Temples of North India

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Title: Temples of North India
Author: Krishna Deva
Publisher: National Book Trust, 2005 (First published 1969)
ISBN: 8123719701
Pages: 83

India is richly endowed with a fine variety of magnificent temples of different architectural styles. There are predominantly two schools of temple construction, based in the north and south of the country but equally impressive and artistically fulfilling. This book covers the temples of north India, focusing on the nagara style. We can see them as far south as the Tungabhadra valley. Despite a basic homogeneity in essential aspects, the various regional styles followed their own course of evolution. This book describes the development of various temple styles in the period from the seventh to twelfth centuries. Krishna Deva was the former director of the Archeological Survey of India (ASI) and later director of the Birla Academy of Art, Kolkata. He was an eminent scholar of art and architecture and had made several significant archeological explorations in the country. He had worked with great archeologists like Aurel Stein and Mortimer Wheeler. Having organized the Temple Survey Project (Northern Region) of the ASI, he conducted a systematic architectural survey of the temples of north India in general and central India in particular.

The temple as we see it today developed during the Gupta period (400 – 700 CE) though simpler constructions that are much older goes back to the Maurya period (200 BCE). The concept of kingship as a viable form of political organisation became well developed in the Gupta period so that the deity in the temple was thought to represent a divine king in the spiritual domain. The abode of the king is the royal palace and hence the temple acquired characteristic features of the palace adapted to the new purpose for which they were being implemented. The early temples contained a simple, square sanctum and a rectangular pillared porch as seen in the remains of such a temple at Sanchi. From the beginning of the seventh century, the sanctum began to be roofed by a tall, curvilinear spire called shikhara.

The construction of an intricately carved temple required such a large investment in men, money and resources that ordinary people or even merchant guilds could not manage it on their own. Consequently, major dynasties took part in the venture as a display of their might and to underline their right to govern the kingdom as being sanctioned by the gods. Temples in central and north India up to the Gupta era were largely made of timber or other perishable material. Dressed stone was introduced at this stage. This increased the durability as no remains of timber were unearthed so far, yet stone temples of the period are so numerous. The development of Bhakti cult as the devotion to a personalized god in the Gupta age led to establishment of an ambulatory path around the sanctum in the extant architecture. The Chalukyas (500 – 750 CE) contributed their part in temple building in the south, but following nagara style of the north. The highly ornate temples of the Hoysala period as evidenced in the magnificent temples at Belur and Halebid was an offshoot of the Chalukyan school. The Pratihara dynasty (eighth - ninth centuries CE) who ruled from Kanauj, instituted a unique style in central and northern India. The group of temples at Naresar near Gwalior is the earliest example of Pratihara style.

The book is divided into chapters that examine local variations in the architecture. The temples in Rajasthan are well known for their exquisite organisation, but from the twelfth century onwards, the style loses its individuality and neatly merges into the Solanki style. The climax of the medieval architecture of the Rajasthan and Solanki styles was reached in the Dilwara group of Jain temples at Mount Abu. The author is an expert on central Indian temples and a large number of references and examples are made to this region. Between the tenth and twelfth centuries, the Kalachuri dynasty kept the torch burning in the eastern part of central India, Chandellas in the central part, Paramaras in the western part and Kachchhapaghatas in the north.

Khajuraho richly deserves and finds a prominent place in the narrative. These breathtakingly beautiful structures mark the zenith of the central Indian building style and reveal certain distinctive peculiarities of plan and elevation. They are compact and lofty temples without any enclosure wall and are erected on a high platform. The peak is reached in the Kandariya Mahadev Temple, which represents the grand finale and culmination of architectural movement. The north Indian style was followed in a large tract of Deccan plateau as well. In the upper Deccan, between the rivers Tapti and Krishna, flourished an individual style of northern architecture. The early notable achievements of this stream are seen in Ajanta and Ellora. This Deccani style was named Bhumija and is widely seen in the central and western parts of India. The book also covers the grand temples of Odisha due to their spectacular individuality. Bhubaneshwar, with about 100 temples is the pre-eminent centre of the Odisha style. The spire of a typical Odishan temple has an almost vertical outline with a pronounced curve only near the top.

The tolerance, peaceful coexistence and mutual assimilation of Indian religions are legendary and a pleasing instance is observed in the seamless overlap of architecture and motifs of Hindu and Jain temples. In some places, you can see them existing side by side with the devotees not making any distinction between them. They follow the same architectural patterns and style to such a level that many devotees cannot even tell them apart. Even the religious motifs of one faith permeate the other’s art as seen in a fine example at Khajuraho. The Parshwanath Jain temple bears significant kinship to the Vaishnava Lakshmana temple a little distance away in displaying among its sculptures a predominance of Vaishnava themes, including scenes from the romantic life of Krishna. Another aspect of the Indian temple architectural style should strike the readers as something extraordinary, even though it is not enumerated in the text. The styles of the north and south of India differ very much in appearance and content, but the flowering of the method occurred at around the same time, during the eleventh to thirteenth centuries CE, across the country.

The book is very short, at only 83 pages with an index, but each page is filled with so much information of a technical nature that some readers would definitely find tedious. But, this book assumes a general familiarity of the readers to architectural terms. No glossary is included. An introductory chapter on the technical terms with illustrations would do wonders to the book’s utility. Many ancient temples, representing specific instances of the development of art are listed and readers are advised to search for the pictures on Google for a hands-on idea. This book was first published in 1969 and several editions and reprints have been effected. This may be the reason why the cover page is wrongly attributed. The page displays the Kandariya Mahadev Temple of Khajuraho, but is indicated as the Sun Temple of Konark.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

 

Let Me Say It Now

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Title: Let Me Say It Now
Author: Rakesh Maria
Publisher: Westland Publications, 2020 (First)
ISBN: 9789389152067
Pages: 614

The police department in Mumbai city is traditionally acclaimed as the best police force east of Suez. They better be, as the city is the financial hub of the country and is a melting pot of numerous societies hailing from every nook and cranny of India. It can safely be designated as the nation in microcosm. The syncretic Mumbai society lives peacefully in the city, protected in the bosom of Marathi culture. The city’s importance to the nation prompts enemy powers to target it and inflict wounds on it so as to bleed India through a thousand cuts. Mumbai Police is at the centre of the intricate network of law-abiding citizens, criminals, thieves, terrorists and bureaucrats and contributes a great deal to the way the city moves. Rakesh Harikrishan Maria was an Indian Police Service (IPS) officer who retired as the Director General (Home Guards) of Maharashtra Police who had also worked as the commissioner of police of Mumbai city. He took part in major investigations such as the 1993 serial blasts and 26/11 attacks. This book is his memoirs spanning 36 years of meritorious work in the IPS, the majority of which was spent in Mumbai.

Maria’s elevation to the top echelons of law enforcement in Maharashtra encourages numerous middle class boys and girls who have no political connections or financial clout to aspire for the glories of Indian civil service. The author is the son of a Punjabi musician and a Pahadi housewife who had no links to power-wielders or elite of the city, which is a triumph of Indian democracy and the inclusive and cosmopolitan spirit of Mumbai. Even while in service, he was sensitive and always receptive to the issues concerning the common man. Maria is usually enraged at the gravity of a crime he investigates just like a layman does. He never puts up airs at being a top police officer and the book is structured in such a way that the readers can empathise with him with minimum effort.

This book is the autobiography of Rakesh Maria, but knowingly or otherwise, the city of Mumbai is also a prominent character in the narrative. Many incidents described in the text would not happen anywhere else. The author is also starry-eyed about his native city in a quite justifiable way. He glorifies the city with the most gratifying epithets such as urbs prima (prime city of the country), the city of dreams and also the city of illusions (maya nagari). The city is the microcosm of India, the symbol of India’s resistance and good cheer that defies all its shortcomings. It is truly cosmopolitan, arduously challenging yet generous. It has created its own language dialects such as Bambaiya Marathi, which is said to be incomprehensible in the state’s countryside.

Quite contrary to the left-liberal portrayal of the early 1990s as a period of great oppression of the minorities in India, we see them quite powerful in this book and capable of forceful retaliations against violence inflicted by organisations representing the majority. Even before the destruction of the disputed structure at Ayodhya in 1992, major cities in India had been rocked by a series of bomb blasts designed to create panic among general public and to undermine the morale of the police and law enforcement agencies. The author notes with concern that the social fabric of Mumbai was so fragile in the 1990s that even a tiny spark was enough to ignite a communal conflagration. Criminal gangs were polarized on communal lines with Dawood Ibrahim leading a group of mainly Muslim thugs and Chhota Rajan leading mostly Hindu thugs. Police diary notes of the 1993 communal riots and the events which led to it clearly indicate that it was not one-sided at all as is often described. The serial blasts of 1993 shocked the nation and the Chhota Rajan gang embarked on killing all those in the serial bomb blasts case.

Maria personally supervised the interrogation of Ajmal Amir Kasab of Faridkot, Pakistan who was the sole terrorist captured alive in the 26/11 attacks and later hanged after a fair judicial trial. He narrates the subtle shades of subterfuge employed by his handlers in Pakistan who nearly succeeded in passing the men off as Hindu terrorists. All of them sported a red string tied around their wrists like a Hindu and carried identity cards with fictitious Hindu names. Kasab was named as ‘Samir Dinesh Chaudhari’ of Hyderabad (p.436). The inordinate delay in hanging Afzal Guru, a convicted terrorist in the deadly 2001 parliament attack case emboldened Kasab that the Indian state was soft and his own execution would also be postponed indefinitely. This book contains the verbatim transcript of the conversations of the attackers with their handlers in Pakistan. The author tried his best to dispel the indoctrination of Kasab that the bodies of the martyred terrorists would glow in the dark and would emanate a sweet scent. He was surreptitiously taken to the hospital morgue where the partially decomposed bodies of the other attackers were kept to have a look at reality. On the way back, he was made to kiss the ground at a safe location and made to utter the patriotic cry Bharat Mata ki Jai twice, which he obeyed meekly.

Even though the author diligently managed the control room activities where he was assigned by his boss during the 26/11 attacks, he was accused by the wife of Ashok Kamte, a senior police officer killed in the attacks. She alleged that Maria sent him to a dangerous location and did not provide timely help. The author does a detailed job to refute this claim but the effort was mentally so taxing that he wishes that he had died that night instead of the other. He then wryly remarks that Ajmal Kasab too wanted to die because he wanted paradise while Maria was getting hell here. This book explains the sad plight of the overburdened police force with long duty hours and poor living conditions far from the required level of fitness. No wonder they sink into apathy and lethargy that comes with repetitive monotonous work. Even then, there are many resourceful officers in the force as evidenced in the clandestine transfer of a criminal from Nepal to India. The Mumbai police team even bribed the Nepali border guards by giving away their gold rings and chains!

The author believes in team spirit at the workplace and studiously lists out names of his subordinate officers – even down to the constables – who had taken part in investigations rather than appropriating sole credit. Some prominent and sensational cases are also discussed to attract readers. Maria is so confident of his ability and investigative prowess that he doesn’t hesitate to admit his goof ups. In the Sherlock Holmes series too, we come across stories such as the ‘Five Orange Pips’ and ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ in which the famous detective failed to provide a breakthrough! A blow by blow account of the 26/11 incidents are given which is very detailed and full of police jargon as to repel many a reader. Conversations in Hindi and Marathi with low-ranking officials, criminals and politicians are reproduced as such along with its English translation. This is very cumbersome at times. We can see such a practice in Sanskrit plays of the classical era. Unrefined characters and women use Prakrit or the local dialect while the major personalities use nothing but Sanskrit on stage. The author was transferred out of the post of commissioner due to a mix up in the sensational Sheena Bora murder case and when the government thought he was taking an undue interest in the case. Though he argued with senior officials and even the chief minister over the issue, the mind of the government was set against him and he could not approach the media with his own version of the story. The title of this book, ‘let me say it now’ in fact means his justification for what he has done in the Bora case.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Mother Tongue

Title: Mother Tongue

Author: Bill Bryson

Publisher: Penguin, 2008 (First published 1990)

ISBN: 9780141037462

Pages: 270

English is the most ubiquitous language used in the world. Even though the number of people who use it as their mother tongue is really small, the rapidly expanding clientele who employ it as a second language make it the world’s most common tongue. It is the most global of languages, the lingua franca of business, sciences, education and politics. Other countries excel the US and UK in many aspects of the language’s everyday usage. In India, there are more than 3000 newspapers in English while there are more students of English in China than there are people in the US. Even this humble blog is the contribution of a person who uses English as a second language and the fact that it has used some 600,000 words so far makes him a little smug! This book was published in 1990, but its point has become further relevant with the spread of computers and the internet. Bill Bryson needs no introduction and he remains one of my favorites.

Bryson’s humour is legendary, but it is strangely subdued in this volume. Anyway, the very first sentence of the book carries the author’s signature with the candid assertion that “more than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to”. This book is not a history of the language nor can it be termed a thorough study in the linguistic sense. Bryson examines many aspects of the tongue’s everyday usage like spelling, American and British varieties, pronunciation, origin of common names, word play and even a chapter on swearing. The narrative is liberally suffused with wit, but not as much as Bryson’s other books.

English now dominates the world beyond doubt, but there was a time when it hung tenaciously on to its home country base whose political power had changed hands many times to foreigners who didn’t even speak a word of it. England remained for a long time under external occupation. The Roman conquest brought civilization to the island, but Viking invasions transformed its structure. Then came the Norman Conquest when the French ruled the roost. No king of England spoke English till 1399 CE when Henry IV began to use it. As recently as the eighteenth century, England chose to install George I, a German, even though he didn’t know English but reigned for thirteen years. The language assumed an inferior position in the Norman society in which the aristocracy was French-speaking while the peasantry spoke English. Linguistic influence of Normans tended to focus on matters of court, government, fashion and high living. That’s why we still see a lot of French-derived words in these domains. However, Bryson points out that it is a cherishable irony that a language that succeeded almost by stealth, treated for centuries as the inadequate and second-rate tongue of peasants, should one day become the most important and successful language in the world.

There are about 2700 languages in the world, of which India leads with 1600 languages and dialects. English has borrowed without any let or hindrance from most of them. Bryson reviews the pathways in which foreign words accrued into his mother tongue. Probably, this makes the English extremely reluctant to learn other languages. The author wonders at the staggering quantity of words accrued. Bryson does not elaborate on one important source of words for English – India. A good number of Indian words have entered the lexicon of the colonial masters after nearly two centuries of imperialist rule over India. Great literary figures have also contributed to the language in the case of new words. Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings of which at least a tenth had never been used before, which is an astonishing display of ingenuity. It is also true that the great dramatist and poet lived in an age when words and ideas burst upon the world as never before or since.

The book hints at the powerful urge for standardization when a language loses its insularity and whole societies start to handle them simultaneously. This process began in the fifteenth century with the invention of the printing press. This brought a measure of much needed uniformity to English spelling. Before 1400, it was possible to tell with some precision where in Britain a letter or manuscript was written just from the spellings. By 1500, this had become all but impossible. London spellings became increasingly fixed and standardization was achieved by 1650. With television, the differences between the two most favorite flavors of English are disappearing fast. Since this book came out just before the internet boom, its effect is not analysed.

This book includes a delightful array of words, phrases and comparison with other languages which is ideal for novices and experienced readers of English. This book is a page-turner, but the chapter on names and pronouncing place names is rather clumsy and uninteresting to non-US and UK readers.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Breaking India

Title: Breaking India – Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Fault Lines

Author: Rajiv Malhotra, Aravindan Neelakandan

Publisher: Amaryllis, 2013 (First published 2011)

ISBN: 9788191067378

Pages: 650

When the British replaced the Mughals as the sovereign of India in the eighteenth century, they wanted to have in place a legal system in consonance with the liturgical principles of the subject nation. Many British scholars studied the Hindu religious and secular texts in Sanskrit. They were astonished to find striking similarities in the structure and vocabulary of Sanskrit and European languages. This common origin of languages implored thinkers to postulate a common race called the Aryans who were the ancestors of Europeans. This race was supposed to have invaded and conquered India in the distant past just like what the British had done in recent history. About a century later, Christian missionaries working in South India conjured up another construct called Dravidians in order to establish a dichotomy between the north and south in the anthropological arena so as to correspond to a few differences in linguistics. This racial theory was held as sacrosanct till genetic studies among the people tore it to pieces. However, the Dravidian idea took a life of its own when it gained political centre stage in Tamil Nadu. Dravidian and Dalit identities are exploited to the hilt by western organisations intent on Balkanizing India because the concept and unity of India in the face of diverse societies, languages and customs is so alien to the ideals these troublemakers cherish. This book handles invented histories, identities and racial categories that was formed and nurtured by colonial powers as it gave cultural superiority, economic advantages and political dominance over the controlled civilization. Rajiv Malhotra is a public intellectual on current affairs, world religions and cross-cultural encounters between East and West while Aravindan Neelakandan is working with an NGO in Tamil Nadu serving marginalized rural communities in sustainable agriculture.

Malhotra explains the compulsions which led the colonial bureaucrats to delve into Indian linguistics. European romanticists of eighteenth century needed a historical basis for their views to escape the rigid framework of Judeo-Christian monotheism. Similarity of Sanskrit with Greek and Latin were quickly noted by early Indologists. This so pervaded the colonial mind as to create a notion of Aryans as harbingers of civilization to all humanity. Europe spun a wide and nauseous web of Aryan master race theory that engendered Nazism and the Holocaust. It was Max Muller who first applied the word 'Arya' as the name of a family of languages and of the people who spoke them. Muller did try to propose an amicable divorce between philology and ethnology, but only after his work had found its way into race sciences. However, after the Second World War, European academics and social institutions made a great effort to exorcize the Aryan race theory from European psyche, but they still continue to apply these ideas to India.

Many Indians are thankful to Max Muller for his in-depth study of classical Sanskrit literature. It is beyond dispute that Muller’s studies still illuminate the path of Sanskrit scholars. This book notes a lesser known aspect of Max Muller. He served as a functionary of evangelists and observed thus: "the Veda is the root of their religion and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3000 years”. On another occasion, Muller wrote: “the ancient religion of India is totally doomed and if Christianity does not step in, whose fault will it be?” (p.26)

After creating the Aryan myth, the colonialists created another myth to oppose and hence to balance it. The authors claim that evangelical and colonial interests worked in tandem with ethno-linguistic scholarship to fabricate the Dravidian identity. In that sense, Bishop Robert Caldwell may be thought of as the father of Dravidians. This missionary scholar of the Anglican Church created the ‘Dravidian race’ through his studies. He proposed the existence of Dravidians before the coming of Aryans, but got cheated by Brahmins who were agents of the Aryan. Simple-minded Dravidians were kept in shackles by the Aryans through exploitation of religion who needed to be liberated by Europeans like him. He proposed the complete removal of Sanskrit words from Tamil. Once the Dravidian mind is free of the Aryan superstitions, Christian evangelism would reap the souls of Dravidians, or so he thought. In parallel with the creation of a Dravidian separate identity in South India another similar mischief was going on in Sri Lanka. A new alien identity was off loaded onto Sinhalese shoulders by using Buddhism as the religion, Sinhalese as the language and Aryan as the race. We have seen the gruesome bloodshed this wicked categorisation has caused in that small island. G U Pope, another Christian scholar, claimed that Thirukural was the result of Christian influence of the Alexandrian school. Other missionary scholars attributed Thirukkural to Jain origins, with the conviction of the ethnic inferiority of Tamils as Caldwell surmised that a treatise on ethics with such lofty ideals couldn't have originated from within the indigenous Tamil tradition.

Evangelists and Christian missionaries try to appropriate Tamil culture as their own in a bizarre theological experiment by claiming powerful Christian influence in the development of Tamil culture. To buttress this claim, they proposed the myth of Saint Thomas as the apostle who came to India in 52 CE. There is absolutely no historical evidence for this but the evangelists propagate that the Tamil classics were composed under his influence. To add force to the argument, they also propose that Tamil spirituality later got infiltrated by ulterior Aryan influence. This book includes the profile of several evangelists who carp on Aryan invasion and Dalit suppression. Deivanayagam and his daughter Devakala have put forward another outlandish theory to ascertain the primacy of Tamil culture. It is said that Tamil race originated from the sunken continent of Lemuria - also called Kumari Kandam in Tamil - and that Tamil civilization and language is the true source of all world developments.

The authors point out liberal discourse on Dalits exceeding the limits and stray into seditious ground. Dalits were severely oppressed in all parts of India in the past. This atrocity still continues at some places, but now there are enough safeguards to fight this menace from inside the system. Still, the academic Dalit studies encourage Dalit writing only from a separate and divisive perspective and not as an important contribution to mainstream Indian literature. Double standards are also at play here. While the sense of national identity in the West is getting stronger, in the less developed countries, scholarship is encouraged toward self-deconstruction. Colonial anthropology transformed Indian community units that were distinguished by their occupational roles into racial groups. Caste is erroneously equated to race and such academics invite the international community led by the US and EU to take punitive action against India according to international laws on racism. Evangelists desire to drive a wedge between Dalits and the rest of Indian society with a design to engineer conversions upon the former. Numerous US institutions take the atrocity literature being produced by evangelists-funded entities, repackage it in a professionally compelling style and feed it to the policy makers of the US centres of power.

This book attempts to look at the historical origins of the Dravidian movement, Dalit identity and the role of the West in exploiting them with a view to divide India into pieces. The book’s right wing leaning is undeniable but the authors have made a thorough objective study to bring all contemporary aspects of the interminable flow of foreign funds to India for religious conversions and stoking sectarian dissent by building up strife where none existed before. The book’s very informative Appendix B on ancient Tamil religion in Sangam literature clearly spells out the basis of Tamil religion on Vedic culture. Many examples from Sangam literature are also listed.

Readers who close this book after reading it are reminded of a clear warning that pervades the book’s entirety - that the forces of dissolution co-opts Indian intellectuals at various levels ranging from lowly data gatherers to identity-engineering programs in the murky backwaters of Non-governmental organisations (NGOs), to mid-level scholars in India, all the way to Indian Ivy League professors and award-winning globetrotters. This is the author's mission statement. Each chapter begins with an ideogram that succinctly puts the main points of discussion in the chapter in graphic form, similar to an algorithmic flowchart. It also lists prominent academics and evangelists as well as profiling major foreign and local advocacy groups who strive to Balkanize India.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star