Paradigms of Indian Architecture: Space and Time in Representation and Design

208 Pages·1997·68.425 MB·English

by  G. H. R. Tillotson

PARADIGMS OF
INDIAN ARCHITECTURE
Centre of South Asian Studies,
School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London
COLLECTED PAPERS ON SOUTH ASIA
10. Institutions and Ideologies
David Arnold and Peter Robb
11. Local Agrarian Societies in Colonial India
Peter Robb, Kaoru Sugihara, Haruka Yanagisawa
12. Myth and Mythmaking
Julia Leslie
COLLECTED PAPERS ON SOUTH ASIA NO. 13
PARADIGMS OF
INDIAN ARCHITECTURE
Space and Time in Representation
and Design
Edited by
G.H.R. Tillotson
First published in 1998
by Curzon Press
This edition published 2013 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 1998 G.H.R. Tillotson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-7007-0628-3 hbk
ISBN 0-7007-1038-8 pbk
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
G.H.R. Tillotson 1
PART ONE: REPRESENTATION
I The Monument Described
1. Past and Present: toward an aesthetics of colonialism 12
Thomas R. Metcalf
2. Tales of the Bharhut Stupa: archaeology in the colonial
and nationalist imaginations 26
Tapati Guha-Thakurta
II The Depicted Place
3. Painting and Understanding Mughal Architecture 59
G.H.R. Tillotson
4. India's Visual Narratives: the dominance of space over
time 80
Vidya Dehejia
PART TWO: DESIGN
in The Built Form
5. Form, Transformation and Meaning in Indian Temple
Architecture 107
Adam Hardy
6. Gods, Patrons and Images: stone sculpture at Vijayanagara 136
Anna L. Dallapiccola
IV The Inhabited Space
7. Spatial Organisation and Aesthetic Expression in the
Traditional Architecture of Rajasthan 159
Kulbhushan Jain
8. A Tale of Two Cities: house and town in India today 176
Sunand Prasad
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NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS
Thomas R. Metcalf
Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley;
author of An Imperial Vision (Faber and Faber, 1989).
Tapati Guha-Thakurta
Fellow in History at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences,
Calcutta; author of The Making of a New ‘Indian* Art (CUP, 1992).
G.H.R. Tillotson
Senior Lecturer in South Asian Art at SOAS, University of London;
author of The Tradition of Indian Architecture (Yale, 1989).
Vidya Dehejia
Curator for Indian and Southeast Asian Art at the Freer Gallery of
Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, D.C.; author of
Early Buddhist Rock Temples (London, 1972).
Adam Hardy
Director of Prasada at De Montfort University, Leicester; author of
Indian Temple Architecture (New Delhi, 1994).
Anna L. Dallapiccola
Honorary Professor at the Department of Fine Art, University of
Edinburgh; editor of Vijayanagara: City and Empire (1985)
Kulbhushan Jain
Professor of Architecture at the School of Architecture in
Ahmedabad; author of Mud Architecture of the Indian Desert (AADI,
1992).
Sunand Prasad
Partner, Penoyre and Prasad Architects, London; author of The
Havelis of North India (Royal College of Art, London, 1988).
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INTRODUCTION
G.H.R. Tillotson
This is a book about conceptions of Indian architecture: about ways in
which India’s historical architecture has been—and ways in which it
might be—thought about. The writing of India’s architectural history
has always been problematic. The indigenous tradition of scholarly
writing on architecture, embodied in treatises known collectively as
silpa-sastras, concerns itself with theoretical, esoteric and religious
matters; these texts provide little description and critical analysis of
extant buildings. Such concerns were established as a domain of art-
historical scholarship during the British colonial period, by British
pioneer archaeologists and art historians and their Indian associates.
Inevitably, the model employed for this exercise was an imported one:
it was a matter of applying to Indian material methods and procedures
already developed elsewhere. In its formative phase, therefore, the
investigation of India’s architectural history—even when undertaken by
Indians themselves—was substantially foreign in approach. In recent
years, the writings of these pioneers of the last century have been
subjected to trenchant criticism, not to say deconstruction, as they have
been analysed in relation to their own historical and ideological
contexts. Attempts have also been made to seek out alternative models
for interpreting India’s great buildings of the past, models perhaps
based more closely on indigenous aesthetics and approaches. Complex
in themselves, both parts of this project are being undertaken at a time
when the wider field of the humanities has been, to say the least,
destabilised by recent developments in cultural theory—notably the
advancement of ideas about the relationship between objects and
‘discourses’ about them—which challenge the status of any text which
purports to offer an explicatory guide to events or artifacts of the past.
The contributors to this volume are amongst those who have been
most active in the field thus sketchily defined; in the present chapters
they summarise and further develop ideas and concerns already
signalled in their previous writings. These individuals have been
selected and brought together not in order to promote some factitious
consensus but, on the contrary, to demonstrate certain divergences
within the spectrum. They make up a varied group in a number of
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