Eloquent Spaces

Meaning and Community in Early Indian Architecture

Shonaleeka Kaul

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000007206
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

Eloquent Spaces adopts the twin analytic of meaning and community to write a fresh history of building in early India. It presents a new perspective on the principles and practices of early Indian architecture.

Defining it broadly over a range of space uses, the book argues for architecture as a form of cultural production as well as public consumption. Ten chapters by leading archaeologists, architects, historians and philosophers, examining different architectural sites and landscapes, including Sanchi, Moodabidri, Srinagar, Chidambaram, Patan, Konark, Basgo and Puri, demonstrate the need to look beyond the built form to its spirit, beyond aesthetics to cognition, and thereby to integrating architecture with its myriad living contexts. The volume captures some of the semantic diversity inherent in premodern Indian traditions of civic building, both sacred and secular, which were, however, unified in their insistence on enacting meaning and a transcendent validity over and above utility and beauty of form. The book is a quest for a culturally rooted architecture as an alternative to the growing crisis of disembededness that informs modern praxis.

This volume will be of interest to scholars and practitioners of architecture, ancient Indian history, philosophy, art history and cultural studies.

1
Introduction

Towards a semantics of architecture

Shonaleeka Kaul

Architecture is a constant rediscovery of constant human values translated into space.

Aldo van Eyck

This volume has its origins in a project initiated by a small group of architects and social scientists to write a new history of Indian architecture from an indigenous perspective – a collective, multidisciplinary effort to rethink the categories through which the discipline has been approached so far and to integrate the science of architecture with its humanist, animating spirit. Replacing the formalism that has, by and large, predominated in studies of ancient Indian buildings – which are usually analyzed in and of themselves, isolated from their surroundings – the twin analytic this inaugural volume adopts is that of meaning and community. A word about these here to introduce the set of chapters that follow.

A project such as the one this volume represents – a new history of indigenous Indian architecture – throws up a host of challenges. Fundamental among these is the problem of definition and that too of terms and concepts crucial to how the project was conceived. In particular, the words ‘indigenous’ and ‘history’ itself are found to be somewhat elusive, if not fraught. While ‘indigenous’ implies originating or occurring naturally in a particular place, in this case native or inherent to India, there could be fears that ‘natural-ness’ or ‘native-ness’ would tend to elide some of the rich diversity in the country that was generated over the centuries by processes including (though not only) immigration and import, as it were, of a number of social groups and non-Indic cultural traditions. However, as this volume will show, while India’s cultural diversity is undeniable, it need not disable any effort to understand unities – recurrent orienting principles of thought or patterns of praxis or symbols of signification that equally characterize Indian history and culture. It is tapping in all their richness some of these ideas and practices in the context of Indian architecture that is at the heart of this project.

Then, the term ‘history’, quite apart from its philosophical complexities, brought with it a number of questions to be answered or choices to be made. Who or what (or who all and what all) were the objects of the history we intended to write: small groups of people and their creations or communities at large? And who was the intended audience or readership of this story? Was it only academics or also practitioners of architecture? And relatedly, what was the purpose of this history: merely documentary or also pedagogic? Methodologically, how was it to be written? Was it to be a recording of the profusion of architectural forms and techniques that are on display in the Indian subcontinent, accreted over the ages? Was that even possible, given the vastness of the landmass, its 5,000-year long antiquity, and, again, its mindboggling artistic heterogeneity? Or were we in a quest for something deeper, if necessarily more selective? An engagement perhaps with meanings and motives, with ideas and impulses that moved both the creators and consumers of architecture in this country.

In the long durèe, the significance of studying, and therefore writing, a history of architecture draws from the centrality of architecture not just to human habitat but to civilization itself. Indeed, the word ‘civilization’ is derived from the Latin ‘ civitas ’ which means ‘city’. That is because for historians and archaeologists, civilization has been synonymous with urbanization. In an iconic article called ‘The Urban Revolution’ published way back in 1950 but cited to this day, the archaeologist V. Gordon Childe put forth this association between the city and civilization and went on to offer a definition, as it were, of urbanism itself as consisting in ten criteria. Prominent among these criteria or indicators of a city was the presence of monumental architecture, which meant for ancient times palaces, cemeteries, temples, stadia, granaries, waterworks, town halls, marketplaces and the like.

The wisdom behind citing architecture as a defining feature of urban civilization was, of course, empirical since all the world’s earliest civilizations – Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Peruvian – in fact possessed highly developed and striking buildings and settlement layouts. But it was more than that. The correlation between civic architecture and civilization that is recognized by historians also carries a deeper significance that deserves to be gone into here. One: the processes and productions of architecture represented the coming together, the mobilization and channelling, of the community’s resources, knowledge and labour on an unprecedented and unmatched scale, thereby signifying and, of course, presupposing foundational social, economic and political forces of the time and place. In other words, architecture was a tangible index of much wider societal processes and phenomena.

Two, not just material processes and phenomena but ideational and valuative ones too are indicated by the development of architecture. That is to say, the association between architecture and civilization would also point to the fact that architecture – like all forms of cultural production – was practice through which a society made sense of itself and the world it inhabited, and through which it articulated its humanity. In other words, it was an expression of the important and lasting beliefs and ideals shared by members of a culture, of their weltanschauung or worldview, and was typically invested with meaning and not only utility. Especially for a highly public and performative field like architecture, articulating and communicating that meaning, making it manifest to a knowing audience or clientele that constituted its community of response, would have been important.

Another way in which to understand this is from within the discipline of building. Space is by definition abstract, so that architecture may be understood, in one view, as a grappling with and shaping of that abstraction into something more intimate and, of course, more tangible in meaning. Shaping space may be analogous to shaping the self for a community; it is the point of interface between a collective and its beliefs. Hence, using the lens of meaning and community, this volume attempts to eke out the centrality of semantics, beyond aesthetics and utility, in premodern Indian conceptions of space-use and building practices. It thereby seeks to explore the ideational content and social presence of architecture in early India.

*

Consider a paradox. Architecture, from the Greek word architecton meaning ‘prime builder’, is fundamentally articulated space. Or as the architect Aldo van Eyck called it, ‘outlined emptiness’ (van Eyck 1962: 50), the outlining performed via the act of building, which involves enclosing and containing space in some measure or the other. In Indic conceptions, however, right from the first millennium bce, the word for space is akash, which implies vastness, transcendence and an all-encompassing phenomenon – in other words, the very opposite of anything finite, bounded or enclosed. In this understanding, architecture would be the paradoxical attempt to limit the limitless, enclose the unenclosable. Is architecture, then, a contradiction in terms?

And yet, humankind has been building and enclosing space for millennia. So what does this transition from the unlimited to the limited, from the transcendent to the contingent, do to space? What are the qualities it brings to space and what perhaps does it take away? In generating an interior and an exterior, does the practice of building or enfolding space not also generate a profound and artificial divide and duality or splitting asunder of experience? In forcing a separation thus between the world within and the world without, and ushering within the built interiors the bulk of our activities, has civilization and its prime force, architecture, contracted and narrowed down rather than expanded our lives and our realities/sense of reality? This is both a question of physics and metaphysics. Ultimately, however, it is perhaps a question of ethics: What is the practice of architecture meant to effect in human terms? A separation or a continuum? A split or equipoise? Alienation or belonging?

These are questions that have agitated the minds of modern thinker-architects in the West as much as closer home, people who have perceived a growing crisis of mindlessness and disembeddedness in modern and contemporary architecture and have gone on to exhort a style of building that would feel like a ‘built homecoming’, ‘places where we can be what we really are’, ‘most alive’ and at complete equipoise with ourselves (van Eyck 1962: 56, 62), or which tapped into the eternal truth in the ordinary and the every day (Alexander 1979: 39).

To quote van Eyck further, he observed:

The wonderful thing about architecture is that it is an art. … The terrible thing about architects today is that they’re not artists! … Far from expanding reality. … architects have often contracted reality. … We must come to terms with the spiritual machinery of art. … the alchemy of it. … and allow it to expand our vision of reality, not make it shrink and wither. [Today] there is no room for the imponderable [in building], for that which defies metric measurement. … Whence this loathesome habit of ostracizing all human meaning from place?

(van Eyck 1962: 58, 66)

Both van Eyck and Alexander felt intuitively the connection between the surrounding built environment and the psycho-social life of humans, and the impact of the former on the latter. They both believed in the transformative potential of architecture in both harnessing and mirroring the inner resources of humankind, and aiding and facilitating the overcoming of contradictions that people and indeed societies felt within themselves – and their attainment of a relaxed equipoise instead, where they were most themselves and therefore most at peace. Though founded on individual psychology thus, van Eyck’s and Alexander’s is fundamentally a social or public manifesto for architecture. They both identified and emphasized the overcoming of dualities – the forced separation of the interior from the exterior in man – as the key to successful, wholesome and harmonious buildings and communities.

Like these earlier thinkers who were writing in the West in the 1940s – 1970s, we too feel the need in this volume to raise these questions of what ultimately are the ends of architecture, since the answer to this question is far from obvious in the architecture, or should one say constructions, that do surround us in this modern, technocratic, machine age where building is a heedless, profiteering business. If you look at urban architecture in India in the last few decades of the 20th century and the ongoing ones of the 21st, an overwhelming functionalism and monotony, apart from a confused poverty of form, is the predominant impression one gets from the mushrooming jungle of skyscraper-slums that the urban core and peripheries alike are becoming. While there is nothing wrong with function and it is a necessary and often sufficient impetus for building, the question really is what is the nature of function that is aimed at. Is it that of mere utility or is it that of purpose – a lasting human validity (van Eyck 1962: 49, 75)? The two are vastly different in terms of their social, not to say spiritual potential and impact.

*

Historically, scholars speak of two broad kinds of function performed by public architecture: the sacred and the secular. To these the great shrines of early India and their cities and palaces, respectively, can be assigned. Among the chapters in this volume, sacred architecture in stone predominates, not by design but somewhat naturally since these are typically the best-preserved specimens of early buildings which are extant today. In their time, they were also richly invested in – not only financially but ideologically and therefore they present (somewhat circularly) a fertile ground for the kind of investigation we undertake here. The meaning of sacred architecture, however, was not limited to its building site. This volume also investigates sacred landscapes, emanating from, but extending very widely beyond, a built focus of worship, and often marked by a large network of not only sacred but social and political focii (Julia Shaw on Sanchi). Moreover, the way space was organized within sacred buildings, whether a Hindu temple (Manu Devadevan on Jagannatha-Puri), a Buddhist monastery (Gerald Kozicz on Basgo), or a Jaina basadi (Pratyush Shankar on Moodabidri), reflected closely on social structures and public spaces outside, and exhibited complex relationships with these. The integration of architecture and its communities is thus everywhere on display.

However, was the distinction between sacred and secular held up assiduously in early India? Or is it perhaps an imposition of Western desacralizing thought that disembeds cultures from their philosophical underpinnings in the name of human progress? Indeed, this distinction or binary is, I submit, a separation imposed by Enlightenment-inspired Eurocentric modernity which expects the sacred today to have a minimal role and the secular perhaps minimal soul. I suggest that this is not how the ancients thought. They professed perhaps far more integrated life goals.

In early Indian thought, form and consciousness were considered inseparable, regardless of the character of the building, and their union invested with cultural meaning and efficacy. Architecture was not only a self-consciously undertaken project; it was believed, much like a ritual sacrifice or yajna, to be transformational both for its practitioners and clientele. Hence perhaps the attribution of divine origins to architects. All artisans and craftsmen were believed to be the descendants of divine architects Vishvakarma, Maya and Tvashtari, and the texts ordained that the hand of the craftsperson was ritually pure despite their putative low social origins, as it was engaged in the creation of objects of consecration. Thus building, along with all other forms of cultural production, whether art or craft, was invested with value and sanctity in early Indian thought – a culturally specific statement of intent that attests both to the significance of architecture for its times and to the r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: towards a semantics of architecture
• 2 Form, space and consciousness: architectural principles in the Vastushastras
• 3 Breathing life into monuments of death: the stupa and the ‘Buddha body’ in Sanchi’s socio-ecological landscape
• 4 Spatial and architectural constructs of tantric Buddhist mandalas: a cognitive approach
• 5 The old temple of Basgo, Ladakh: a hypothesis on the superimposition of ‘celestial assembly’ on sculpture and sangha
• 6 Temple and territory in the Puri Jagannatha imaginaire
• 7 Stepwells in western India: Ranki Vav at Patan
• 8 Outer places, inner spaces: constructing the gaze in Chola Chidambaram
• 9 Interpreting public space in the Jaina Basadis of Moodabidri
• 10 On the water’s edge: tracing urban form in old Srinagar
• Glossary