![]() In The Medieval Indian ContextVijaya Ramaswamy LATE TEMPLE ARCHITECTURE OF INDIA- 15TH TO 19TH CENTURIES: CONTINUITIES, REVIVALS, APPROPRIATIONS AND INNOVATIONS By George Michell Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2015, pp. 352, Rs. 1395.00 VOLUME XXXIX NUMBER 10 October 2015 George Michell is a Professorial Fellow at the School of Architecture
in Melbourne. He has dedicated the major part of
his academic career to look at architecture in the medieval
Indian context and more specifically at temple architecture. His prolific
writings on temples in the Deccan and on the monumental
ruins of the Vijayanagar Empire testify to his long term involvement
with this knowledge domain and his command over the academic
field of India’s architectural heritage.
The present monograph draws partly from
Michell’s earlier researches but focuses on the latermedieval
period leading up to the early colonial times.
The time frame taken up for the study itself makes
this monograph valuable because most studies on
temple architecture take up the developments under
the Cholas and Chalukyas rather than the period from
the Nayaka rule onwards that is roughly the seventeenth-eighteenth
centuries. In Northern India some
major temples were constructed in the eleventh-twelfth
centuries under the patronage of Chandelas of
Khajuraho, Eastern Gangas of Orissa, Palas of Bengal
and the Sisodia-Guhilot dynasty of Rajasthan. This
book situates its analysis within a study of stylistic continuities in
the earlier temple structures but moves rapidly to the state of temples
during the Sultanate and Mughal periods, continuing the study into
the colonial period.
This profusely illustrated monograph consists of four distinct
analytical blocks in the place of the usual chapters. The author calls
these blocks—‘Continuities, Revivals, Appropriations And Innovations’.
The main body of the book is foregrounded by a historical
and religious overview of medieval India focussing particularly on
the devotional movements and the patronage of rulers and sectarian
leaders to temples. Part three of this work looks at temples regionwise
beginning from the Himachala-Himalayas and Jammu-Kashmir
right down to Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
Somewhat unusually, Michell starts his book with destruction
rather than construction. Drawing upon earlier scholarship including
that of Richard Eaton, he meticulously maps the destruction of
cities and temples as a result of Muslim invasions. To quote Michell,
‘There can be little doubt that the Muslim armies were systematic
and effective in their destructive endeavours, as in the cities and
towns of the Ganga-Yamuna river valley, extending from the Punjab
to Bengal…. So thorough were the intruders in this regard that hardly
a single Hindu or Jain monument was left standing in an almost
2000 kilometre long corridor’ (p. 20). This statement of the author
is backed by ... Table of Contents >> |