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

THE PERIOD OF THE HINDU DYNASTIES 293
clastic raid on Somnath, and the final conquest
of this whole region by the Delhi Sultans in
1298. The present ruin of most of these splendid
structures is due not only to the fury of the
invaders but to a cataclysmic earthquake that
devastated western India in the nineteenth
century. The magnificence of these shrines was
made possible by the commercial wealth of
Gujarat under the Solanki Dynasty, a period
when the ports of western India were a
clearing-house for the trade between the Eastern
and Western worlds. These originally
jewel-encrusted temples were not entirely the
result of royal patronage, but were communal
dedications in the true sense of the word, in that
they were erected through voluntary subscriptions
and contributions of skilled labour of all
kinds. A further parallel to the communal
interest in the Church in the Gothic period lies
in the fact that they were the work of builders'
guilds under the direction of master masons
who transmitted their knowledge of the sastras
to successive generations of apprentices down
to modern times.
Almost all the western Indian temples are so
ruinous that it is difficult to select a single example
of the style to illustrate their character. The
most famous of the
Gujarat temples was the
Siva shrine at Somanatha-Patan that was the
special object of Mahmud of Ghazni's fury and
religious zeal against idolatry, when, in 1025, he
smashed the jewelled lingam and put the
temple to the sack. The shrine, although restored
after this desecration, was totally wrecked
by the final Mohammedan invaders at the end of
the thirteenth century. The plan, which is
225. Delhi, Qutb mosqiu from Hindu temples