Figure 4.1 Map showing distribution of Buddhist sites in India
4
From Multi-Religious Sites to Mono-Religious Monuments in South Asia
The Colonial Legacy of Heritage Management
The 1972 UNESCO Convention Concerning the Protection of the World’s Cultural and Natural Heritage, also known as the World Heritage Convention, aims to identify heritage sites of ‘outstanding universal value’ for preservation as a part of the heritage of mankind as a whole (Labadi 2007: 149). It is often argued that the criteria used for assessing ‘outstanding universal value of sites’ are based on European conceptions of linear history and chronology and hence, it is no surprise that a majority of sites on the World Heritage List are located in Europe (Labadi 2007). Of the 936 World Heritage sites, only twenty-eight are in India, of which twenty-three are cultural and five are natural properties.1 Implicit in the western construction of history is the search for origins and ideas of continuity, which reaffirm collective national identities. State-centred histories acquire centrality and the past is discussed as a linear progression of Empires or States. Lost in this process are parallel narratives and multi-vocality that are encapsulated within the monument’s multicultural past.
In this chaper, I argue that colonial intervention between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries in South Asia not only altered the nature of symbiotic linkages that had existed across Asia from at least the middle of the first millennium BCE onwards, but more significantly redefined the understanding of monuments, essentially religious structures, from being abodes of spiritual power to objects of artistic and aesthetic appreciation. Here, I focus on specific case studies from Madras Presidency, Andhra and the present state of Bihar, though the argument could be extended to other regions and religious architecture as well. As these examples show, there were changes in legislation relating to religious endowments, conservation policies and museum practices, and these had far-reaching implications for the study and understanding of the nature of Indic religions.
Sacred landscapes in Asia have generally been studied in terms of the architecture and imagery of the monuments or with regard to chronology and patronage, and more recently within debates of generation of colonial knowledge. A distinction is often made between colonial and nationalist studies of Indian architecture, with the former based on accurate delineation and documentation of architecture spearheaded by James Fergusson (1808–86), in South Asia, while the latter took recourse to aesthetics and spirituality, as evident in the writings of Anand Coomaraswamy (1877–1947). The positing of this supposed opposition between western scientific study of architecture and the Indian or nationalist predilection for Sanskrit treatises presents a simplistic representation of the complex legacy of colonialism, which attempted to impose a monotheistic religious identity on essentially culturally pluralistic societies in Asia. This was compounded by the colonial state’s limited understanding of the religious heritage of South Asia (Ray 2008: 417–49).
The practice of restoring ancient religious structures and their subsequent metamorphosis into monuments under the guidance of colonial archaeology rested on some of the assumptions that were fundamental to colonial power relations: namely, an interpretation of Indian history as a story of degeneration and decline caused by corrupt political and religious systems, a teleological understanding of British rule in India as the bearer of progress, unity, secularism and history and a belief in the role of archaeology and conservation of monuments as agents of progress, as bearers of the Enlightenment idea in a culture that, as nineteenth-century British historians emphatically claimed, lacked history.
(Sengupta 2010: 169)
In this quote Sengupta draws attention to unequal power relations and attempts by the British to consolidate these by taking recourse to India’s past, as they understood it. As will be discussed in the first section, the East India Company’s engagement with the temple in the seventeenth century started in the Madras Presidency where the Company first established itself and where some of the large and rich temples continued in worship. This engagement became a test case, as the Company sought to rationalise revenue collection from temple lands and to establish its authority modelled on that of the Hindu king. A major difference between the two, which the Company failed to comprehend, was that while the Hindu king combined judicial and administrative functions in himself, the Company by its very institutional structure dealt with the two functions of the state separately. This dichotomy resulted in contradictions in the Company’s dealings with the temple and resulted in introduction of legislation that had far-reaching implications not only for the communities involved in temple service, but also in terms of the wider academic discourse on the temple.
This is followed by a discussion of the site of Bodh Gaya located on the Phalgu River, a tributary of the Ganga which is 182 kilometres south of Patna, the capital of Bihar, but more significantly, the site where the Buddha is said to have attained Enlightenment. Colonial intervention sought to highlight the ‘Buddhist origins’ of the site, often leading to legal battles over control of religious architecture (Figure 4.1).
Figure 4.1 Map showing distribution of Buddhist sites in India
The third section discusses the different trajectories in the discovery, archaeological excavation and study of the sites of Amaravati (discovered in 1798) and Nagarjunakonda (exposed in 1920) both located in the Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh. Both the sites are located along the river Krishna in the Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh and are often quoted as Buddhist sites of the early centuries CE. This is in spite of the fact that there is a large corpus of inscriptions and sculptures which establish that the Buddhist mahacaitya at Amaravati continued to flourish from the third century BCE until the fourteenth century CE and that a temple to Amaresvara or Siva was built about half a kilometre from the stupa at the edge of the river Krishna in the tenth century, which coexisted with the Buddhist establishment. Located in the secluded Nagarjunakonda valley shut in on three sides by offshoots of the Nallamalai Hill Range, Nagarjunakonda provides crucial archaeological data on the changing religious landscape from the earliest Neolithic settlement in the third millennium BCE to the sixteenth century. More than thirty Buddhist establishments, nineteen Hindu temples and a few medieval Jaina shrines were unearthed in several seasons of archaeological excavations conducted at the site after its discovery in 1920 until its submergence in 1960. What marks a stark difference in the trajectories of conservation and heritage management at the two sites is the gap of over one hundred and twenty years in their discovery and restoration. Amaravati was discovered in 1798, while Nagarjunakonda came to light in 1920 and by then public awareness and intervention in heritage protection had acquired a different meaning. Finally, I present an overview of writings on architecture in the nineteenth century that framed the study of religious architecture in South Asia. The next section starts by tracing the beginnings of this process by focusing on the Hindu temple in precolonial and colonial India.
The Multi-Religious Meets the Colonial
(…) Under the new arrangements, (a certain amount of) land is assigned for [maintaining] perpetual lamps and another plot of land, bordering it, is set aside as a garden for areca nuts, coconuts, and flowers.
As for the temple servants who are in the [deity’s] presence, those among the temple servants who were formerly doing the three [services] of the assistant (māni) will continue to have custody of their land so long as they do the three services to the mani. The temple servants, the drummers, he who is temple manager by the king’s authority, the devotees and the flywhisk women are assigned residences in the temple precincts.
(992 CE inscription on the central shrine of the Uktavedisvara temple in Kuttalam, Thanjavur district; Orr 2000: 89)
This inscription records complex arrangements for the use of temple lands between the community of workers and the temple in the southern state of Tamilnadu in the precolonial period. Nor was this a unique and exceptional case. In the larger temples of coastal Andhra, we find mention of several classes of temple employees such as administrators, treasurers, accountants, temple women, cooks, sweepers, artisans, watchmen, etc. Resources for temple rituals and for the large number of employees were generated through surplus agricultural production on temple lands. In Telengana, for example, entire villages were created to provide for the deity enshrined in the temple and the proprietary rights to the land vested in the village deity. Land or villages were thus a temple’s precious resource (Talbot 2001: 89).
It seems that land belonging to temples was either cultivated under the direct management of temple staff or farmed out to local agriculturists on lease. An inscription from Katukuru, Khamam taluk in Andhra, tells us that the village levied a cess (local tax) on all double-cropped wet land, which was intended to provide for ritual services in the local temple dedicated to Gopinatha, a form of Vishnu. Another inscription stipulates the exact amounts of rice and other crops that peasants should pay a temple yearly in exchange for their use of temple lands. There was yet a third, occasional alternative to direct management of land or leasing. A donor could formally make a gift of land, but actually retain the management of it in his own hands, giving only a portion of the produce to the temple. In other words, while proprietorship of the land would be officially transferred, immediate control of it was not. Because so much land was donated to temples, these institutions were inextricably enmeshed in local agricultural networks (Talbot 2001: 102).
Wealthy temples in some areas could also serve as a source of capital for neighbouring villages. Cash donations received by the Rajarajesvara temple at Thanjavur during the eleventh century were sometimes loaned out to village assemblies or merchant associations at a standard rate of interest (Spencer 1968). At Tirupati during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, cash endowments were invested in irrigation improvements to the temple’s own lands. It is this complex web of economic transactions of the temple that allowed it to create and foster linkages across communities and to integrate diverse groups. Patronage to temples was crucial for the political elite, as it ‘validated their social position and at the same time facilitated greater intrusion into local agricultural processes’ (Talbot 2001: 120). The temple was thus a public arena for fostering and articulating social and political identities and hierarchies.
Appadurai (1981: 18) has argued that the primary consequence of British rule and its post-independence successor has been to radically complicate the idea of control and specifically to fragment key authority relations in the temple. The distinction between the administrative powers of the king, as distinct from the legislative powers of the British was that in the former case, the orders were context specific and context bound. However, in the latter case, the case law generated by legal decisions as well as the legislation on which such decisions were based, created rules and precedents of general applicability, so that decisions made in one context had under certain conditions, automatic application in other contexts (Appadurai 1981: 69). Thus, traditionally, an endowment to the temple meant the pooling of resources for ritual requirements of the deity. It tied together several corporate units such as families, caste groups, monasteries, kings, etc., either as donors or temple servants and linked the temple to a complex decentralised network located in its agrarian or urban landscape. Norms governing the functioning of these units vary from temple to temple, but are by and large ‘legitimated by a shared idea of the past, of hallowed convention, which is based on a fragile consensus’ (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1976: 205).
This fragile consensus, however, was irrevocably transformed first by the East India Company as it sought to establish its authority in the seventeenth century in the Madras Presidency in south India and later by the colonial government. Though normally the Company continued the practice of ancient customs, they also deviated from some observances, especially when their own financial and business interests were at stake, and when by doing so they could promote trade. This is particularly evident in the case of management of temple endowments in the Madras Presidency.
An important responsibility of a Hindu king, for example, was to provide protection to religious institutions situated in his jurisdiction. It was the king’s responsibility to see that they were properly administered and that funds were used for the purpose for which the temples were founded, though they left the administration and management of temples in the hands of several bodies of priests (Sontheimer 1964: 77). As the Company sought to replace the king, it was faced with the problem of administering temple endowments. One of the local customs that came in for drastic change was the payment of duties by the Hindu and Muslim merchants for the maintenance of each other’s place of worship. From the minutes of the Company, it is evident that such a custom existed, which they continued to respect and continued to collect the dues at the Custom House and distribute them among the religious institutions. By the end of the seventeenth century, this practice came under severe strain as more and more groups were allowed to opt out of it (Mudaliar 1974: 2).
First, contrary to their general principle of collection of dues on all merchandise, the English merchants were granted immunity from this requirement since the early days of the settlement. Another instance occurred when the Company granted special privileges to Armenians with a view to encourage them to settle in the English towns of south India. They were exempted ‘from the payment of minor dues ordinarily payable. (…) To Muskeet [mosque] and Pagodas [temple]’. In 1716, the Muslims refused to pay the duties towards the maintenance of the Hindu temples. Many of them left Madras and their departure affected the Company’s economy adversely. The Company therefore conceded to their demand that the amount paid by the Muslims should go to the mosque rather than to the temple (Mudaliar 1974: 5). Thus, by the early eighteenth century, the cohesion in maintaining each other’s religious shrines had been dented and radically altered with long-term implications for the relations between the two communities.
The relationship between the different communities was further complicated by a standing order of the Board of Revenue that the Christian missionaries should be prohibited from getting rent-free lands for their missionary purposes even though the Hindu and Muslim institutions were granted such lands for religious purposes. This no doubt was not taken kindly by the missionaries who widely believed that due to the support of the government, the indigenous religions were gaining more adherents and making their own mission impossible. As a result of the growing tension between the government and the missionaries, in 1833, in a Despatch to the Government of India, the Directors of the East India Company ‘opined that toleration and civil protection of religion must on no account be converted into patronage of what was at variance with precepts and practices of Christianity’ (Mudaliar 1974: 18).
To improve matters, the Religious Endowments Act XX of 1863 was passed to enable the Government to rid itself of all direct connections with the superintendence of religious establishments and transfer its functions to committees of local people who would function in accordance with established custom. The Act applied to all the public Hindu and Muslim religious endowments in the Presidencies of Bengal and Madras. The sole model that nineteenth-century British officials used was the English model of the ‘charitable trust’, which had roots going back to 1600 by which the protection of charitable trusts was vested in the king (Appadurai 1981: 173).
Not only the inherent lacunae of the Act, but also the personnel of the committees, the character and statutes of the trustees, and the inability of the people to adapt an ‘alien’ format, rendered the Act too weak and ineffective to protect the properties of the trusts. At least twelve attempts at legislation were made between 1870 and 1920 to remedy the defects of the Act either at Madras, Bombay or Calcutta. Act I of 1925 was an important milestone in the history of the Hindu Religious Endowments and was the first law relating purely to Hindu Religious Endowments enacted by the Legislature. Muslim endowments were however excluded from the scope of the Act, and later, a separate legislation – the Muslim Wakf Act was enacted (Mudaliar 1974: 52–53).
This situation was further complicated by awarding permanent occupancy rights to the Christian and Muslim tenants of the estates of temples and mathas in Tanjore, Trichinopoly, Madura and Ramnad districts, and this contributed to the conversion of a religious problem into one of an economic-religious character (Archaeological Survey of India file no. 169/2/44). A confidential report dated 30 June 1942 suggested that this change in the nature of the populace in the vicinity of the temples and mathas often created explosive situations as contrasted to those temples where large numbers of people living nearby remained devoted to the main deity enshrined in the shrine. This, for example, was the case with the temple dedicated to goddess Minakshi at Madurai.
Thus, by the twentieth century religious institutions had acquired mono-religious status – they were either ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’ or ‘Buddhist’ or ‘Jain’ and the integrated economic and social linkages across the multireligious spectrum had long been abandoned. No doubt these had serious implications for social relations in the subcontinent, as will be discussed in the case of Bodh Gaya in the present state of Bihar.
Bodh Gaya and the Mahabodhi Temple
The UNESCO charter describes the Mahabodhi temple as one of the four holy sites associated with the life of the Buddha, and also the earliest brick construction in the subcontinent and hence of great historical value. How valid is this definition? The Buddha is stated to have lived in the sixth to fifth centuries BCE, whereas the earliest archaeological evidence at Bodh Gaya dates from the fourth to third century BCE. A representation of a temple with a tower on a terracotta plaque excavated from Kumrahar near Patna and dated from the second to third century CE on the basis of the Kharosthi inscription is often cited as a prototype for the Mahabodhi temple (Mukherjee 1984–85: 43–46). The issue then is: When was the temple constructed and by whom? Huntington argues that ‘the present temple is largely a nineteenth century British Archaeological Survey of India reconstruction based on what is generally believed to be an approximately fifth-century structure’ (Huntington 1985: 61; Figure 4.2).
Figure 4.2 11th to 12th century model of the Bodh Gaya shrine from Myanmar. These circulated widely across the Buddhist realm and it is suggested that they formed the basis for reconstruction of the Bodh Gaya temple (Photo H. Ray)
More than its historicity, the Mahabodhi temple and the structures in its vicinity present a living record of additions and reconstructions – a practice frowned upon given the stress in archaeology on ‘origins’ rather than religious practice. These structures include a polished stone throne of third century BCE date, stone railings that were added first in the first century BCE as a result of donations by three women – Kurangi, Sirima and Nagadevi; the first was the sister-in-law of the ruler Agnimitra. After the reconstruction of the temple around the fifth century CE, a second railing was added a century later, while a gateway was constructed in the eighth century CE and there are several inscriptions recording gifts of images. Two other edifices are important: a plastered walkway at the spot where the Buddha walked after attaining Enlightenment; and a tank that a brahman had excavated at the site, as described by the seventh century CE Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang (Cunningham 1892).
There is no doubt that Bodh Gaya has been revered as a sacred site and centre of pilgrimage well into the present. There is a continuous record of missions from Sri Lanka, China and Burma starting from the early centuries CE that provided grants for maintenance and restoration work at the site. In addition, the Burmese sent two missions in 1035 and 1086 to renovate and repair the temple. Burmese inscriptions from this period also record a history of the temple at Bodh Gaya, crediting the Mauryan ruler Asoka with its construction. The great Tibetan translator Rinchen Sangpo (958–1051) placed offerings at the gate of Bodh Gaya followed by the Tibetan monk Dharmasvamin in 1234. The latter refers to several important places around the temple, such as the Tara shrine, a tooth relic and foot prints of the Buddha.
However, it needs to be stressed that ‘Bodhgaya is not, and never has been, only a Buddhist site. Hindus have been visiting Bodhgaya since at least the Buddha’s own lifetime, and beginning in the fifteenth century and extending into the twentieth, the site was actually maintained by a lineage of Saiva priests’ (Kinnard 1998: 817).
Archaeological data from neighbouring Gaya, six kilometres from Bodh Gaya, provides evidence for its inviolability in the performance of ancestral rituals. References to Gaya occur in the Mahabharata and by the fifth century CE it had attained great sanctity as recorded in the Visnusmriti. The Vayu Purana, dated to the eighth to ninth century, lists 324 holy sites around Gaya related to ancestral rites and also contains an elaborate mythology of Gaya recorded in the Gaya Mahatmya. The location of these holy sites mark out the Gaya ksetra or the meso-cosmos around the Visnupad temple (enshrining the footprints of Visnu) covering a radius of kilometres and including the Mahabodhi tree in the south, which is worshipped on the fourth day of the rituals.
Despite these references, building activity at the site dates to mid-eleventh century when the ruler of Gaya established a temple of Vishnu (Gadadhara) and other religious shrines. In the late eighteenth century, Queen Ahilya Bai Holkar of Indore built the Visnupad temple complex at Gaya. There is nevertheless inscriptional evidence from the eighth century onwards of donations and of a continuous tradition of pilgrimage at least from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries. In addition there are several examples of images from Bodh Gaya, which include a relief dated 807 CE depicting Surya, Lakulisa and Visnu. Its inscription indicates dedication of a caumukha Mahadeva icon within the boundaries of the temple complex for the benefit of the snatakas who were the inhabitants of the Mahabodhi (Barua 1934: 231). There are several other Saiva images found at the Mahabodhi temple complex that survive, while others are worshipped as heroes given the Vaisnava identity of the present temples at Gaya (Asher 1988: 74–88).
Thus, it is evident that Bodh Gaya and Gaya formed a religious complex revered by several sections of society with diverse religious affiliations and underwent both spatial and temporal changes. In the search for origins and chronology, the social history of religious architecture or the constant changes that any religious structure underwent as a ‘living’ monument in Asia were eliminated in the colonial period. This transformation of a shrine with varied following into a relic is a practice that was to be repeated at several other places of worship in South Asia. At Bodh Gaya, as elsewhere, it had serious ramifications.
The appeal of Buddhism lay in the perception that the Buddha had been an opponent of Hinduism and the vast majority of Victorians easily comprehended this antagonism. The image of the Buddha as a social reformer who led a crusade against Hinduism not only looms large in Victorian writings, but through Alexander Cunningham (1814–93) these ideas found their archaeological manifestation and continue to be repeated well into the present. Thus, while James Fergusson highlighted a racial-religious framework for the study of Indian architecture based on photo archives of plans and architectural details, Cunningham’s treatment took in sculptures and inscriptions as well. Cunningham sought to divide religious architecture on the basis of dynastic history, though his primary concern remained the study of Buddhism, which had found no mention in the Puranas.
Cunningham’s archaeological zeal was met with the religious fervour of Anagarika Dharampala (1864–1933), the Sri Lankan Buddhist reformer who was influenced by Edwin Arnold’s (1832–1904) book Light of Asia published in 1879 and attempted to restore sites associated with the Buddha to their past glory (Brekke 2002). For Dharampala, Bodh Gaya was an especially galling example of the worship of the Buddha image by non-Buddhists who regarded it as an avatar of Vishnu; in other words, the priests clothed it and performed rituals as if it were a Hindu deity. After several early attempts at gaining control of the temple at Bodh Gaya, Dharampala finally decided to resort to direct action. On the morning of 25 February 1895, he entered the temple along with his assistants and attempted to install a Japanese stone image of the jina Buddha Amitabha. This was resented by the followers of the Saiva mahant who summarily removed the idol. Kinnard argues that in ‘trying to restore the image of the Buddha to its rightful place in the Mahabodhi temple’, Dharmapala was ‘himself responding to, and at the same time perpetuating, a long-standing Orientalist conception of Hindu-Buddhist relations in which Hindus, through their idolatrous and fetishistic ritualizing, perverted the pure image of the Buddha’ (Kinnard 1998: 820). Nevertheless, the removal of the image led to a legal dispute that went through several ups and downs (Copland 2004: 527–60).
In 1903, the Viceroy, Lord Curzon intervened in the dispute on the side of the Buddhists and tried to persuade the mahant of Gaya to hand over the temple to the Imperial Government. It is no coincidence that in 1901, the Viceroy had received an invitation from the Mahabodhi Society to lay the foundation stone of a new guest house for Buddhist pilgrims at Gaya, which the Society planned to name the Victoria Memorial Dharamsala to honour the Queen Empress. Curzon, however, had to beat a hasty retreat in the face of public opinion, which castigated him for pressurising the mahant to give over his rights to the temple. By the 1920s, a disillusioned Dharampala turned to Indian politicians of the Congress Party to gain custody of the Bodh Gaya shrine. This was a strategy that paid off, but only after Dharampala’s death and Indian Independence in August 1947. Early in 1949, the newly elected Congress Provincial Ministry introduced the Bodh Gaya Temple Bill into Bihar Legislative Assembly that transferred control over the temple to a nine member committee comprising of the District Magistrate of Gaya as chairman, four Buddhists and four Hindus (Copland 2004: 555).
Thus, Bodh Gaya is a classic case of a multireligious site being converted to an exclusive shrine of the Buddhists in the nineteenth century, largely through Cunningham’s archaeological work; a shrine that underwent legal disputes to authenticate and legalise this affiliation, but to no effect. Finally, it was the politicians in post-Independence India that provided corroboration and support. Is Bodh Gaya an isolated case or are there other examples? We now move to the next section in an attempt to contrast the history of the discovery and restoration of Amaravati with that of Nagarjunakonda – both located in the Krishna valley of Andhra. These are, however, different in their case histories from Bodh Gaya – the question is: Did archaeological work at these sites involve local participation? Did the local population recognise the significance of these early Buddhist sites? In the case of Bodh Gaya, Copland (2004) argues that public opinion was a major factor that stopped Lord Curzon in his bid to take control of the Mahabodhi temple – was this replicated elsewhere?
Religious Architecture in the Krishna Valley
The story of Amaravati starts in the eighteenth century and is closely linked to Colin Mackenzie (1754–1821), who secured a commission in East India Company’s Madras Army in 1783 and carried out two surveys: one of Guntur and the other of the roads from Nellore to Ongole. In 1792, he was appointed as Engineer and Surveyor to the Subsidiary Force in the service of the Nizam of Hyderabad, and in 1798, he encountered the stupa at Amaravati, making him the first European to discover this second century BCE monument, though he did not recognise it as being of Buddhist affiliation (Figure 4.3). In 1816, Mackenzie returned to Amaravati with a team of draftsmen who drew pictures of the sculptures found on-site. These 1419 drawings are now in the British Library (Howes 2002), London, and included in the Amaravati Album whose importance lies in two areas. First, it documents one of the earliest known excavations of a religious site in peninsular India, and second, it contains drawings of sculptures, many of which are now lost, while others are dispersed in museums both in India and Britain largely as a result of this early rediscovery.
Figure 4.3 Amaravati sculpture now in the British Museum (Photo H. Ray)
In 1905–6 and again in 1908–9, Alexander Rea conducted two more seasons of excavations at the site and uncovered Iron Age Megalithic remains, thereby considerably deepening its chronological span. In the post-Independence period, the Archaeological Survey re-excavated the site of Amaravati in 1958–59 and again in 1973–74, and it is evident that the region continued in occupation from the prehistoric period onwards. The crucial issue that needs to be addressed is the nature of religious structures at the site from the little evidence that is still available in the post Buddhist mahacaitya phase of Amaravati (Burgess 1882, 1887), i.e. at the time of the construction of the Amaresvara temple in the tenth century CE. On the basis of inscriptions, it is evident that the mahacaitya continued to coexist with the Hindu temple well into the fourteenth century CE. The pillar inscription of AD 1182 refers to the presence of a Saiva temple of Amaresvara at the site and adjacent to it a very lofty caitya of lord Buddha (Epigraphia Indica 6, 1900–901: 146–60), while the Gadaladeniya rock inscription of 1344 from Sri Lanka records the restoration of a two-storey image house at Dhanyakataka by a sthavira named Dharmakirti (Epigraphia Zeylanica 4: 90). The evidence from inscriptions is further corroborated by finds of Buddhist stone sculptures and bronzes and a seventh to eighth century inscription in Sanskrit detailing matters of Buddhist principle (Knox 1992: 215–23). The Vijayanagar kings did provide grants to maintain the temple, but it was the local kings of the eighteenth century CE who provided vast endowments to the Amaresvara temple.
This modern discovery of Buddhism in India is attributed to Edwin Arnold and his writings which were translated into Hindi and several other languages. The overall impression given was that all memory of Buddhism had been lost in its land of origin. Velcheru Narayana Rao argues that Tirupati Sastri (1872–1920) and Venkata Sastri (1870–1950) – both poets writing in Telugu at the behest of the zamindar Krishana Rao composed the life story of the Buddha following the second century CE poet Asvaghosa and others – the latter including Edwin Arnold (Rao 2008: 101). To what extent can this line of reasoning be sustained? What is the evidence for knowledge of Buddhism in the nineteenth century prior to Arnold’s work? To address this question, movements of people between Andhra and Burma need to be taken into account, especially after the introduction of regular steamer services in 1870. These migrations were largely from coastal Andhra and were seasonal, especially since the requirement for manpower was in rice mills and agricultural operations. There were also movements to counter conditions of scarcity and famine. As early as 1865–66 there is evidence for large-scale movement of people from the coastal district of Visakhapatnam in Andhra to lower Burma to flee the famine raging in the former areas (Adapa 2001: 12–13). These travels across the Bay of Bengal no doubt brought familiarity with Buddhism, a living religion in Burma, but did it translate into action to save the Buddhist heritage of Andhra? This can be best answered through the example of Nagarjunakonda.
At the time of its discovery in 1920, Nagarjunakonda was still a wild and desolate place shut in by a ring of the rocky Nallamalai range. The nearest railway station was at Macherla, twenty kilometres from the site, and the remaining distance had to be traversed by bullock cart and by foot. The other alternative was to use the river for getting in and out of the valley. The hamlet of Pullareddigudem was located in the centre of the valley and was inhabited by Telugu Hindus and tribal groups such as the Lambadis and Chenchus (Longhurst 1938: 2). After his excavations, Longhurst found it easier to store the sculptures in a special enclosure at the site itself than to remove them, and suggested that a museum be constructed to house the antiquities. When Woolley visited Nagarjunakonda in 1938, a museum was being constructed there at a cost of 27,000 Rupees, but this decision was met with a lot of criticism from him (Ray, 2007: chapter 4).2
In 1939, Woolley, in his report on the working of the Archaeological Survey, seriously questioned the wisdom of retaining sculptures at a site as inaccessible as Nagarjunakonda, which did not even have a motorable road connecting it.
A collection of magnificent stone sculptures of a type not represented in any museum in India is kept out of public sight at Nagarjunakonda, an almost inaccessible place.
(Leonard Woolley report: 29)3
Woolley argued that both the excavations and the sculptures had been kept open for public viewing, but apart from officers of the Department, he was the first person to visit the museum in two years. In 1944, the newly appointed Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), Mortimer Wheeler, supported this view and suggested that the sculptures from the site should be removed either to the Indian Museum, Calcutta or the Government Museum, Madras.
Officers within the Survey, such as G.C. Chandra, Superintendent (Southern Circle) and Dr A. Aiyapan, Superintendent (Government Museum, Madras), resisted this suggestion on the grounds that in the best interest of study at site and for conservation, all such stone sculptures should remain at the site of the archaeological museum at Nagarjunakonda.4 Aiyapan drew Wheeler’s attention to the Government Order regarding regulation of antiquities and their distribution.5 Wheeler responded that the Government orders did not apply in this case, since the building at Nagarjunakonda was not and could not be a ‘museum’ in the proper sense of the term. In any case, the order in question may be regarded as a dead letter.6 But perhaps the most strident critique of it came from an unexpected quarter.
On 1 October 1944, the Working Committee of the Guntur District Andhra Mahasabha held a meeting at Sattenapalli and passed a resolution emphatically disapproving any move to shift the sculptures from Nagarjunakonda to Calcutta or to any other museum. Agitation and angry protests at several levels, including in the Legislative Assembly, followed this resolution and copies of fourteen resolutions passed by various bodies condemning the removal of antiquities were sent to Wheeler. In addition, daily newspapers such as the Hindu, the Indian Express, Madras, Andhra Patrika, Deshabhimani and Guntur, covered the protests and published the statements made.
On 20 November 1944, Mr K.S. Gupta raised a series of questions relating to the removal of sculptures from Nagarjunakonda in the Legislative Assembly and pointed out that the colonial Government had already presented the tooth relic of the Buddha discovered at Nagarjunakonda to the Mahabodhi Society and he feared that the Nagarjunakonda finds would follow the Amaravati sculptures to London. He stressed the importance of Nagarjunakonda both in the history of the Andhras as well as a centre of pilgrimage.7 Dr M. Rama Rao, Professor of History at the Hindu College, Guntur and Secretary of the Andhra History Committee, spearheaded the protests at the academic level. It was also resolved that in case the ASI was unwilling to run the museum themselves, they should hand it over to a local body in Guntur District.
On Mortimer Wheeler’s instructions, the Superintending Archaeologist (Southern Circle), undertook a detailed analysis of the expenditure incurred at Nagarjunakonda and calculated that 19,064 Rupees had been spent on the excavations, which had aroused interest among the local groups. 1,600 visitors went to the site museum annually, averaging 4.5 persons daily.8
These protests had the desired effect and forced Mortimer Wheeler to travel to Guntur in March 1945 to pacify local groups. In his meeting with them, he gave them two years in which to get together a suitably guaranteed Andhra museum. This discussion clearly indicates the strength of public opinion in the preservation of heritage even in pre-independence India. As a result, the finds from the excavations at Nagarjunakonda were not only preserved at the site, but ASI also conducted salvage archaeology from 1954–60 before the submergence of the site under the waters of the Nagarjunasagar dam. ASI also brought out several publications highlighting the beginnings of settlement in the valley and the plans of the different monuments and religious structures. Thus the discovery and preservation of Nagarjunakonda presents a marked contrast to that of Amaravati thanks largely to the dissemination of information about the site in the press and the interest generated in academic and local communities to protect it and to insist on the preservation of its antiquities at the site itself. One final issue needs to be addressed, and that relates to changes in the nature of interaction between the colonial state and religious institutions, and the extent to which legislation introduced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries impacted this relationship.
However, before that, it would be pertinent to discuss the academic discourse on the past that developed and within which the ‘discovery’ and cataloguing of the religious architecture no longer in worship were debated and reviewed.
The ‘New’ Disciplines: Archaeology and Art History
The connection between architectural form and religious change was firmly established in nineteenth-century India and the quest for chronology securely rooted architecture within linear time. More importantly, this linear development of Buddhist-Jain-Hindu architecture in the subcontinent accepted notions of origins and decline and antagonism between the different religions, coexistence being ruled out.
The Western caves afford the most vivid illustration of the rise and progress of all the great religions that prevailed in India in the early centuries of our era and before it. They show how Buddhist religion rose and spread, and its form afterwards became corrupt and idolatrous. They explain how it consequently came to be superseded by the nearly cognate form of Jainism and the antagonistic development of the revived religion of the Brahmins.
(Fergusson and Burgess 1969: 166)
James Fergusson (1808–86) came to India to work for the family firm of Fairlie, Fergusson & Co. of Calcutta. Soon his interest shifted from merchandising to architecture; and for about six years from 1836 to 1841, he travelled to various parts of India, studying and documenting Indian architecture. After returning to London in 1845, his sketches were lithographed and published in a book entitled, Illustrations of the Rock Cut Temples of India, which consisted of eighteen plates.
In Fergusson’s frame of reference, Indian architecture provided an important missing link in the development of architecture in the world, especially the twelfth to thirteenth century flowering of architecture in Europe. Besides, even though India could never reach ‘the intellectual supremacy of Greece, or the moral greatness of Rome’, architecture in India was still a living art, which could inform in a variety of ways about developments in Europe (Fergusson 1910: 4–5). This was significant, since there was a lack of historical texts in India, and post-fifth-century Indian history could only be studied through monuments and inscriptions. Fergusson’s classification was essentially within a racial-religious framework and the limits of Dravidian architecture were defined by the spread of people speaking Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kanada. He proposed that a characteristic feature of Dravidian temples was the emphasis on ornamentation and almost every nook and corner was elaborately sculpted to the detriment of architectural planning. Another failing of the region, according to him, was that Dravidian temples were a fortuitous aggregation of parts, arranged without plan unlike European architecture, which adopted a uniform plan, changing only with the progress of time (Fergusson 1910: 39–40, 302).
Fergusson applied these criteria to the study and analysis of the Durga temple at Aihole, which was first photographed in the middle of the nineteenth century by a British artillery officer, Biggs. The temple’s apsidal form led James Fergusson to suggest that it was a Buddhist structure subsequently appropriated for the worship of Siva, and by the 1860s, the temple featured ‘as an inglorious, structural version of a Buddhist caitya hall, appropriated by Brahmanical Hindus and buried under rubble at a site of the ancient Chalukya dynasty’. As a result of subsequent investigation and research not only on the plan of the temple, but also its rich imagery, it is now evident that the Durga temple is one of nearly 150 temples built across 450 square kilometres of the Deccan in the seventh and eight centuries CE, though the Durga temple is the largest and most lavishly constructed monument dating to around 725–30 CE (Tartakov 1997: 6). It is also apparent that religious development of the period was diverse and included not only the setting up of Hindu temples, but also shrines of the Buddhists and the Jainas (Tartakov 1997: 102). Thus the evidence does not support any association of the apsidal form solely with Buddhism.
Another multireligious site was Ter in the present state of Maharashtra. In 1901, Henry Cousens visited Ter, about 45 kilometres east of Barsi, a major cotton centre, and remarked on the extensive mounds around the town littered with brickbats and pot shards. Remains of several brick-built Hindu, Jain and Buddhist shrines and scattered sculptures were extant at the site and in his report, Cousens describes the apsidal temple, which he claims was earlier a Buddhist caitya or shrine on account of the brick sizes (17” × 9” × 3”) and the form of the architecture, but was later converted to a Hindu temple of Trivikrama after addition of a flat-roofed mandapa (hall). Other finds included ‘four carved Buddhist stones’ used in the Jaina temple of Mahavira and Parsvanatha; a number of sati stones ‘with a bent arm with open palm upon them’; mutilated figures of Siva, Siva-Parvati, Bhairava and Ganapati of the Chalukyan period; and a modern shrine with Vithoba’s footprints, ‘while in a niche, in the back of this same temple, is an old image of Visnu’. Clearly then, Ter was a multireligious site with a variety of religious architecture, which continued from the early centuries of the Common Era into the present. Cousens, of course, was more interested in tracing the conversions and antagonisms between Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism (Cousens 1904).
Thus, James Fergusson established a link between architectural form, ethnicity and religious affiliation. He postulated that India produced cyclical visions of time, which were inconsistent with historical reasoning and hence the reliance on colonial methodologies when studying modern disciplines such as art history. What is often overlooked in this formulation is that within larger cyclical notions, regional histories of monuments link social structures, space and time. Babb terms this ‘social time’ and analyses three Jain temples in Rajasthan: the Dadhimati temple at Goth-Manglod near Nagaur, and the Mahavir and Sacciya Mata temples at Osian as ‘physical substrata for the deposit of historical ideas’ (Babb 2000: 193–222).
In the final analysis, it is evident that colonial policies and redefinitions of monuments, history, ruins and conservation practices shaped and reflected larger imperial politics and the bureaucratic order. Examining how new forms of knowledge such as archaeology arose and was harnessed to suit the colonial vision through institutions such as the Archaeological Survey of India must involve addressing indigenous thought-worlds and knowledge practices, such as methods of restoration of religious shrines.
How did the state deal with resistance to colonial attempts at enforcing conservation practices, which were clearly contrary to the local practice of sponsoring restoration of religious shrines? In the context of Bodh Gaya, we do know that the Bengal Government deputed Rajendralal Mitra (1823/4–91), a proponent of the social history of monuments to advise the Government in regard to the manner in which the operations of the Burmese excavators should be controlled. The question that needs to be addressed relates to Mitra’s methodology in the study of religious architecture and the extent to which it differed from that of Cunningham and Fergusson. Mitra stressed that ‘every literature, however fabulous or mythical may be its character, has a historical value and that of India cannot be an exception. In the same way, almost every monument or carved stone (…) bears on its face an index to the intellectual condition of some individual or community and may be made, with proper care to yield an acceptable contribution to the cause of history’ (Mitra 1875–80: v). Thus of all the three, Mitra’s canvas as it related to a study of the visual data for a social history of India was perhaps the widest, since Fergusson focused mainly on architecture to the detriment of sculpture and the textual evidence and Cunningham on the archaeology of Buddhism based on accounts of Chinese pilgrims. Also, it was Mitra who attempted a social history of architecture – a methodology largely neglected in subsequent writings.
In considering colonial encounters, it is therefore important not to allow the recolonisation of South and South East Asian intellectual history by inclusion of studies of monuments in dynastic mode into linear meta-narratives of national histories, with emphasis on political legitimisation, ‘decline and fall’, followed by the myth of colonial salvation. As Appadurai has stated, the intimate yet delicate relationship between state, sect and temple was altered in several key respects with the introduction of British rule. First, the temple was not essential to the maintenance of the colonial state’s authority in south India. Besides, given the state’s increasing revenue bureaucracy, it was increasingly drawn into the day-to-day functioning of religious shrines, which it was reluctant to resolve, given the separation of executive from judiciary under British rule. ‘Given the contrast between the context-bound nature of Hindu royal orders made to resolve temple disputes and the generalizing tendency of the case law of the British courts (which grew immensely important after 1870) it is no surprise that the temple and the Anglo-Indian judiciary grew entangled in a growing cycle of interactions, which resolved little, but provoked much new conflict’ (Appadurai 1981: 215).
Notes
1 Online:http://whc.unesco.org/en/list (accessed 15 November 2010).
2 Archaeological Survey of India File no. 27D/1/44: Distribution of Antiquities from Nagarjunakonda.
3 Archaeological Survey of India File no. 27D/1/44: Distribution of Antiquities from Nagarjunakonda.
4 Archaeological Survey of India File no. 27D/1/44, letter no. 103-C/153 dated 14 March 1944.
5 Archaeological Survey of India File no. 27D/1/44, letter no. 154 of 26 April 1930.
6 Archaeological Survey of India File no. 27D/1/44, DO 5315 dated 8 August 1944.
7 Archaeological Survey of India File no. 13/4/1944: Assembly questions regarding the removal of antiquities from Nagarjunakonda.
8 Archaeological Survey of India File no. 27D/1/44, no. 165 dated 5 November 1944.
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