Temple to Love: Architecture and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Bengal
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Temple to Love: Architecture and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Bengal
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Overview
"[A]n excellent analytical study of a sensationally beautiful type of temple. . . . This work is not just art historical but embraces . . . religious studies, anthropology, history, and literature." —Catherine B. Asher
"[A]dvances our knowledge of . . . Bengali temple building practices, the complex inter-reliance between religion, state power, and art, and the ways in which Western colonial assumptions have distorted correct interpretation. . . . A splendid book." —Rachel Fell McDermott
In the flux created by the Mughal conquest, Hindu landholders of eastern India began to build a spectacularly beautiful new style of brick temple, known as Ratna. This "bejeweled" style combined features of Sultanate mosques and thatched houses, and included second-story rooms conceived as the pleasure grounds of the gods, where Krishna and his beloved Radha could rekindle their passion. Pika Ghosh uses art historical, archaeological, textual, and ethnographic approaches to explore this innovation in the context of its times. Includes 82 stunning black-and-white images of rarely photographed structures.
Published in association with the American Institute of Indian Studies
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253023537 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Series: | Contemporary Indian Studies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 278 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Pika Ghosh is Associate Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is co-editor (with Michael W. Meister) of Cooking for the Gods: The Art of Home Ritual in Bengal.
Read an Excerpt
Temple to Love
Architecture and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Bengal
By Pika Ghosh
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2005 Pika GhoshAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02353-7
CHAPTER 1
Desire, Devotion, and the Double-Storied Temple
The radical new design embraced for Krishna's temples provided the architectural environment for stimulating the intensely emotional relationship with the divine that Chaitanya upheld. This chapter explores the reorganization of temple space by the addition of a pavilion and a courtyard to make the divine more accessible to the community. The new temples provided an exclusive conjugal space for Krishna and his beloved in the upper chamber. My research suggests that during festivals the attending priests took the images of Radha and Krishna from the sanctum where they resided to the upper shrine, where they could enjoy each other's company through the performance of special rituals. The temple thus functioned as a house with multiple rooms so that the gods could move about and engage in various activities. Concurrently, the openness of this pavilion, with its multiple doors and its careful alignment with the courtyard below, would have made the ritual enactment of their passion available as a model for gathered devotees gazing up from the courtyard and allowed them to participate through song in that divine play. This spatial reorganization thus accommodated the style of collective devotional activity embraced by Gaudiya Vaishnavism and gave the community a more active role in the life of the temple. It therefore suggests a renegotiation of the balance of authority between Brahman priests and lay devotees.
The new architecture and festivities broke away from earlier practices in the region. In providing an upper pavilion and a courtyard for gatherings, these newer temples diverged from Bengal's earlier Nagara structures. The dark, constricted sanctum of the older temple-type had made the deities less visible to large numbers of people standing at the doorway, and the absence of a large courtyard had denied the devotional community a gathering area. The innovative Ratna form thereby enabled the shift from priest-controlled worship in Nagara temples to a community experience of the gods at play. I analyze this transformation in how a temple functioned for the Vaishnava community of seventeenth-century Vishnupur through the changes embodied in the architecture, the new form of deity images that could move from one room to another, the nature of the festivals, the songs performed at these occasions, and depictions on the temples' walls.
The Second Shrine
The upper pavilion provides a key to understanding how Ratna temple space is organized and how the structure facilitated the new rituals celebrating the love of Krishna and Radha. Although the upper shrines of Vishnupur's temples are no longer in use, traces of their function are preserved in the architecture and in vignettes of ritual activity on the terra cotta panels that draw attention to the double-storied form. Since ritual use of the upper shrine is scarcely discussed in religious texts from the period, I turned to ethnographic research to fill out my understanding of the processes that shaped and were shaped by the new temple formation. I draw upon the oral accounts I collected from residents of Vishnupur and other towns that were once part of the Malla domain, as some of them had witnessed the use of the second level or inherited stories of it. Significant continuities also emerged when this evidence was correlated with my own observation of current use of the temples' many spaces. I use the living tradition to probe the archaeological record because several temple communities claim a history of undisrupted use into the present. Their deity images are served by succeeding generations of the original families appointed by the Malla rajas. These connections suggest the likelihood of some continuities, despite inevitable adaptations and shifts in practice and meaning, that can illuminate the spatial reorganization undertaken in the seventeenth century.
Ratna upper pavilions are typically octagonal or square, surmounted by a domical spire (figure 1.1). The enclosed space is limited, about the same size as the sanctum below, suggesting that only a few people could have fit into the pavilion at a time. Iron rungs and hooks still attached to the domical ceilings indicate that a swing-like throne was probably suspended for the images of Krishna and Radha. Some temples still have ropes hanging from these hooks. A second set of rungs at the corners likely served to secure a canopy over their heads as they do in the sanctum below. These arrangements suggest that even though they are today the homes of bats and snakes, the upper chambers provided an alternate venue for ritual organized around the deity images.
The Shyam Ray, Vishnupur's earliest double-storied temple, has an octagonal upper shrine with a covered pathway wrapping around it. The inner surfaces of the pilasters supporting the arches of the outer pathway and the walls of the inner chamber are lined with bands of terra cotta figures of dancers and drummers that rise up the length of the walls (figure 1.2). In its ritual setting, the ornamented interior with the deity images swinging at the center would have re-created a three-dimensional rasamandala, the circular formation of Krishna's erotic dance with the gopis. On the banks of the Yamuna, under a full autumnal moon, Krishna had replicated himself to embrace each of his female companions and satisfy her desire to be with him alone. In the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition the rasalila is revered as the essence of Krishna's numerous lilas. Devotees recreate Krishna's dance through meditation and aspire to the utter abandon of the gopis in their passionate relationship with the deity. As an architectural expression of Krishna's play, the upper pavilion with its rows of dancing women around the central space for the deity images would have served to concretize the object of the aspirant's contemplation. It would have functioned as an architectural analog to the rasamandala depicted in two-dimensional form on the temple's south façade and discussed further in chapter 4 (figure 4.28).
The temple built earlier at Gokulnagar in 1638 offered a slightly different arrangement for worship (figure 1.3). An elevated altar platform at the center of the octagonal upper shrine would have supported a metal or wooden throne for the divine images (figure 1.4). This platform is identical in profile to the one in the sanctum below and bears the same moldings and decorative elements, making the upper altar conceptually parallel to the lower one. As in the sanctum, a drainage spout makes its way from under the wall of this shrine to the exterior for unobtrusive disposal of ritual fluids. Indented niches in the walls would have served as shelves for oil lamps and other ritual implements in the same way that they do in the lower-level sanctum today. The niches and drains point to the role of the upper level as an equivalent venue for ritual activity. In feel, however, the two spaces are dramatically different. Four doorways punctured in the cardinal walls of the upper pavilion allow sunlight to flood in and create an airy space, in contrast to the dark sanctum that is bounded by walls on three sides. The openness of the upper shrine also makes it visible from below so that Krishna, seated high above, can observe the throngs gathering in the courtyard and, reciprocally, devotees below can participate in the activities of the gods above.
This early temple thus reveals the basic elements of what would become Vishnupur's convention for the second shrine above the sanctum. Only the immovable altar platform is replaced by swings in the later temples, likely because the swing allowed movement back and forth, increasing visibility from below, and also enhancing the pleasure of the gods. I also read this shift to swings as heightening the contrast between structures and practices above and below. The undulation of the swing would complement the stasis associated with worship in the sanctum, as the light and airiness of the pavilion would differentiate it from the darkness of the sanctum, conceived as a womb-chamber (garbhagrha) from which divinity emerges.
The upper shrines are approached through a staircase that is usually located in the southwestern corner of the building. The stairs are accessible from the passage leading into the sanctum from the south porch (figure 1.5), suggesting that only priests who had access to this passageway would also have access to the stairs and upper level. The layout therefore also indicates that members of the devotional community, who were not allowed access to the inner areas beyond the porch, would not be able to go upstairs. Rather, they would enjoy the proceedings from the courtyard outside, creating a vertical axis of devotional activity. Perforations in the upper part of the porch wall adjacent to the staircase serve as a window, providing light for these dark stairwells. The window is often treated as a large terra cotta panel, not unlike the others adorning these inner porch walls. The grid of the window is thus embellished with floral forms. Some have indented niches for placing an oil lamp for additional light. Aside from being dark, the stairs are typically steep and narrow, clearly not intended for large numbers of people to traverse. They lead to the northwestern corner of the upper story, that is, its back wall, from darkness into the light.
This fundamental organization is fairly consistent in Ratna temples from the earliest Malla-sponsored temple at Gokulnagar to mid-eighteenth-century monuments such as the Radha Shyam Temple (figure 0.11). Conformity to the established pattern for over a century indicates that it was a successful response to the buildings' functional needs, one that persisted despite variations in the ornamentation of these structures. Thus the reorientation of the temple to incorporate an additional shrine provided an appropriate space for specific Gaudiya Vaishnava rituals.
Only after a century of proliferation was such practice gradually abandoned. Corresponding changes in building conventions demonstrate that most temples built from the second half of the eighteenth century onward no longer incorporate stairs to the upper level. Consequently, the upper space could not be used for ritual activity. The Ratna thus was transformed from a functional building-type to an icon. Later temples, such as the Bose family's Sridhar Mandir in Vishnupur, preserve memory of the multi-leveled structures of the earlier period. This modified Ratna form was extended to temples dedicated to other deities, such as the Kalanjay Shiva Temple at Patrasayer to the north of Vishnupur (figure 1.6). This adapted form is even used for the Dakshineshwar Kali Temple, built in the nineteenth century outside Calcutta, where the popular saint Ramakrishna presided. Divested of its distinctive upper pavilion, and hence of its function as an alternative venue for the gods' pleasure, the temple form therefore became available for other religious communities with different priorities, and with deity images that are not as conveniently portable as the Vaishnava ones discussed below. The co-option of the Ratna form also signaled that Gaudiya Vaishnavism itself had become mainstream enough by this time to provide a resource for other emergent traditions.
Portable Gods
The rise of distinctive Gaudiya practices is consonant with the emergence of the additional structure, and the new theological emphasis on love and intimacy and the new worship style may well have stimulated the need for an additional shrine. The construction of an alternate shrine that Radha and Krishna can periodically inhabit is based on the premise that ritual practice is organized around their movement from one place to another. Mobility enables the gods to be present at multiple locations both to perform miracles and to receive the services that constitute worship. In this way, the movement of Krishna's forms from temple altars makes the deity more accessible to his following. The gods' journeys are a recurrent theme in the biographies of deity images, and mobility also features in modern festivals. Portability thus is a key to the restructuring of temples in the seventeenth century.
The deity did not permanently inhabit the miniature temple on the terrace above the sanctum of double-storied temples. Instead, Krishna lived in the altar in the sanctum on the lower level, and the upper structure served as a pavilion for his occasional pleasure. Evening arati, the final ritual of the day, was conducted on a grand scale in the upper shrine during royally sponsored festivals celebrating the lives of Krishna, Radha, and the major Gaudiya Vaishnava saints and leaders. At Gokulnagar, for example, celebrations involving ritual worship of Krishna in the upper pavilion were Rathajatra (the chariot procession), Doljatra (the spring celebration of colors), Jhulan (the swing festival), and Rasalila (the celebration of the famous circular dance in which Krishna multiplied himself to satisfy the passion of each of his female companions).
On these festive occasions, temple priests removed the deity images from the throne-like metal or wooden shrine where they were permanently installed in the sanctum below and took them up the curving stairway to the upper pavilion. Today it is the anthropomorphic forms of Krishna and Radha — either carved from monolithic dark gray phyllite or cast in astadhatu, an alloy of eight sacred metals — that are typically moved, while the shalagram, an ammonite fossil that represents Vishnu in a more abstract, non-anthropomorphic form, is not transported for such occasions. Such worship practices differ from the south Indian convention of using a separate set of festival images (utsavamurti) that are reserved solely for such occasions. These temporary images are kept in a storage shed in the temple compound and brought out only at festival times.
Frequent transportation of the enthroned deity in Bengali temples is possible only because the typical images worshiped in this region are smaller than those in many other parts of South Asia (figures 1.7, 1.8). The permanent deity images are between fourteen and twenty inches high on average, small enough to allow for frequent and convenient transportation. Metal images are also less fragile than lithic ones. These images are never affixed permanently to the ground as are stone forms such as the lingam, Shiva's phallic pillar. Consequently they can simply be lifted from the altar in the sanctum downstairs and carried by the priest up the stairs, or outside to the edge of the plinth where they are today taken to enjoy the festivities taking place in the courtyard.
That ease of portability underlies the events that constitute the biographies of Vishnupur's deities. Mobility is at the heart of the popular narrative of Vishnupur's acquisition of the image of Madan Mohan, probably in the early part of the seventeenth century, by Raja Vir Hambir. Madan Mohan is said to have come to Vir Hambir in a dream and requested the raja to serve him in a suitable manner, as the impoverished Brahman who kept him was unable to do so. The king then traced the image to the house of the Brahman in Birbhum district, draped Madan Mohan in his shawl, and smuggled him back to Vishnupur. While this narrative speaks to the history of the region in a number of ways, here I want to emphasize the fundamental assumption that the divine image is portable. It is such portability that allows for the ambulatory nature of images such as Radha Raman, the family deity of Srinivas Acharya. They have no permanent home, but rather move from shrine to shrine, from the hospitality of one branch of the devotee family to that of another. Portability makes relocating ritual activity to multiple shrines possible and, conversely, the new architecture and ritual practices require deity images that can travel without too much difficulty.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Temple to Love by Pika Ghosh. Copyright © 2005 Pika Ghosh. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Introduction
1. Desire, Devotion, and the Double-Storied Temple
2. A Paradigm Shift
3. Acts of Accommodation
4. Axes and the Mediation of Worship
Epilogue: A New Sacred Center
Glossary of Architectural Terms
Notes
Bibliography
Index