The art and architecture of India - Buddhist, Hindu, Jain (Art Ebook)

THE PERIOD OF THE HINDU DYNASTIES 277
We have dwelt at such length on the iconographical
and ritualistic determination of Indian
forms in art so that the reader may be
warned that, although, as one would expect in a
traditional art, Hindu temples and images explicitly
follow the recipes of the sastras, such a
conformity to sacred texts is not in itself the
final criterion ofthe aesthetic worth ofthe monuments,
any more than a glassy-eyed and simpering
saint by Carlo Dolci is a work of art, however
exactly it may have met the anti-aesthetic requirements
of Jesuit propaganda. For the same
reason, works of Indian art - especially for the
Western student - must be subjected to an
analysis from the point of view of their final
aesthetic as well as iconographic effectiveness.
As we have tried to stress, one of the great values
of the seemingly rigid prescriptions of the
sastras was that, in addition to ensuring the
magical appropriateness of an icon or a temple,
they were certainly intended to maintain a norm
of aesthetic and technical probity by the establishment
of methods and canons arrived at and
found right through generations of experience
in workshop tradition.
From the historical point of view the great
period of Hindu architecture is that of the various
dynasties that succeeded to the Gupta
Empire in the seventh century. In western India
and the Deccan the Chalukya Dynasty was
in power until 750, when it was overthrown by
the Rashtrakutas. In south-eastern India, meanwhile,
the Pallavas ruled as far south as the
Kaveri river. These were Hindu kingdoms, and
it was, as we have seen, only in the Ganges
Valley that Buddhist art survived under the
Pala and Sena Dynasties.
3. pattadakal:
the genesis of
later hindu styles
We have already considered some of the buildings
in the territories of the Chalukyas in the
Gupta Period, notably the late cave temples at
Ajanta and the earlier shrines at Aihole. Another
great centre of temple-building was at Pattadakal,
near Badami and Aihole, where there
survive today numerous temples dating from
the late seventh and early eighth century.
Pattadakal is an insignificant little village in
the sandstone hills near Badami. Above the
roofs of the modern mud houses one sees the
splendid temple towers of what must once have
been a great stronghold of Hindu worship. At
this one site we can see standing side by side four
or five examples of Indo-Aryan and Dravidian
temples.
Of these the most pretentious is the Viriipaksha
temple, dedicated to Siva in 740 [212]. It was
built by the monarch Vikramaditya II, who
died in 746 or 747. It has been surmised that this
king was so much impressed with the architecture
of Kancipuram, which he had conquered,
that he persuaded architects and workers from
that site to return with him to Pattadakal. An
inscription on the Virupaksha seems to confirm
this, since it speaks of the shrine's having
been built by 'the most eminent sutradhdri
of the southern country'. 8 It is of the typically
Dravidian type, with a series of terraced
roofs above the sanctuary, dominated by
the characteristic stupika of the Dravidian order.
The main shrine is preceded by an assembly
hall and a small porch; in front is a separate
shrine for Siva's bull Nandi [213]. The horizontally
of these structures is emphasized by the
employment of heavy overhanging cornices,
which are evidently an imitation in stone of
some earlier thatched construction. The same
type of entablature crowns the individual panels
with reliefs of Hindu deities that are let into the
walls of the temple proper and the Nandi porch.
Light is admitted through pierced stone grilles
in the walls of the enclosed hall. Each one of the
buildings is supported on a high basement or
podium ornamented with reliefs of lions and
fantastic monsters. The thatch-like entablature
decorated with blind chaitya arches is repeated