a better medium for education and the transmission of knowledge and the arts; they created a new organ of communication, by which one doctrine or belief could mould a people into homogeneous unity. They opened new roads for the transport and traffic of ideas, and immensely accelerated the tempo, and enlarged the range and content, of life. Has any other invention ever equalled, in power and glory, the common noun?

Next to the enlargement of thought the greatest of these gifts of speech was education. Civilization is an accumulation, a treasure –house of arts and wisdom, manners and morals, from which the individual, in his development, draws nourishment for his mental life; without that periodical reacquisition of the racial heritage by each generation, civilization would die a sudden death. It owes its life to education.

Language- Its results. Education

Little or no use was made of writing in primitive education. Nothing surprises the natural man so much as the ability to communicate with one another, over great distances, by making black scratches upon a piece of paper.(10) Many tribes have learned to write by imitating their civilized exploiters, but some, as in northern Africa, have remained letter-less despite five thousand years of intermittent contact with literate nations. Simple tribes living for the most part in comparative isolation, and knowing the happiness of having no history, felt little need for writing. Their memories were all the stronger for having no written aids; they learned and retained, and passed on to their children by recitation, whatever seemed necessary in the way of historical record and cultural transmission. It was probably by committing such oral traditions and folk-lore to writing that literature began. Doubtless the invention of writing was met with a long and holy opposition, as something calculated to undermine morals and the race.

Language- Its results. Initiation

Of course we can only guess at the origins of this wonderful toy. Perhaps, as we shall see, it was a bye-product of pottery, and began as identifying “ trade marks” on vessels of clay. Probably a system of written signs was made necessary by the increase of trade among the tribes, and its first forms were rough and conventional pictures of  commercial objects and amounts. As trade connected tribes of diverse languages, some mutually intelligible mode of record and communication became desirable. Presumably the numerals were among the earliest written symbols, usually taking the form of parallel marks representing the fingers; we still call them fingers when we speak of them as digits. Such words as five, the German funf and the Greek pente go back to root meaning hand;(11) so the Roman numerals indicated fingers, “V” represented an expanded hand, and “X” was merely two “V’ s” connected at their points. Writing was in its beginning- as still is in China and Japan- a form of drawing, an art. As men used gestures when they could not use words, so they used pictures to transmit their thoughts across time and space; every word and every letter known to us was once a picture, even as trade marks and the signs of the zodiac are to this day.The primeval Chinese pictures that preceded writing were called ku-wan- Literally, “gesture- picture.” Totam poles were pictograph writing; they were. As Mason suggests, tribal autographs. Some tribes used notched sticks to help the memory or to convey a message; others, like the Algonquin Indians, not only notched the sticks but painted figures upon them, making them into miniature totem poles; or perhaps these poles were notched sticks on a grandiose scale. The Peruvian Indians kept complex records, both of numbers and ideas, by knots and loops made in diversely colored cords; perhaps some light is shed upon the origins of  South American Indians by the fact that a similar custom existed among the natives of the Eastern Archipelago and Polynesia Lao-tse calling upon the Chinese to return to simple life, proposed that they should go back to their primeval use of knotted cords.(12)

Language- Its results. Writing

More highly developed forms of writing appear sporadically among nature men. Hieroglyphics have been found on Easter Island, in the South Seas; and on one of the Caroline Islands a script has been found which consists of fifty-one syllabic signs, picturing figures and ideas.(13) Tradition tells how the priests and chiefs of Easter Island tried to keep to themselves all knowledge of writing, and how the people assembled annually to hear the tablets read; writing was obviously, in its earlier stages, a mysterious and holy thing, or sacred carving. We cannot be sure that these Polynesian scripts were not derived from some of the historic civilizations. In general writing is a sign of civilization, the least uncertain of the precarious distinctions between civilized and primitive men.

Literature is at first words rather than letters, despite its name; it arises as clerical chants of magic charms, recited usually by the priests, and transmitted orally from memory to memory. Carmina, as the Romans named poetry, meant both verses and charms; ode, among the Greeks, meant originally a magic spell; so did the English rune and lay, and the German Lied. Rhythm and meter, suggested, perhaps, by the rhythms of nature and bodily life, were apparently developed by magicians or shamans to preserve transmit and enhance the” magic incantations of the verse.”(14) The Greeks attributed the first hexameters to Delphic priests, who were believed to have invented the meter for use in oracles.(15) Gradually, out of  these sacerdotal origins, the poet, the orator and the historian were differentiated and secularized: the orator as the official lauder of the king or solicitor of the deity; the historian as the recorder of the royal deeds; the poet as the singer of originally sacred chants, the formulator and preserver of heroic legends, and the musician who put his tales to music for the instruction of populace and kings. So the Fijians, the Tahitians and New Caledonians had official orators and narrators to make addresses on occasions of ceremony, and to incite the warriors of the tribe by recounting the deeds of their forefathers and exalting the unequalled glories of the nation’s past: how little do some recent historians differ from these. The Somali had professional poets who went from village to village singing songs, like medieval minnesingers and troubadours. Only exceptionally were these poems of love; usually they dealt with physical heroism, or the relations of parents and children.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

Gore Vidal

REFERANCES

(1)’Ratzel, 34: Muller-Lyer, Social Development,50-3, 61

(2) Ibed46-9;Renard,57; Robinson. J.H.,735-740

(3)Lubbock,227, 339 ,342f

(4) Muller, Max, Lectures on the science of language,i,360

(5) Tylor,E.B., Anthropology, 125

(6) Muller Science of Languages,i,265,303n;39

(7) Venkateswara,S.V., Indian Culture through the ages vol I

(8) White,W.A., Mechanisms of Character Formation,83

(9) Lubbock, 353-4

(10) Ibid, 35

(11) Ibid, 299

(12) Mason.W,A., Ch.ii; Lubbock,35

(13) Mason.W,A.,  146-54

(14) Briffault,i,18

(15) Spencer. Sociology,iii,218-26

OUR ORIENTAL HERITAGE- WillDurant ,72-78

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Mrs Sudha Rani Maheshwari, M.Sc (Zoology), B.Ed.

Former Principal.A.K.P.I.College, Roorkee, India

The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments. Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.

George Washington

Man is not willingly a political animal. The human male associates with his fellows less by desire than by habit, imitation, and the compulsion of circumstance; he does not love society so much as he fears solitude. He combines with other men because isolation endangers him, and because there are many things that can be done better together than alone; in his heart he is a solitary individual, pitted heroically against the world. If the average man had had his way there would probably never have been any state. Even today he resents it, classes’ death with taxes, and yearns for the government which governs least. If he asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbour needs them; privately he is an un-philosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.

Primitive Anarchism

The common belief behind the word primitive is that it exists at the bottom of a hierarchy and applies to everything that is simple: “primitive stone tools” as opposed to iron tools; “ “primitive people” as opposed to civilized ones; etc.  Again, this is a common misconception – and its very wrong.  The word “primitive” is derived from the word “prime” which essentially means the first – so, technically using the word “primitive” means that something is the first – not that it is more simple than this or that.  In this context, applying the word “primitive” to human beings simply means they were the first, or more fitting – they are exhibiting the primary human pathways.

In the simplest societies there is hardly any government. Primitive hunters tend to accept regulation only when they join the hunting pack and prepare for action. The Bushmen usually live in solitary families; the Pygmies of Africa and the simplest natives of Australia admit only temporarily of political organization, and then scatter away to their family groups; the Tasmanians had no chiefs, no laws, no regular government; and Veddahs of Ceylon formed small circles according to family relationship, but had no government, the Kubus of Sumatra “live without men in authority” every family governing itself; the Fuegians are seldom more than twelve together; the Tungus associate sparingly in groups of ten tents or so; the Australian ”horde” is seldom larger than sixty souls.(1) In such cases association and cooperation are for special purposes, like hunting; they do not rise to any permanent political order.

The Clan and the Tribe

A clan is a group of people united by actual or perceived kinship and descent. Even if lineage details are unknown, clan members may be organized around a founding member or apical ancestor. The kinship-based bonds may be symbolical, whereby the clan shares a “stipulated” common ancestor that is a symbol of the clan’s unity. When this “ancestor” is non-human, it is referred to as a totem, which is frequently an animal. Clans can be most easily described as tribes or sub-groups of tribes. A unit of sociopolitical organization consisting of a number of families, clans, or other groups who share a common ancestry and culture who have the same language, customs, and beliefs and among whom leadership is typically neither formalized nor permanent.

The earliest form of continuous social organization was the clan-a group of related families occupying a common tract of land, having the same  totem, and governed by the same customs or laws. When a group of clans united under the same chief the tribe was formed, and became the second step on the way to the state. But this was a slow development; many groups have no chiefs at all,(2) and many more seem to have tolerated them only in time of war.(3) Instead of democracy being a wilted feather in the cap of our own age, it appers as its best in several primitive groups where such government as exists is merely the rule of the family-heads of the clan, and no arbitrary authority is allowed.(4) The Omaha Indians were ruled by a Council of Seven, who deliberated until they came to a unanimous agreement; add this to the famous League of the Iroquois, by which many tribes bound themselves- and honoured their pledge- to keep the peace, and one sees no great gap between these “savages” and the modern states that bind themselves revocable to peace in the League of Nations.

The King-War

It is war that makes the chief, the king and the state, just as it is these that make war. In Samoa the chief had power during war, but at other times no one paid much attention to him. The Dyaks had no other government than that of each family by its head; in case of strife they chose their bravest warrior to lead them, and obeyed him strictly; but once the conflict was ended they literally sent him about his business.(5) In the interval of peace it was the priest, or head magician, who had most authority and influence; and when at last a permanent kinship developed as the usual mode of government among a majority of tribes, it combined- and derived from- the offices of warrior, father and priest. Societies are ruled by two powers: in peace of the word, in crises by the sword; force is used only when indoctrination fails. Law and myth have gone hand in hand throughout the centuries, cooperating or taking turns in the management of mankind; until our own day no state dared separate them, and perhaps tomorrow they will be united again.

How did war lead to the state? It is not that men were naturally inclined to war. Some lowly peoples are quite peaceful and the Eskimos could not understand why Europeans of the same pacific faith should hunt one another like seals and steal one another’s hand “How well it is”- they apostrophized their soil-“that you are covered with ice and snow. How well it is that if in your rocks there are gold and silver, for which the Christians are so greedy, it is covered with so much snow that they can not get at it. Your unfruitfulness makes us happy, and saves us from molestation”(6) Nevertheless, primitive life was incarnadined with intermittent war. Hunters fought for happy hunting grounds still rich in prey, herders fought for new pastures for their flocks, tillers fought for virgin soil; all of them, at times, fought to avenge a murder, or to harden and discipline their youth, or to interrupt the monotony of life, or for simple plunder and rape; very rarely for religion. There were institutions and customs for the limitation of slaughter, as among ourselves- certain hours, days, weeks or months during which no gentleman savage would kill; certain functionaries who were inviolable, certain roads neutralized, certain markets and asylums set aside for peace; and the League of the Iroquois maintained the “Great Peace” for three hundred years.(7) But for the most part war was the favourite instrument of natural selection among primitive nations and groups.

Its results were endless. It acted as a ruthless eliminator of weak peoples, and raised the level of the race in courage, violence, cruelty, intelligence and skill. It stimulated invention, made weapons that became useful tools, and arts of war that became arts of peace. Above all, war dissolved primitive communism and anarchism, introduced organization and discipline, and led to the enslavement of prisoners, the subordination of classes, and the growth of government. Property was the mother; war was the father of the state.

The State- As the Organization of Force

State commonly refers to either the present condition of a system or entity, or to a governed entity (such as a country) or sub-entity (such as an autonomous territory of a country).

“A herd of blonde beasts of prey,” says Nietzsche, “a race of conquerors and masters, which with all its warlike organization and all its organizing power pounces with its terrible claws upon a population, in numbers possibly tremendously superior, but as yet formless,…such is the origin of state.”(8) “The state as distinct from tribal organization,” says Lester Ward, “begins with the conquest of one race by another.”(9) “Everywhere,” says Oppenheimer, “we find some warlike tribe breaking through the boundaries of some less warlike people, settling down as nobility, and founding its state.”(10)”Violence” says Ratzenhofer, “is the agent which has created the state.”(11) The state, says Gumplowicz, is the result of conquest, the establishment of the victors as a ruling caste over the vanquished.(12) “The state,” says Sumner, “is the product of force, and exists by force.”(13)

The Village Community

This violent subjection is usually agricultural group by a tribe of hunters and herders.(14) For agriculture teaches men pacific ways ,inures them to prosaic routine, and exhausts them with the long day’s toil; such men accumulate wealth, but they forget the arts and sentiments of war. The hunter and the herder, accustomed to danger and skilled in killing, look upon war as but another form of the chase, and hardly more perilous; when the woods cease to give them abundant game, or flocks decrease through a thinning pasture, they look with envy upon the ripe fields of the village, they invent with modern ease some plausible reason for attack, they invade, conquer, enslave and rule.

It is a law that holds only for early societies since under more complex conditions a variety of other factors- greater wealth, better weapons, higher intelligence- contribute to determine the issue. So Egypt was conquered not only by Hykose, Ethiopian, Arab and Turkish nomads, but also by the settled civilizations of Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome and England – though not until these nations had become hunters and nomads on imperialistic scale.

The state is a late development, and hardly appears before the time of written history. For  it presupposes a change in the very principle of social organization- from kinship to domination; and in primitive societies the former is the rule. Domination succeeds best where it binds diverse natural  groups into an advantageous unity of order and trade. Even such conquest is seldom lasting except where the progress of invention has strengthened the strong by putting into their hands new tools and weapons for suppressing revolt. In permanent conquest the principle of domination tends to become concealed and almost unconscious; the French who rebelled in 1789 hardly realized, until Camille Desmoulins reminded them, that the aristocracy that had ruled them for a thousand years had come from Germany and had subjugated them by force. Time sanctifies everything; even the most arrant theft, in the hands of the robber’s grandchildren, becomes sacred and inviolable property. Every state begins in compulsion; but the habits of obedience become the content of conscience, and soon every citizen thrills with loyalty to the flag.

The citizen is right; for however the state begins, it soon becomes an indispensable prop to order. As trade unites clans and tribes, relations spring up that depends not on kinship but on contiguity, and therefore requires an artificial principle of regulation. The village community may serve as an example; it displaced tribe and clan as the mode of local organization, and achieved a simple, almost democratic government of small areas through a concourse of family-heads; but the very existence and number of such communities created a need for some external force that could regulate their interrelations and weave them into a larger economic web. The state ogre though it was in its origin, supplied this need; it became not merely an organized force, but an instrument for adjusting the interests of thousands conflicting groups that constitute a complex society. It spread the tentacles of its power and law over wider and wider areas, and though it made external war more destructive than before, it extended and maintained internal peace; the state may be defined as internal peace for external war. Men decided that it was better to pay taxes than to fight among themselves; better to pay tribute to one magnificent robber than to bribe them all. What an interregnum meant to a society accustomed to government may be judged from the behaviour of the Baganda, among whom, when the king died, every man had to arm himself; for the lawless ran riot, killing and plundering everywhere.(15) “Without autocratic rule,” as Spencer said, “ the evolution of society could not have commenced.”(16)

The Psychological Aides of the State

A state which should rely upon force alone would soon fall, for though men are naturally gullible they are also naturally obstinate, and power, like taxes, succeeds best when it is invisible and indirect. Hence the state, in order to maintain itself, used and forged many instruments of indoctrination- the family, the church, the school- to build in the soul of the citizen a habit of patriotic loyalty and pride. This saved a thousand policemen, and prepared the public mind for the docile coherence which is indispensable in war. Above all, the ruling minority sought more and more to transform its forcible mastery into a body of law which, while consolidating that mastery, would afford a welcome security and order to the people, and would recognize the rights of the subject sufficiently to win his acceptance of the law and his adherence to the state.

The real reason that we can’t have the Ten Commandments posted in a courthouse is this:

You cannot post ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal,’ ‘Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery,’ and ‘Thou Shall Not Lie’ in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians…It creates a hostile work environment

- Uncle Bob

The Present Indian Government  (JUST FOR FUN)

References

1-Sumner and Keller. I 16, 418,461;Westermarck, Moral Ideas, i, 195-8

2- Sumner and Keller. I ,461

3- Rivers,W.H.R.,Social Organization, 166

4- Briffault,ii, 364, 494; Ratzel,; 133 Sumner and Keller, 470-3

5- Ibid.,463, 473

6-Ibid., 316

7- Sumner and Keller. I ,132

8-Roth, H. L., in Thomas, W.I., Source book for Social Origins,111

9- Ibid.;Mason, O.T.,190; Lippert,165.

10-Renard,123

11-Briffault, The Mothers,ii.460

12- Renard,35

13- Sutherland,G.A.,ed., A System of Diet and Dietetics,45.

16- Ibid, 86

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Mrs Sudha Rani Maheshwari, M.Sc (Zoology), B.Ed.

Former Principal, A.K.P.I.College, Roorkee, India

Marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it is simply purgatory.

Abraham Lincoln

To regulate the relation of sexes is the first task of those customs that constitute the moral code of a group. Actually these are a perennial source of discord, violence, and possible degeneration. The basic form of this sexual regulation is marriage, which may be defined as the association of mates for the care of offspring. This institution is quite a fluctuating and variable institution, which has passed through almost every conceivable form and experiment in the course of its history, from the primitive care of offspring without the association of mates to the modern association of mates without the care of offspring.

Marriage- its biological origins

Our animal forefathers invented it. Some birds seem to live as reproducing mates in a divorceless monogamy. Among gorillas and orang-utans the association of the parents continues to the end of the breeding season and has many human features. Any approach to lose behaviour on the part of the female is severely punished by the male.(1) Marriage is older than man.

Societies without marriage are rare, but the sedulous inquirer can find enough of them to form a respectable transition from the promiscuity of the lower mammals to the marriages of primitive men. In Futuna and Hawaii many people did not marry at all;(2) the Lubus mated freely and indiscremately, and had no conception of marriage; certain tribes of Borneo lived in marriageless association, freer than the birds; and among some peoples of primitive Russia “the men utilized the women without distinction, so that no woman had her appointed husband. African pygmies have been described as having no marriage institutions but as following” their animal instinct wholly without restraint”(3) This primitive “nationalization of women”, corresponding to primitive communism in land and food, passed away at so early a stage that few traces of it remain. Some memory of it, however, lingered on in divers forms:  in the feeling of many nature peoples that monogamy- which they would define as the monopoly of a woman by one man- is unnatural and immoral; in periodic festivals of license when sexual restraints were temporarily abandoned; in the demand that a woman should give herself- as at the Temple of Mylitta (one of the forms of Ishtar)  in Babylon- to any man that solicited her, before she would be allowed to marry, in the custom of wife-lending, so essential to many primitive codes of hospitality; or right of the first night, by which, in early feudal Europe, the lord of the manor, perhaps representing the ancient rights of  the tribe, occasionally deflowered the bride before the bridegroom was allowed to consummate the marriage.(4)

Sexual Communism in Marriage

A variety of tentative unions gradually took the place of  indiscriminate relations. Among the Orang Sakai of Malacca a girl remained for a time with each man of the tribe, passing from one to another until she had made the rounds; then she began again.(5) Among the Yakuts of Siberia, the Botocudos of South Africa, the lower classes of Tibet, and many other peoples, marriage was quite experimental and could be ended at the will of either party, with no reasons given or required. Among the Bushmen” any disagreement sufficed to end a union, and new connections could  immediately be found for both.” Among the Damaras, according to Sir Francis Galton, “the spouse was changed almost weekly, and I seldom knew without inquiry who the pro tempore husband of each lady was at any particular time.” Among the Balia “women are bandied about from man to man, and of their own accord leave one husband for another. Young women scarcely out of their teens often have had four or five husbands, all still living.” (6) The original word for marriage, in Hawaii meant to try.”(7)

Marco Polo writes of a Central Asiatic tribe, inhabiting Peyn (now Keriya) in the 13^th century: “If a married man goes to a distance from home to be absent twenty days, his wife has a right, if she is so inclined to take another husband and the men on the same principle, marry wherever they happen to reside.”(8) So old are the latest innovations in marriage and morals.

Individual Marriage

What was it that led men to replace the semi-promiscuity of primitive society with individual marriage? Since, in a great majority of nature peoples, there are few, if any, restraints on premarital relations, it is obvious that physical desire does not give rise to the institution of marriage. For marriage, with its restrictions and psychological irritations, could not possibly compete with sexual communism as a mode of satisfying the erotic propensities of men. Nor could the individual establishment offer at the outset any mode of rearing children that would be obviously superior to their rearing by the mother, her family, and the clan. Some powerful economic motives must have favoured the evolution of marriage. In all probability these motives were connected with the rising institution of property.

Individual marriage came through the desire of the male to have cheap slaves, and to avoid bequeathing his property to other men”s children. Polygamy, or the marriage of one person to several mates, appears here and there in the form of polyandry- the marriage of one woman to several men-as among the Todas and some tribes of Tibet;(9) the custom may still be found where males outnumber females considerably.(10) But this custom soon falls prey to the conquering male, and polygamy has come to mean for us, usually, what would more strictly be called polygyny- the possession of several wives by one man. In early society, because of hunting and war, the life of the male is more violent and dangerous, and the death rate of men is higher, than that of women. The consequent excess of women compels a choice between polygamy and the barren celibacy of a minority of women; but such celibacy is intolerable to peoples who require a high birth rate to make up for a high death rate, and who therefore scorn the mate-less and childless woman. Again , men like variety; as the Negroes of Angola expressed it, they were “ not able to eat always of the same dish.” Also, men like youth in their mates, and women age rapidly in primitive communities. The women themselves often favoured polygamy; it permitted them to nurse their children longer and therefore to reduce the frequency of motherhood without interfering with the erotic and philoprogenitive inclinations of the male. Some times the first wife, burdened with toil, helped her husband to secure an additional wife, so that the burden might be shared and additional children might raise the productive power and wealth of the family.(11) Children were economic assets, and men invested in wives in order to draw children from them like interest. In the patriarchal system wives and children were in effect the slaves of the man; the more a man had of them, the richer he was. The poor man practised monogamy, but he looked upon it as a shameful condition, from which some day he would rise to the respected position of a polygamous male.

Polygamy in Marriage

Doubtless polygamy was well adapted to the marital needs of a primitive society in which women out numbered men. It had a eugenic value superior to that of contemporary monogamy; for where as in modern society the most able and prudent men marry latest and have least children, under polygamy the most able men, presumably, secured the bests mates and had most children. Hence polygamy has survived among practically all nature people, even among the majority of civilized mankind; only in our day has it begun to die in the orient. Certain conditions, however, militated against it. The decrease in danger and violence, consequent upon a settled agricultural life, brought the sexes towards an approximate numerical equality; and under these circumstances open polygamy, even in primitive societies become the privilege of the prosperous minority.(12) The mass of the people practised a monogamy tempered with adultery, while another minority, of willing or regretful celibates, balanced the polygamy of the rich .Jealousy in the male, and possessiveness in the female, entered into the situation more effectively as the sexes approximated in number; for where the strong could not have a multiplicity of wives except by taking the actual or potential wives of other men, and by offending their own polygamy became a difficult matter, which only the cleverest could manage. As property accumulated, and men were loath to scatter it in small bequest, it became desirable to differentiate wives into “chief wife” and concubines, so that only the children of the former should share the legacy; this remained the status of marriage in Asia until our own generation. Gradually the chief wife became the only wife, the concubines became kept women in secret and apart, or they disappeared; and as Christianity entered upon the scene, monogamy, in Europe, took the place of polygamy as the lawful and outward form of sexual association. But monogamy, like letters and the state, is artificial, and belongs to the history, not to the origins, of civilization.

Exogamy in Marriage

Exogamy is a social arrangement where marriage is allowed only outside of a social group. The social groups define the scope and extent of exogamy, and the rules and enforcement mechanisms that ensure its continuity.

Whatever form the union might take, marriage was obligatory among nearly all primitive peoples. The unmarried male had no standing in the community, or was considered only half a man.(13) Exogamy, too was  compulsory: that is to say, a man was expected to secure his wife from another clan than his own. Whether this custom arose because the primitive mind suspected the evil effects of close inbreeding or because such intergroup marriages created or cemented useful political alliances, promoted social organization, and lessened the danger of war, or because the capture of a wife from another tribe had become a fashionable mark of male maturity, or because familiarity breeds contempt and distance lends enchantment to the view- we do not know. In any case restriction was well-nigh universal in early society.

Marriage by service

How did the male secure his wife from another tribe? Where the matriarchal organization was strong he was often required to go and live with the clan of the girl whom he sought. As the patriarchal system developed the suitor was allowed after a term of service to the father, to take his bride back to his own clan. Some times the suitor shortened the matter with plain, blunt force. It was an advantage as well as a distinction to have stolen a wife; not only would she be a cheap slave, but new slaves could be begotten of her, and these children would chain her to her slavery.

Marriage by Capture

Sometimes the women were included in the spoils of war. The slavs of Russia and Serbia practised occasional marriage by capture until the last century.(14) Vestiges of it remain in the custom of simulating the capture of the bride by the groom in certain wedding ceremonies.(15) All in all it was a logical aspect of the almost incessant war of tribes, and a logical starting-point for the eternal war of the sexes whose only truces are brief nocturnes and dreamless sleep.

Marriage by purchase

As wealth grew it became more convenient to offer the father a substantial present-or a sum of money- for his daughter, rather than serve for her in an alien clan or risk the violence and feuds that might come of marriage by capture. Consequently marriage by purchase and parental arrangement was the rule of the early societies.(16) Transition forms occur; the Melanesians sometimes stole their wives, but made the theft legal by a later payment to his family. Among some natives of New Guinea the man abducted the girl, and then, while he and she were in hiding, commissioned his friends to bargain with her father over a purchase price.(17) The ease with which moral indignation in these matters might be financially appeased is illuminating.

Marriage by purchase prevails throughout primitive Africa, and is still a normal institution in China and Japan; it flourished in ancient India and Judea, and in pre-Columbian Central Amarica and Peru; instances of it occur in Europe today.(18) A Maori mother wailing loudly, bitterly cursed the youth who had eloped with her daughter, until he presented her with a blanket.”That was all I wanted,” she said; “I only wanted to get a blanket, and therefore made this noise.”(19) Usually the bride cost more than a blanket: among the Hottentots her price was an ox or a cow; among the Croo three cows and a sheep; among the Kaffirs six to thirty head of cattle, depending upon the rank of the girl’s family; and among Togas sixteen dollars cash and six dollars in goods.(20) It is a natural development of patriarchal institutions; the father owns the daughter, and may dispose of her, within broad limits, as he sees fit. The Orinoco Indians expressed the matter by saying that the suitor should pay the father for rearing the girl for his use.(21) Sometimes the girl was exhibited to potential suitors in a bride –show; so among the Somalis the bride, richly caparisoned, was led about on horseback or on foot in an atmosphere heavily perfumed to stir the suitors to a handsome price.(22) There is no record of women objecting to marriage by purchase; on the contrary, they took keen pride in the sums paid for them and scorned the woman who gave herself in marriage without a price;(23)they believed that in a “love –match” the villainous male was getting too much for nothing.(24) On the other hand, it was usual for the father to acknowledge the bride-groom’s payment with a return gift which, as time went on approximated more and more in value to sum offered for the bride.(25) Rich fathers, anxious to smooth the way for their daughters, gradually enlarged these gifts until the institution of the dowry took form; and the purchase of the husband by the father replaced, or accompanied, the purchase of the wife by the suitor.(26)

Primitive Love in Marriage

In all these forms and varieties of marriage there is hardly a trace of romantic love. We find a few cases of love-marriages among the Papuans of New Guinea; among other primitive peoples we come upon instances of love ( in the sense of mutual devotion rather than mutual need) , but usually these attachments have nothing to do with marriage. In simple days men married for cheap labor, profitable percentage, and regular meals. “In Yariba,” says Lander, “marriage is celebrated by the natives as unconcernedly as possible; a man thinks as little of taking a wife as of cutting an ear of corn-affection is altogether out of question.”(27) Since premarital relations are abundant in primitive society, passion is not dammed up by denial, and seldom affects the choice of a wife.. For the same reason-the absence of delay between desire and fulfilment-no time is given for that brooding introversion of frustrated, and therefore idealizing, passion which is usually the source of youthful romantic love. Primitive peoples are too poor to be romantic. One rarely finds love poetry in their songs. The kiss, which seems so indispensable now, is quite unknown to primitive peoples, or known only to be scorned.

Economic Functions of Marriage

In general the “savage” takes his sex philosophically, with hardly more of metaphysical misgivings than the animal; he does not brood over it, or fly into a passion with it; it is as much a matter of course with him as his food. He makes no pretence to idealistic motives. Marriage is never a sacrament with him, and seldom an affair of lavish ceremony; it is frankly a commercial transaction. It never occurs to him to be ashamed that he subordinates emotional to practical considerations in choosing his mate; he would rather be ashamed of the opposite, and would demand of us, if he were as immodest as we are, some explanation of our custom of binding a man and a woman together almost for life because sexual desire has chained them for a moment with its lightning. The primitive male looked upon marriage in terms of sexual license but of economic cooperation. He expected the woman-and the woman expected herself-to be not so much gracious and beautiful as useful and industrious, she was to be an economic asset rather than a total loss; otherwise the matter- of- fact “savage” would never have thought of marriage at all. Marriage was a profitable partnership, not a private debauch; it was a way whereby a man and a woman working together, might be more prosperous than if each worked alone. Wherever, in the history of civilization, woman has ceased to be an economic asset in marriage, marriage has decayed; and sometimes civilization has decayed with it.

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Present Scenario (JUST FOR FUN )

BEFORE MARRIAGE
He: Yes. At last. It was so hard to wait.
She: Do you want me to leave?
He: NO! Don’t even think about it.
She: Do you love me?
He: Of course! Over and over!
She: Have you ever cheated on me?
He: NO! Why are you even asking?
She: Will you kiss me?
He: Every chance I get!
She: Will you hit me?
He: Are you crazy! I’m not that kind of person!
She: Can I trust you?
He: Yes.
She: Darling!

AFTER MARRIAGE
Read from the bottom going up

- Unknown

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References

1-Ellis,H., Studies in psychology of sex vi 422

2-Briffault,Robert:The Mothers ii 154

3-Sumner and Keller,iii1547

4-Muller-Lyer, Family55

5- Sumner and Keller,iii1548

6- Briffault,Robert:The Mothers ii 81

7-Lubbock, Sir John- The Origin of Civilization 69

8- Polo Marco- Travels 70

9-Examples in Briffault i 769

10- Westermarck-Moral ideas i 387

11- Muller-Lyer- Modern Marriage 34

12- Lowie, R.H- Are we civilized? 128

13- Sumner and Keller,iii1540, Westermarck-Moral ideas i 399

14- Westermarck-Moral ideas i 435 – Sumner and Keller,iii1625-6

15- Sumner and Keller,iii1631

16-Hobhouse,L.T: Morals in Evolution 15817-

17- Sumner and Keller,iii1629

18- Westermarck-Moral ideas i 383

19- Briffault,Robert:The Mothers ii 244

20- Muller-Lyer- Modern Marriage 125

21- Hobhouse,L.T: Morals in Evolution 151-

22-Ibid- 1648

23- Briffault,Robert:The Mothers ii 219-21

24- Lowie, R.H- Are we civilized? 125

25 Briffault,Robert:The Mothers ii 215

26- Sumner and Keller,iii1658

27- Lubbock, Sir John- The Origin of Civilization 52

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Mrs Sudha Rani Maheshwari, M.Sc (Zoology), B.Ed.

Former Principal, A.K.P.I.College, Roorkee, India

“Long before the European nations knew anything of hygiene, and long before they realized the value of tooth-brush and a daily bath, the Hindus were, as a rule, given to both. Only twenty years ago London houses had no bath-tubs and the tooth-brush was a luxury.”

LAJPAT RAI, L: Unhappy India, Calcutta 1928 pp 280

It will seem incredible to the provincial mind that the same people that tolerated such institutions as child marriage, temple prostitution and suttee was also pre-eminent in gentleness, decency and courtesy. Aside from a few devdasis, prostitutes were rare in India, sexual propriety was exceptionally high. “It must be admitted” says the unsympathetic Dubiois, “that the laws of etiquette and social politeness are much more clearly laid down, and much better observed by all classes of Hindus, even by the lowest, than they are by people of corresponding social position in Europe.” The leading role played by sex in Occidental conversation and wit was quite alien to Hindu manners, which forbade any public intimacy between men and women, and looked upon the physical contact of the sexes in dancing as improper and obscene. A Hindu woman might go anywhere in public without fear of molestation or insult; indeed the risk, as the Oriental saw the matter, was all on the other side. Manu warns men: “Women are by nature ever inclined to tempt man; hence a man should not sit in a secluded place even with his nearest female relative” and he must never look higher than the ankles of a passing girl.

Cleanliness was literally next to godliness in India; hygiene was made an essential part of piety. Manu laid down, many centuries ago, an exacting code of physical refinement. “Early in the morning,” one instruction reads, “Let him” “bathe, decorate his body, clean his teeth, apply collyrium to his eyes, and worship the gods”. The native schools made good manners and personal cleanliness the first courses in the curriculum. Every day the caste Hindu would bathe his body, and wash the simple robe he was to wear; it seemed to him abominable to use the same garment, unwashed, for more than a day. “The Hindus,” said Sir William Huber, “stand out as examples of bodily cleanliness among Asiatic races, and, we may add, among the races of the world. The ablutions of the Hindu have passed into a proverb.”

Yuan Chwang, 1300 years ago, described thus the eating habits of the Hindus:

They are pure of themselves, and not from compulsion. Before every meal they must have a wash; the fragments and remains are not served up again; the food utensils are not passed on; those which are of pottery or of wood must be thrown away after use and those which are of gold, silver, copper or iron get another polishing. As soon as a meal is over they chew the tooth-stick and make themselves clean. Before they have finished ablutions they do not come in contact with each other.

The Brahman usually washed his hands, feet and teethes before and after each meal; he ate with his fingers from food on a leaf, and thought it unclean to use twice a plate, a knife or a fork; and when finished he rinsed his mouth seven times. The toothbrush was always new- a twig freshly plucked from a tree; to the Hindu it seemed disreputable to brush the teeth with the hair of an animal, or to use the same brush twice: so many are the ways in which men may scorn one another. The Hindu chewed almost incessantly the leaf of the betel plant, which blackened the teeth in a manner disagreeable to Europeans, and agreeable to himself.

Hindu law books give explicit rules for menstrual hygiene, and for meeting the demands of nature. Nothing could exceed in complexity and solemnity the rituals for Brahman defecation. The twice-born (dwij) must use only his left hand in this rite, and must cleanse the parts with water; and he considered his house defiled by the very presence of Europeans who contented themselves with paper. The outcastes, however, were less particular, and might turn any roadside into a privy. In the quarters occupied by these classes public sanitation was confined to an open sewer line in the middle of the street.

In so warm a climate clothing was a superfluity, and beggers and saints bridged the social scale in agreeing to do without it. Untill the late 18^th century it was probably the custom in south India to go naked above the waist. Children were dressed for the most part in beads abd rings. Most of the population went barefoot; if the orthodox Hindu wore shoes they had to be of cloth, for under no circumstances would be use shoes of leather. A large number of the men contented themselves with loin clothes; when they need more covering they bound some fabric about the waist, and threw the loose end over the left shoulder. The Rajputs wore trousers of every color and shape, with a tunic girdled by a ceinture, a scarf at the neck, sandals or boots on the feet, and a turban on the head. The turban had come in with the Moslems, and had been taken over by the Hindus, who wound it carefully around the head in varying manner according to caste, but always with the generosity of a magician unfurling enfless silk; some time one turban, unravelled, reached a length of 70 feet. The women wore a flowing robe-colourful silk sari, or homespun khaddar- which passed over both shoulders, clasped the waist tightly, and then fell to the feet; often a few inches of bronze flesh were left bare below the breast. Hair was oiled to guard it against the desiccating sun; men divided theirs in the center and drew it together into a turf behind the left ear; women coiled a part of theirs upon their heads, but let the rest hang free, often decorating it with flowers, or covering it with scarf.The men were handsome, the young women were beautiful and all presented a magnificent carriage, an ordinary Hindu in a loin cloth often had more dignity than a European diplomat completely equipped. Pierre Loti thought it “incontestable of perfection and refinement among the upper class” in India. Both sexes were adept in cosmetics, and the women felt naked without jewelry. A ring in the left nostril denoted marriage. On the forehead, in most cases, was a painted symbol of religious faith.

According to the laws of Manu and the practice  of the world a lie told for good motives is forgivable; if, for example, the death of a priest would result from speaking the truth, falsehood is justifiable. But Yuan Chwang tells us: “They do not practice deceit, and they keep their sworn obligations…They will not take anything wrongfully in favour of India, reports the Hindus of the 16^th century as “religious, affable, cheerful, lovers of justice, given to retirement, able in business, admirers of truth, grateful, and of unbounded fidelity.” “Their honesty,” said honest Keir Hardie, “is proverbial. They borrow and lend on  word of mouth, and the repudiation of adebt is almost unknown,” “I have had before me” says a British judge in India, “hundreds of cases in  which a man”s property, liberty and life depended upon his telling a lie, and he has refused to tell it.” How shall we reconcile these conflicting testimonies? Perhaps it is very simple: some Hindus are honest and some are not.

Nevertheless there is comparatively little crime in India, and little violence. By universal admission the Hindus are gentle to the point of timidity, too worshipful and good-natured, too long broken upon the wheel of conquest and alien despotisms, to be good fighters except in the sense that they can bear pain with unequalled bravery. Their greatest faults are probably listlessness and laziness; but in the Hindus these are not faults but climatic necessities and adaptions. The Hindus are sensitive, emotional, temperamental, and imaginative; therefore they are better artist and poets than rulers or executives. They can exploit their fellows with the same zest that characterises the entrepreneur everywhere; yet they are given to limitless charity, and are the most hospitable hosts this side of barbarism (Atithi devo bhava). Even their enemies admit their courtesy, and a generous Britisher sums up his long experience by ascribing to the higher classes in Calcutta “polished manners, clearness and comprehensiveness of understanding, liberality of feeling, and independence of principle, that would have stamped them gentlemen in any country in the world”.

The Hindu genius to an outsider, seems sombre, and doubtless the Hindus have not had much cause for laughter. The dialogues oh Buddha indicate a great variety of games, including one that strangely resembles chess; but neither these nor their successors exibit the vivacity and joyousness of Western games. Akber in the 16^th century, introduced into India the game of polo (From the Tibetan word pulu, Hindu Balti dialect polo, meaning ball;cf. The Latin pila) which had apparently come from Persia and was making its way across Tibet to China and Japan; and it pleased him to play pachisi( the modern”parches”) on squares cut in the pavement of the palace quadrangle at Agra, with pretty slave-girls as living pieces.

Frequent religious festivals lent colour to public life. More decorous were the wedding festivals that marked the great event in the life of every Hindu. At the other end of life was the final ceremony-cremation. In Buddha’s days the Zoroastrian exposure of the corpse to birds of prey was the usual mode of departure; but persons of distinction were burned, after death, on a pyre, and their ashes were buried under a tope or stupa-i.e., a memorial shrine. In later days cremation became the privilege of every man. In Yuan Chwang’s time it was not unusual for the very old to take death by the forelock and have themselves rowed by their children to the middle of the Ganges, where they threw themselves into the saving stream. Suicide under certain conditions has always found more approval in the East than in the West; it was permitted under the laws of Akber to the old or the incurably diseased, and to those who wishes to offer themselves as sacrifices to the gods. Thousands of Hindus have made their last oblation by starving themselves to death, or burying themselves in snow.

References

WILL DURANT:Our Oriental Heritage New York 1954

BEBL,AUGUST:Women under Socialism.New York 1923

DUBIOS ABBE J. A: Hindu Manners Cusstoms and Ceremonies. Oxford, 1928

WILLIAMS, H.S:History of Science.5v New York, 1904

WATTERS, T.: On Yuan Chuang’s Travels in India 2v London,1904

SUMNER,W.G: Folkways. Boston, 1906

WOOD, ERNEST: An Englishman Defends Mother India. Madras, 1929

MULLER MAX: India: What Can It Teach Us? London,1919

MUKERJI,D.G: A Son of Mother India Answers. New York, 1928

SMITH, V.A: Akbar.Oxford, 1919

FRAZER,R.W:Litrary History od India. London1920