# A Handbook of Indian Art/Section 1/Chapter 6

CHAPTER VI
the sikhara temple, or king's tabernacle
The stūpa, as we have seen, was the monument of a dead king, and the cult of stūpa worship, which took the chief place in early Buddhist ritual, was no doubt connected with the shrāddha ceremonies of royalty. The stūpa-house, as a memorial chapel, must have had its counterpart in some kind of sacrificial structure, temporary or otherwise, where the living king assisted at the performance of religious rites.
Such were the tabernacles in which the fire and Soma rites of the Aryan tribes were performed in Vedic India. In them the celebrant, whether he were chieftain or high priest, sometimes remained for a whole year, so they must have been structures upon which the royal craftsmen bestowed religious care. In the Sathapatha Brahmana, a special form of tabernacle called the Āgnidrīya, or fire-house, is mentioned, which was quite distinct from the Āgni-sāla, the fire-hall of the Aryan household. It was in charge of a special fire-priest, the Āgnīdhra, and through the kindling of the fire it became the dwelling-place of the All-gods (Visve-devas).
The Vedic rites were therefore not independent of the builder's craft, as Fergusson and other writers have assumed. In later Vedic times the development of the Yoga cult would have made the building of a private ​royal chapel almost a necessity. There is much historical significance in the name given to a temple in Southern India—a kōvil, or King's house.
The limited view of ancient Indian life afforded by early Buddhist sculpture gives no indication of any kind of royal chapel other than the domed stūpa shrine. Buddhism was a protest against the rites celebrated by Aryan kings in Vedic India. No Brahmanical paintings or sculptures of that period are known. In the beginning the Buddhist cult of stūpa worship concerned itself with the Buddha as the Great Yogi, who at his death had attained to Pari-Nirvāna—the Sākya Prince had not assumed any priestly functions or instituted a ritual of divine worship. The royal chapel in early Buddhist times conformed to the ritual of stūpa worship and was covered by a dome, as shown in the shrine attached to the Palace of the Gods in the Bharhut sculptures (Pl. XXXIV, a).
It was not until Mahāyāna Buddhism introduced the idea of a Bodhīsattva as a king of the heavenly spheres that another form of shrine appeared in Indian art—that which is crowned by the curvilinear steeple, or sikhara, not unlike the high peaked crown, or mūkuta, of the Bodhīsattva himself. And the form, when it does appear, is, as Fergusson observed, already fully developed as if it had a long history behind it.
There are several indications that the sikhara temple was the Kshatriya king's chapel where the rites of Sūrya or Vishnu worship were performed in his presence as the gods' representative on earth. The cap of it, in the oldest as well as in the most modern examples, is invariably the same as that found in Asoka's imperial standards—the amalaka, or fruit of Vishnu's blue lotus, the symbol of a Chakra-vartin, or world ruler. The Mānāsāra Silpa-Sastra lays down the rule that a ​Vishnu temple must be placed on the Rājapatha, the King's Road, with its entrance facing east. The geographical distribution of the sikhara temple corresponds with that of the Vaishnava cult; it is the almost universal form in Northern India, where the Vaishnavaites are in the great majority, whereas the temples in Southern India, where the Saivas predominate, are as frequently crowned by the stūpa dome.
In the Buddhist temple architecture the sikhara became the distinctive mark of the Bodhīsattva cult, associated with Mahāyānist doctrine, while the stūpa was the architectonic symbol of the Hīnayānists, for whom the Buddha was a yogi and a teacher rather than a king. Mahāyānists pursued the path of bhakti, or loyalty to their spiritual king; orthodox Hīnayānists sought salvation in the jnāna-marga, the way of knowledge of the Law. The distinction between the Buddha as a king and as a guru is very clearly marked in Indian painting and sculpture.
As to the peculiar Indian form of the sikhara, there can be little doubt that it was derived from bambu and thatch construction. The amalaka was probably the straw cap bound with strings to make it watertight, and the kalasa, or jar, was an inverted water-pot placed over the ends of the bambu supports to protect them from the rain, according to the practice still followed by native thatchers in Bengal and Southern India. The symbolism of the lotus and the nectar or soma jar was a decorative treatment of these practical constructive details.
There is good reason to believe that this most characteristic feature of Indo-Aryan architecture was not, as Fergusson was convinced, indigenous in India, but was introduced by the Aryans from Mesopotamia, ​together with the millets, barley, wheat, and oil-seeds with which they enriched the agriculture of non-Aryan India. There does not exist in India any primitive indigenous type from which the sikhara can be derived, for the temple car covered by a bambu framework in the form of sikhara can hardly be the prototype of the temple itself. But the tall conical mud huts of Mesopotamian villages are strikingly suggestive of the conical form of temple sikhara sometimes found in India.
The more usual curvilinear form of it in India is only a technical modification of structure due to the use of a bambu framework. As to the antiquity of these cone-shaped structures in Mesopotamia there can be no doubt. A group of buildings carved on a relief discovered by Layard in the Palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh (Pl. XX, a), built in the eighth century b.c., shows both the sikhara cone and the hemispherical stūpa-dome. Whether this relief represents a village or a palace, it certainly suggests the probability that both the Indo-Aryan forms were derived from Mesopotamia—a probability which is greatly increased by the recent discovery of the Aryan domination of the Euphrates valley in the second millennium b.c., and of the interesting fact that the Aryans of Mitanni, besides worshipping the Vedic gods, also venerated the Assyrian goddess Ishtar or Ashtaroth. "Verily now have I sent her (Ishtar)," writes King Dasaratha to his brother-in-law, Amenhetep III, King of Egypt, "and she is gone. Indeed, in the time of my father, the lady Ishtar went to that land; and just as she dwelt therein formerly and they honoured her, so may now my brother honour her ten times more than before." This remarkable letter gives a very different account of ​the religious attitude of the Aryans in Vedic times to that given by Fergusson when he writes of the sikhara that "no-one can accuse the pure Aryans of introducing this form into India, or of building temples at all, or of worshipping images of Siva and Vishnu with which these temples are filled."
Another more ancient Mesopotamian sculpture is the famous stele of Narām Sin, circ. 2750 b.c., in the Louvre (Pl. XX, b), commemorating his victory over Satuni, King of Lulaba. Whether the tall cone represents a king's fort, or is only an artistic convention for the summit of a lofty mountain, it certainly suggests a connection between the Indian sikhara and Mesopotamian art, for the shrine crowned by the sikhara and by Vishnu's lotus emblem was a symbol of the holy mountain Mandara, of the mystic Merū round which the sun and moon revolved.
To sum up the evidence, it seems that the sikhara, as well as the many Assyrian or Babylonian decorative motives occurring at Sānchī and Bharhut, are accounted for by six centuries of Aryan rule in Mesopotamia. Used as a temporary shrine or tabernacle in ancient Vedic ritual, and later on in the cult of Yoga, the sikhara was introduced into India by the Aryan conquerors; there, by the employment of bambu in its construction, it acquired its peculiar Indian curvilinear form. Buddhism deprived it of its raison d'être as the shrine of the Sun-god; therefore the form only survived in bambu or wooden materials until the development of the cult of bhakti in Mahāyāna Buddhism again made the king, as a Bodhīsattva, the symbol of divine majesty and the temporary ruler of the Sangha. In Gupta times the revival of Vedic traditions in the royal courts of India ​inspired the master-builder to give a permanent form to the royal sikhara such as Asoka had given to the stūpa. Thus, when the sikhara first appears in Indian architecture in brick and stone, the form of it was fully developed, for it was coeval with the beginning of Aryan rule in India.
The form of the sikhara lent itself well for enshrining the image of Vishnu in his especial character as the Upholder of the Heavens (Pl. LX, a), for then he is always standing rigidly upright, his body forming the mystic Mount Merū round which the universe revolves. He is armed with the weapons of an Aryan chieftain, and on his high-peaked crown, the form of which is repeated by the sikhara, flash the three sun jewels, marking sunrise, noon, and sunset. Through the doorway facing east, or the window above it usually formed like the great window of the Buddhist stūpa-house, the light of the morning sun streams in upon the image when Lakshmi, the bright goddess of the day, rises from the cosmic ocean to greet her lord and throws herself upon his breast.
Fergusson assumed the sikhara temple to have been borrowed by the Aryans from some aboriginal fetish shrine of a type which no longer existed. But in reality it is the type of Indian architectural design which retains most clearly the mark of its Aryan associations; and its history, if it were completely known, would be ​the history of Aryan rule in India, as every Indo-Aryan dynasty built royal chapels for the worship of its Ishta-devata. Beginning with Vedic times, it was the symbol of the Kshatriya chieftain's priestly functions, laid aside for a time when the Buddhist monk became the people's guru, and the relic shrine the people's temple. It reappeared when Buddhism itself found an iconic symbol in the crowned king, and when the abbot of a monastery assumed all the insignia of royalty. From that time to the present day almost every temple in Aryāvarta, the modern Hindustan, has been crowned by the royal sikhara.
Plate XIIIa
ASOKA'S TEMPLE AT BODH-GAYĀ
Plate XIIIb
EXISTING TEMPLE AT BODH-GAYĀ
When this temple took the place of Asoka's, the Buddha was already worshipped as the Supreme Lord of the Sangha and an incarnation of Vishnu. Several of the Buddhist Kushān kings had names which were synonyms of Vishnu, and the tree was one of Vishnu's symbols. His was the mystic tree of which the sun and moon and stars are fruits. It was therefore appropriate that the spot where the Buddha attained to full knowledge of the Universal Law under the Tree of Wisdom should be marked by the symbol of world-dominion, Vishnu's sacred shrine. When in modern times the Mahant of a neighbouring Vaishnava monastery took possession of the restored temple, the Burmese Buddhists who were accustomed to worship there protested that Hindus had no right to be custodians of the holy places of Buddhism; but in all probability the Mahant's claim was historically justified, for the Vaishnavas were the heirs of Mahāyāna Buddhism, though the creed of the monks of Bodh-Gayā did not correspond with that of Sākya Muni.
The Bodh-Gayā temple is more interesting for its historical associations than for its architectural design, and unfortunately no important structural temples of the Gupta period, the classic age of Indian sculpture and painting, are extant, doubtless because they were built either of wood or of brick. But the succeeding centuries which preceded Gothic architecture in Europe were extraordinarily rich in temple building. Many volumes would be necessary to do full justice to the fertility of invention and skill of craftsmanship lavished upon the royal chapels of the dynasties which ruled over Aryāvarta.
​For the style of architecture most characteristic of the great Gupta period, one must turn to the ancient capitals of Indian dynasties least affected by the storm of Muhammadan iconoclasm which began to sweep over Northern India in the eleventh century, and continued to rage at intervals down to the time of Aurangzib. Bhuvanēshvar, which from a time of unknown antiquity was the capital of the kingdom of Orissa, or Kalinga—the conquest of which by Asoka is described in his Edicts as the event which led to his becoming a disciple of the True Law—is one of these.
Surrounded by rocky hills in the caves of which Jain and Buddhist hermits found retreats, Bhuvanēshvar in the course of centuries acquired an odour of sanctity which made it, like Benares and other places, a city of the gods, encircled by a pilgrims' procession path and filled with hundreds of temples. The name Bhuvanēshvar, "Lord of the Universe," suggests that it was a king's capital, and the temples are, in fact, nearly all crowned by the royal sikhara, and have the orthodox aspect of a Vishnu shrine facing the rising sun, though in many cases Siva is the deity worshipped.
In Jain, Buddhist, or Brahmanical temples when the saint or deity of the shrine is worshipped as a hero, or world-conqueror, Indian craft ritual ordains that the roof shall be Vishnu's spire instead of Siva's dome.
In the centre of the group towers the steeple of the Great Linga-rāj temple, over 180 feet high (Pl. XIV, a), a masterpiece of fine masonry built of the local laterite stone, perfectly jointed without mortar or cement.
Plate XIVa
SIKHARA OF LINGA-RĀJ TEMPLE, BHUVANĒSHVAR
Plate XIVb
MĀRKANDĒYA POOL AND TEMPLE, BHUVANĒSHVAR
But archæologists assign to it a later date—the ninth or tenth century. Such discrepancies between Indian and European chronology are often accounted for by the fact that a great temple built as a votive offering by a ruling dynasty frequently enclosed a smaller shrine of venerable antiquity. We have seen that this was the case with the Great Stūpa at Sānchī; and as Bhuvanēshvar was a sacred city long before the ninth century, it is not unlikely that the king who built the Linga-rāj temple to the glory of his patron deity enclosed within the royal sikhara an ancient shrine where his ancestors had been accustomed to worship. The "linga" of Siva worshipped there may have been originally a Jain or Buddhist stūpa. It would be as easy to enclose the cubical dome-shaped shrine, such as is depicted in early Buddhist sculpture, within Vishnu's lofty steeple as it would be to cover a stūpa by a stūpa. Whether this method was adopted in particular cases could only be ascertained by careful examination of the holy of holies, into which the inquisitive archæologist is never allowed to enter.
It is, however, perfectly clear that this was one of the main principles of Indian temple design. A shrine in which a god had deigned to dwell for centuries might fall into decay from natural causes, but the temple architect who was priest as well as builder would never profane it by rebuilding it on a larger scale. Another site might be chosen upon which to raise a ​more stately abode, or the deity might be honoured by building a series of enclosures, each one grander and more sumptuous than the last, whereby the builder could demonstrate the manifold aspects in which the divinity declared itself, and provide accommodation for the priests and pilgrims who worshipped there. But the shrine itself could only be preserved for posterity by enclosing it in imperishable materials. Both the stūpa and the sikhara were sacrosanct symbols which could not be lightly changed to make them more pleasing to the eye.
Plate XVa
SIKHARA SHRINE, CHOHTAN, MARWAR
Plate XVb
SIKHARA SHRINE, BOD, BENGAL
The magnificent royal chapels built in the course of many centuries by the Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu dynasties of Northern India are a proof that the restrictions thus imposed upon the master-builder's initiative did not deaden his creative powers—the decadence of Indian architecture was due to other causes.
Kanauj, Benares, Ujjain, Mathurā, Gaur or Lak nauti, and other important capitals of ancient India, where one would expect to find the most splendid royal chapels built by the powerful dynasties of Aryāvarta before Muhammadan times, were repeatedly sacked and destroyed by the iconoclasts of Islam. But volumes might be devoted to those which remain at other places to illustrate the development of the sikhara type of temple, built in brick and stone, from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries.
The most remarkable group, after that of Bhuvanēshvar, is at Khajurāho, in Central India, formerly the capital of the Chandēla dynasty, now a deserted place lying about 150 miles south-east of Gwalior. Here about thirty royal chapels are monuments of the palmy days of the Chandēl kingdom, from about a.d. 950 to 1050, when it held a strong front against the attacks of Islam, and its dominions covered the districts now ​known as Bundēlkhand in the Native States and the Central Provinces of British India. The Jain, Vaishnava and Saiva sects had each an equal share in building the temples, but they are nearly all of the sikhara type, symbolising the universal sovereignty of the deity worshipped—whether it be a Jain hero, Vishnu, who rules in Vaikuntha, or Siva, the Lord of Kailāsa.
The back view of the Chāturbhuja temple, Pl. XVI, gives a good idea of the effect of these stately structures, in which, by adding a covered procession path and massive porches to the cell in which the image of the deity is enshrined, and by piling pinnacle upon pinnacle, carved with wondrous patience and skill, around the central sikhara, the builders realised a noble architectonic conception of Vishnu's holy mountain, Mandara, with which he stirred the cosmic waters to bring up the golden jar with the nectar of immortality, or of his mystic lotus rooted in the depths of the universal ākāsha which flowers in the highest heavens.
Plate XVI
CHATURBHUJA TEMPLE, KHAJURĀHO, FROM WEST
Plate XVII
CHATURBHUJA TEMPLE, KHAJURĀHO, FROM SOUTH-EAST
The famous Rajput fortress of Chitor, the capture of which by Akbar in 1568, after a prolonged siege, was one of the most memorable military events of his reign, contains many memorials of the great Rānā of Mewār, Kumbha (1428-68), among them the magnificent nine-storied tower of victory, 122 feet high, built to celebrate his defeat of the Sultan of Mālwā in 1440. In the fifteenth century Mewār, whose dynasty proudly claimed descent from the Sūryavamsa of ancient Aryāvarta, was the chief of the Rajput States, and at constant war with the three Musalmān kingdoms, Gujerat, Mālwā, and Khandēsh, which had thrown off their allegiance to the Sultanate of Delhi. Kumbha Rānā's most powerful antagonist, Ahmad Shah of Gujerat, was also a great builder, and the splendid royal mosque which the latter built at Ahmadābād resembled very closely the great temple which was built in Kumbha's reign at Rānpur, in honour of ​the Tirthankaras, the divine heroes of the Jains, except that the sikhara, the ensign of the Sūrya-vamsa, which never appears in Musalman buildings, is wanting. The Gujerāti dynasty, like that of Mewār, was of Rajput descent—Ahmad Shah's grandfather having embraced Islam to save his life—and maintained all the traditions of Rajput culture, so that the Muhammadan architecture of Gujerat is "Saracenic" only in the sense that it is Indo-Aryan architecture adapted to the ritual of Islam.
At Chitor, which was his capital, Kumbhā Rānā built a royal chapel in honour of Vishnu, but the most important one there is named after his Queen, Mirā Bāī (Pl. XIX, a). Like the Khajurāho temple illustrated in Pl. XVI and XVII, it has a covered procession path round the shrine leading from the great assembly-hall, or Sabha-mandapam, with its lotus dome covered externally by a pyramidal roof which differs from those of the Khajurāho temples in being placed diagonally in relation to the front of the shrine. The lofty sikhara crowning the latter is more severe in style than those which crown the royal chapels of the Chandēla dynasty, although it is several centuries later in date; for the royal line of Mewār, proud of its illustrious ancestry, and schooled in a constant struggle for independence, has always maintained its martial traditions and some of the dignified simplicity of early Indo-Aryan court life.
Plate XVIIIa
INTERIOR OF MANDAPAM, KHAJURĀHO
Plate XVIIIb
CARVING OF MANDAPAM ROOF, ITTAGI
Plate XIXa
MĪRĀ BĀĪ'S TEMPLE, CHITOR
Plate XIXb
CITY OF THE DEVAS, PALITĀNA
* ↑ See below, section ii ("Sculpture"), chapter i.
* ↑ History of the Near East, H. R. Hall, p. 197.
* ↑ History of Indian and Eastern Architecture. 2nd Edition. Introduction, p. 14.
* ↑ In modern temples this window is usually filled up with sculpture, and the shrine is only illuminated by lamps, but the original intention of the design is clear enough.
* ↑ It is by no means the case, however, that the Vishnu shrine in modern times is always occupied by a Vishnu image, for should the possessors of a sikhara temple happen to be Saivas, they would instal a Siva image or symbol therein, and in doing so they would not admit any architectural inconsistency, for Siva to the Saivas, like Vishnu to the Vaishnavas, is the Three in One—Brahmā, Vishnu, and Siva.
* ↑ Hiranya-garbha, womb of the universe.
* ↑ Jina = Conqueror.
* ↑ Chāturbhuja is a name of Vishnu signifying his universal sovereignty.
* ↑ Ether.
* ↑ Bhoga = food.
* ↑ The dimensions of the temple are approximately the same as those of the Kandarya Mahādeva temple, which are given by Fergusson as follows: Length 109 ft., breadth 60 ft., height 88 ft. above the terrace, or 116 ft. above the ground.
* ↑ For an explanation of the Indian method of dome construction, see Fergusson's History of Indian and Eastern Architecture. 2nd Edition. Vol. i, pp. 312-9.
* ↑ These Hindu towers of victory are the lineal descendants of the pillars, or royal ensigns of Asoka and other Indo-Aryan kings. Converted to the service of Islam in later times, they became the models for the minarets of Muhammadan mosques.