India Discovered (18 page)

The Konarak war-horse, prancing into battle with a massively strong warrior striding beside it, appealed to Havell because it also showed that the Indian sculptor was quite capable of handling martial themes. ‘Not even the Homeric grandeur of the Elgin marbles surpasses the magnificent movement and modelling of this Indian Achilles, and the superbly monumental war-horse
with its massive strength and vigour is not unworthy of comparison with Verocchio’s famous masterpiece at Venice.’ None of the then fashionable equestrian statues in Calcutta and elsewhere could begin to compare with it. Here was an area in which the Indian artist should be encouraged and patronized.

To many, Havell appeared somewhat partisan; he protested too much. But then he was an art teacher,
and his concern was not simply to validate Indian art but actively to promote it. He passionately believed that what he called ‘the Indo-Aryan master craftsman’ was still a vital force. Though suppressed because of Islam’s veto on all iconography, and scorned through the ignorance and philistinism of the British, the old skills were still there. A modicum of recognition and patronage could bring
about a real renaissance. At Madras and Calcutta, Havell purged his schools of all western influence and encouraged his young painters, sculptors and architects to rediscover their indigenous culture. He inveighed against the sterility of Anglo-Indian art and particularly architecture. It was madness to go on erecting neo-classical — or now, more commonly, neo-Gothic and Scottish baronial – monstrosities
when the skills and artistry that had produced the Taj Mahal and the Rajput palaces were still there for the tapping.

Havell totally rejected the idea that Indian culture had declined beyond recognition or redemption. For Burt and Cunningham this theory offered a convenient explanation for the eroticism of places like Khajuraho. Havell could only lamely propose that the sensual
apsaras
were no
more than a conventional decorative motif, and that the
mithuna
couples represented ‘the extravagance and eccentricity’ to which the Indian artist was vulnerable when the lofty ideals of his art deserted him. In other words, for a degree of respectability and perhaps patronage, there was a high price to be paid. All that was sensual in Indian art must be ignored. On no subject had the Indian artist
lavished so much skill and affection as the female figure. Yet Havell scarcely mentioned it. Of course, there was nothing wrong with the female nude as such. But the Indian artist was no more content with a naturalistic portrayal of a woman than he was with a true-to-life study of a horse or an elephant. Just as he must present the essence of a horse, so he must celebrate the femininity of a
female. And in a society unfettered by the sexual taboos of the West, this meant bringing out her sexual charms.

Hence those gloriously thrusting breasts, the hour-glass waist, and the full and forty hips. No pin-up ever approached the provocative postures, the smouldering looks and the languorous gestures of the Khajuraho nymphs. Serene rather than saucy, intent rather than ecstatic, they go
gracefully about their feminine business, adjusting the hair, applying eye shadow, removing a splinter, approaching their lovers; then the kiss, the caress, the passionate love-making of first acquaintance, and the erotic experiments of a mature affection. Here there is love and beauty, passion and joy, instruction even and inspiration; but anything less sordid it is hard to imagine. One can only
feel sorry for those generations of Europeans whose own sexual inhibitions prevented them from seeing it that way.

Captain Burt took particular exception to the fact that such sculptures should adorn a place of worship. It made the crime twice as awful. Since his day, many and ingenious have been the explanations for this: advertising the services of the temple courtesans, according to some,
allegorizing the soul’s longing for communion with the deity, according to others. Or was it to proclaim the vanity of human desires as compared to the inward peace of the temple’s interior? Or, again, did it mean that Khajuraho had been a centre for Tantric worship’s orgiastic rites? The question is still unsolved and none of these explanations makes much sense when faced with the experience of the
sculptures themselves. The Indian artist, though never explicit in a representational sense, was rarely oblique or obscure. It is evidence that his art is still neither fully understood nor appreciated that one must ask, rather than insist, whether he simply wished to proclaim the supreme joy of carnal love. If this still seems out of place in a temple, perhaps the explanation should be sought
not in the mind of the artist but of the observer.

CHAPTER NINE
Wild in Human Faith and Warm in Human Feeling

In 1842 Lord Ellenborough, the most erratic and vainglorious of India’s Governors-General, conceived the idea of restoring to the famous temple of Somnath in Gujerat its sandalwood gates. They had been taken to Afghanistan by that arch-vandal, Mahmud of Ghazni. Ellenborough’s motives are never easy to determine, but perhaps he thought
that such a gesture would help to legitimize the current British occupation of Afghanistan. He was reckoning, though, without Macaulay. It was bad enough that in the past British officers had helped restore the odd temple. ‘We decorated the temples of false gods’, he told the British parliament, ‘we provided the dancing girls, we gilded and painted the images&.’ Now, to ‘this most immoral of superstitions
in which emblems of vice are objects of worship’, Ellenborough was proposing to extend what amounted to official patronage. Worse still, Somnath was a Siva temple. Macaulay hoped there was no need for him to spell out to the House of Commons which ‘emblem of vice’ was sacred to Siva. ‘I am ashamed to name those things to which he [Ellenborough] is not ashamed to pay public reverence.’

In the
event the gates proved to be the wrong ones, and the whole idea was lost in the sudden and disastrous rout of the British forces in Afghanistan. But it is interesting that, though prepared to blacken every other aspect of Indian culture, Macaulay stopped short of directly attacking its architecture. Instead he preferred to savage Hinduism and, had the temple been a mosque, would no doubt have given
Islam an equally rough ride.

For, as even he would have conceded, India’s architecture was in a class apart. Here was one aspect of Indian civilization which the severest critic could not dismiss. Moreover, masterpieces like the Taj Mahal were barely 200 years old, and the lovely palace of Dig had been built within the last century. The theory that Indian culture had been steadily declining for
the last millennium – applied so freely to sculpture and literature – obviously did not hold. But why not? The first thing that struck the traveller in India was its extraordinary variety of architectural styles. For example, a south Indian temple of the twelfth century bore no resemblance to a contemporary temple at, say, Khajuraho in central India, or Mount Abu in the west, or Orissa in the east.
Likewise, it was extremely difficult to distinguish any chronological development of styles. A prominent feature like the curvilinear tower suddenly appeared from nowhere – no debut as a small protuberance on the roof steadily evolving into the massive superstructure that characterizes the Orissa temples. Instead, it is first found as a fully developed architectural feature.

The bulbous dome
too, an equally distinctive feature, this time of Islamic architecture, suddenly appeared from nowhere. Only in this case there was an obvious explanation: the dome might not in fact be Indian. Mohammedan conquerors must have brought the idea with them from Persia or Central Asia. How much more, then, of Islamic architecture, and in particular the celebrated Moghul style, was of alien origin? And
could there be some similar explanation for the innovations and variations in pre-Islamic architecture? In short, to what extent were India’s monuments testimony to indigenous civilization and products of native craftsmen?

Questions like these much exercised Alexander Cunningham, but by the 1860s a somewhat unlikely amateur had already made the subject peculiarly his own. James Fergusson, the
son of an Ayrshire doctor, joined the family firm in Calcutta in the late 1820s. The firm was on the brink of financial disaster and Fergusson, promptly and wisely, left it to start an indigo business in Bengal. Indigo, a dye made from the leaves of a type of pulse, was, along with opium, the boom crop of the early nineteenth century. Fergusson rapidly made a fortune. Equally rapidly, he developed
an interest in architecture, embarked on a series of architectural rambles, and within ten years retired to England.

Bishop Heber, touring India in the 1820s, had formed no good opinion of planters in general and indigo planters in particular. They were ‘largely confined to Bengal and I have no wish that their numbers should increase’. Their behaviour was a frequent source of scandal, as much
for their notoriously oppressive handling of Indians as for their loose living. Many were Scots, most drank and a good few perpetuated the eighteenth-century custom of keeping native mistresses. They were an embarrassment to the British administration, and their contribution to the study of India’s past was negligible.

James Fergusson may well have been an outstanding exception, but the planting
fraternity was certainly an unlikely spawning ground for an art historian. He seems to have had no contact with Prinsep and the Calcutta orientalists. Highly self-disciplined, brilliantly self-taught, and latterly somewhat self-opinionated, he approached the confusion of India’s monuments like a high-powered executive determined to instil method and logic into the operation of some ailing conglomerate.
Schliemann, the explorer of Troy and himself a classic example of the self-made man, dedicated his great work on Tiryns to Fergusson as ‘the historian of architecture, eminent alike for his knowledge of art and the original genius that he has applied to the solution of some of its most difficult problems’.

Such a vast subject as the classification of India’s architecture was, anyway, beyond Cunningham:
he was too busy fending off railway contractors, marching and counter-marching, and forever obsessed with the Buddhist legacy. ‘The old campaigner’ was, moreover, far too disorganized, a victim of his years, of the depth of his scholarship and of his too close affection for the wide open plains of the north. What the subject needed was a trouble-shooter, a man who could seize on essentials,
was not afraid to generalize, not ashamed to improvise; and in Fergusson it got just that. No individual could hope to visit every monument in India, so Fergusson took a short cut. He embraced the latest technology and collected photographs. On his own travels he had used the ‘camera lucida’ as an aid to making a quick sketch; as soon as photography proper had caught on in India – in the late
1850s – he started accumulating prints. While Cunningham sat at his camp table in a cloud of mosquitoes defending his weatherworn notebooks from the rapacious Indian crows, Fergusson sifted his crisp photographs in a London town house within easy reach of libraries and museums. His forum was not the now persecuted Asiatic Society in Calcutta (recently renamed, and thereby demoted, as the Asiatic
Society of Bengal) but the Royal Asiatic Society, its increasingly prestigious London equivalent.

Through much travel and study, Fergusson was soon an equally esteemed authority on the architecture of Europe, Egypt and the Middle East. It lent much weight and respectability to his Indian studies, and enabled him to place India’s monuments in a world perspective. Cunningham had lived and worked
too long in north India and Burma; he scarcely acknowledged the existence of architecture in areas, such as the south, where Buddhism had never established itself. But no one could accuse Fergusson of parochialism. Furthermore, he was not bound by any ties of loyalty to the government of India. Cunningham could be scathing enough about individual acts of vandalism: a District Collector who was in
the habit of removing local antiquities to his personal collection came in for a vicious broadside when he made off with a pillar of the Gupta period.

Mr Broadley has omitted to mention two facts which, I believe, may be ascribed partly to his ignorance and partly to his modesty. To the first I should attribute his having fixed the pillar on its brick pedestal
upside down,
in spite of the two Gupta inscriptions&. To the second I would ascribe his neglecting to mention that in his anxiety to leave evidence of his own rule in Bihar, he had the whole of the uninscribed surface of the pillar covered with a rudely cut inscription, in which his name figures twice&. How fortunate it is that Mr Broadley did not remain long enough to leave more ‘evidence of his rule’ in other parts of India.

But as an officer and employee of the government of India, Cunningham had to moderate his tone when protesting against official indifference and vandalism. Not so Fergusson. He berated Anglo-Indian officialdom, and especially the military, whenever opportunity offered. He even took the Archaeological Survey to task. Cunningham’s obsession with inscriptions often blinded him to more obvious indications
of date, his drawings were frequently inaccurate, his reports disorganized and his architectural theories ill-formed.

Needless to say, Cunningham replied in kind. ‘My friend, Mr Fergusson,’ he called him but there was little love lost between the two Scots. Fergusson’s first works were on the rock-cut temples and on the sculptures of Sanchi and Amaravati. Cunningham soon had the measure of his
scholarship; the man could not read a single Indian script so no wonder he had got the dates of all these monuments wrong. Dating by architectural styles was all very well, but it could only work when much more was known about them. Meanwhile it was safer to stick to Prinsep’s method based on the scripts.

The controversy thus sown would soon have ample grounds on which to flourish. In 1855 Fergusson
published
The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture in all Ages and Countries.
A sequel followed in 1862, and both works were revised in 1867 as A
History of Architecture in All Countries from the Earliest Times until the Present Day.
This immediately became a standard work and the second edition, published in 1876, included a whole volume on
The History of Indian and Eastern Architecture
with
700 pages and 400 illustrations, most of them devoted to India itself. Fergusson was nothing if not thorough. He had a note of every known building, including 900 cave temples, and his photographs now covered ‘3000 Indian buildings, with which constant use has made me as familiar as with any other object that is perpetually before my eyes’. Many sites, especially in Mysore, owe their fame to Fergusson’s
discrimination; though not one was his discovery. Although well aware that many buildings might yet remain to be discovered, the idea of archaeological exploration did not appeal to him.