Rough Draft "Introduction," The Contemporary Hindu Temple

1 Introduction to The Contemporary Hindu Temple: Fragments for a History Annapurna Garimella The study of contemporary temples has been an important development in the field of South Asian art and architecture, religious studies and anthropology. Over the last two decades, scholars such as Jyotindra Jain, Richard Davis, Kavita Singh, A. Srivathsan, Joanne Waghorne, Samuel Parker, Tapati Guha Thakurta, Smriti Srinivas, Annapurna Garimella, Deepa Reddy and John Zavos, Marta Kudelska et al. and many others have focused on individual temples such as the Gujarati synoptic pilgrimage temples which collapse a variety of sacred geographies into one encompassing location, the temples associated with the Bhagvad Gita, Akshardham in New Delhi, diasporic temples, the vastushastra and the sthapati, ephemeral religious structures and temple festivals, elite mercantile patronage of magnificent temples, temple publics and urbanism. Our volume seeks to contribute to these studies in two specific ways. Firstly, we define the term contemporary as a viewpoint to examine both ancient as well as recently built temples, rather than as a unified aesthetic with overarching features. By doing so, we hope to identify the Hindu temple as a multifaceted object of study, and further open up fresh directions and frameworks. Secondly, we wish to study the Hindu temple from the perspective of formal and informal institutions and individuals, including priests, practitioners and worshippers, to discuss what it means that the temple is no longer at the center of Indic life, but has become instead one among several important sites of social praxis. We see such a focus on the making, the uses and 2 the conceptual underpinnings of the contemporary Hindu temple as an under-developed area that can be further explored through a variety of approaches. What does it mean to study the temple from a contemporary viewpoint? One way we define the contemporary of the Hindu temple is in terms of the position of the researcher in relation to the object of study. For instance, if placed in linear, chronological time, a temple is located in a particular culture and geography, providing a synoptic view that can then be summarized by the architectural historian or archaeologist. Instead, if the temple is placed in the contemporary, the researcher and the building share a temporality as well as a similar space, at least in the present of the study, which obviates the possibility of a totalizing narrative. In effect, the writing offers rich fragments for the present, but which awaits more time, that is the future, to become history. Our study of the contemporariness of the Hindu temple is not just the documentation of recently built temples. It includes both ancient as well as brand new structures. In the context of an ancient Hindu temple, its contemporariness incorporates the temple’s primordiality, antiquity and relevance to the present, while for recently constructed spaces, aspects such as rupture, innovation, patronage and the evocation of the past become more significant. As such, this study hopefully would lead to, in the not too distant future, a theorizing of the contemporary for non-avant-garde art practices. We think that this would be very useful in rethinking not just the study of Hindu temples but also the positioning of religious art in general. One question the contributors raise and seek to address is the notion of sacrality and space, i.e. how is the experience of the divine made possible in the contemporary temple? By posing this question we bring focus on to the relationship between the temple 3 and its religious audiences. Second, we highlight active contestations, negotiations and innovations in the Hindu temple from the point of view of its present-day agencies such as the sthapatis, the architects, the priests, religious authorities, and government and private bodies — their policies and laws etc. — all of which engage in the making and maintenance of the temple as well as the creation of its meaning. As editors, we asked for and sought contributors who can engage with these larger themes in specific aspects of the Hindu temples they research. Through their work, we wanted actual building practices, materialities, rituals, spatial configurations and new iconographies to be discussed and the concept of what makes a modern temple to be further articulated. The Hindu temple is a well-established architectural form that has seen centuries of innovation. An architectural history which seeks to systemize and develop an understanding of cave, brick, rock-cut and structural temples began in the colonial period with Ram Raz’s Essay on the Architecture of the Hindus (1834) which developed for the first time a discussion of temples, along with the construction and design of other built forms and human settlements, through existing shilpa sastra manuscripts. A series of publications written by various colonial and native writers which sought to represent the architectural history of India through temples followed this. While attention was paid to the specificity of sectarian orientation in some cases, such a Buddhist caves and stupas, in others not much attention was paid to understand how a built form could be used for a variety of gods or enlightened beings. These structures were studied like botanical specimens in which the number of tiers in a tower were described much in the same way a botanist describes the number of petals a particular flower has. This scientizing approach became linked to racial theories which equated the 4 Dravida temple form described in a shilpa shastra to the southern part of the country and with non-Aryan people, while the Nagara temple form came to be equated with the northern regions and Aryans.1 It was only with Stella Kramrisch’s majestic The Hindu Temple (1946) that a serious engagement with materials, the type of divinity, forms of planning and design, naming, the ritual process of seeding and emanation, rites of construction and consecration and making images became consolidated and led to an array of historical and geographically specific analytical studies. It was some decades again when another monumental study, the multi-volume Encyclopedia of Indian Temple Architecture, starting in 1983, began to publish a vast array of historic temples that had previously never been documented and published before and to date, it has covered structures that were built up to the late eighteenth century.2 This publication uses the terminology of the regional shilpa sastra texts and provides plans and measured drawings. It has become the basis of many later studies that seek to look at history, ritual, patronage in conjunction with architectural theory and practice in the making of particular temples. In spite of such large projects, it was only in 2015, as my co-editor A. Srivathsan points out in his essay in this volume, that the architectural historian George Michell published a work of late temple architecture especially those built in the 19th century.3 By the time Michell’s book came out, many scholars, some of whom I have mentioned in the beginning paragraph of the Introduction, had begun to look at the 20th See James Fergusson’s various iterations of The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture, being a Concise and Popular Account of the different Styles of Architecture prevailing in all Ages and Countries which first appeared in 1855 and The History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, which appeared in 1876 as the fourth volume in the revised series. See also Gabriel Jouveau-Dubreuil’s Dravidian Architecture, ed. S. Krishnaswami Aiyangar (1917, reprint Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1987). 2 George Michell, Encyclopaedia of Indian Temple Architecture: South India, Drāviḍadēśa, Later Phase, c. A.D. 12891798 (New Delhi: American Institute of Indian Studies, 2001). 3 George Michell, Late Temple Architecture of India, 15th to 19th Centuries: Continuities, Revivals, Appropriations, and Innovations (London and New Delhi: Oxford, 2015). 1 5 century, whether the temples were freshly built or recently renovated, in India or elsewhere, as important objects of study. There are important reasons why the focus of art and architectural historians has turned to contemporary temples over the last several decades. Of major significance is the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and the rise of post-colonial theory in practice, for example the landmark Subaltern Studies series. Said criticized Orientalist scholarship and ways of looking at places such as India as populated by people who were incapable of or had lost the capacity of producing culture, governance and forms of history that could match the accomplishments of Occidental civilizations. Orientalism was part of the larger colonial enterprise even when it questioned it. In 1977, a year before Said’s book was published, the art historian Partha Mitter published Much Maligned Monsters, his trenchant analysis of European reactions to Indian, particularly Hindu, art. Mitter and Said’s work led many graduate students and scholars to question and remake the foundations of art history and the study of religion. While today there is a more modulated engagement with Said’s important critique, political, social and economic events and structural transformations in the 1980s and later turned many scholars to the task of writing about India as a fully historical place, not as a timeless essence.4 This in turn brought a fresh focus on how nationalist history wrote about colonialization and the struggle for independence and Subaltern Studies made a remarkable contribution in opening completely different ways for thinking about everyday life and ordinary people.5 All this moved fairly rapidly into art Ronald B. Inden, Imagining India (Oxford, England and Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell Publishers, 1990). Today, the Subaltern Studies group is no longer publishing the series but its effect on South Asian studies is profound even if heavily criticized by many on the left and the right. Yet its members wrote some extremely nuanced histories that brought light on the complex intersections between ordinary people, their relationship to 4 5 6 and architectural history (see Pika Ghosh’s 2005 book Temple to Love: Architecture and Devotion in Seventeenth-century Bengal for a mature work that is the fruit of this disciplinary upheaval) and validated a focus on more recent history. In this volume, Crispin Branfoot’s essay marks this transition between the earlymodern and the 20th century, between seeing the temple as history and seeing it as modernity. Through his study of the Chettiar merchants’ renovation and patronage of temples in Tamil country in the first half of the 20th century, Branfoot tells us that even old and canonical temples were not immune to the zealous remaking of sacred space by a wealthy group. Rich merchants who made their wealth in the colonial trade, were some of the first to make their mark in creating novel temple architecture, in relation to style, design and materials. The Chettiars, the Marwaris and many others massively renovated temples or built entirely new ones. In the process, they created innovative aesthetics and in the name of continuing or purifying tradition, they instituted reforms or reoriented temple worship to discourses such as Hindu nationalism. In the years after Independence, temple construction was more modulated.6 The availability of durable construction materials was controlled by state rationing and ideologically, independent India’s temples, as Jawaharlal Nehru put it, had to be dams and also factories, industries, etc. These historical circumstances and attitudes need to be engaged with to understand the nuances of actual temple construction that happened the divine and great historical and political struggles. See for example David Hardiman, The Coming of Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987). 6 Much more research needs to be done on this period to understand what happened to the temple in the years immediately after Independence. Two important discussion of this period are Richard Davis’ “Reconstructions of Somanatha,” Lives of Indian Images (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 186-221 and more recently Vyjayanthi Rao, “The Future in Ruins,” Ann Laura Stoler, ed. Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 2013), 287-321, which has a profound discussion of temple transplantation and revivification in the construction of the Srisailam Dam in Andhra Pradesh, in this case in the village of Jetprole, now in Telangana which lost many of its temples when they were submerged. 7 between 1947 and 1980s.7 At a cursory glance, the idea of infrastructure development took precedence as did the planning of new cities; new temples, such as those built in military cantonments or public sector colonies, did not mark a built landscape the way religious architecture of the pre-modern and the colonial period or after 1990 does.8 One could perhaps suggest that state-controlled capitalism flattened the religious landscape in such a way so that temple shikaras, church spires and masjid minarets had to be built with the knowledge that the sky was not the limit. The liberalization of the economy in 1991 and the rapid transformation of India’s cities are structural transformations that have greatly impacted the construction of religious architecture, particularly temples. With cement now easily available, the arrival of materials such as reflective glass, an expansive palette of paint colors, fiberglass and steel railings along with new money and hence patronage coming into the public sphere, small and big players expanded or built temples. Just as the Birlas had used cement to build temples in the 20th century and demonstrated simultaneously their nationalism, their piety and the prowess of a modern material which they manufactured and sold to handle traditional architectural forms, in the years after economic liberalization many large and small organizations and individuals from the International Society of Krishna Consciousness to local leaders (see Garimella and Hawley, Chapters ___ and __) have invested in the idea of temples made entirely with or in combination with modern materials such as fiberglass (Sridharan and Ramanathan, Chapters __ and __). If Sovietstyle five-year economic plans and modernist urban planning had curtailed communities’ A. Srivathsan’s article in this volume directs us to some of the architectural criticism on modern temples. In fact, many of these cantonment temples designed and built by military engineers look like Habib Rahman’s Gandhi Ghat (1949) in Kolkata. 7 8 8 capacity to build spaces that allowed for the creation of a collective experience of the sacred, then liberalization certainly renewed and increased possibilities for such communal activities. As cities began to expand with ring roads, flyovers and novel forms of mobility produced by the automobile gained currency, a religious structure on the sidewalk, in a park, on a hill or along a highway, provided a different kind of visibility for gods and their devotees. Scholars such as Smriti Srinivas, Janaki Nair, Joanna Waghorne, Kajri Jain and others have shown how urban memory, planning agendas, discourses around heritage, and desires for greater political visibility and social empowerment have been sustained and created in the context of competing policies and groups in India’s rapidly expanding cities and urbanizing rural landscapes.9 An event of great consequence both for the rise of new temples and scholarship about them is the growth of the Hindutva or cultural Hindu nationalism. If the demolition of the historic Babri Masjid (1992) has been of great consequence in the political landscape of the country, the slow growth of Hindutva in the decade or so before the demolition gradually brought focus on sites of historical contestation such as the Somnath temple in coastal Gujarat or created controversy about sites which had dual sectarian affiliations such as Baba Budangiri in the Western Ghats of Karnataka. The desire to make a Hindutva landscape led to the political patronage of novel temples such as the Smriti Srinivas, “Highways for Healing: Contemporaneous ‘Temples’ and Religious Movements in an Indian City,” Mary Hancock and Smriti Srinivas, eds., Roundtable on Spirited Topographies: Religion and Urban PlaceMaking, Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2018), 473–496, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfx058; Janaki Nair, Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century (Delhi : Oxford University Press, 2005); Kajri Jain, “Post-reform India’s Automotive-Iconic-Cement Assemblages: Uneven Globality, Territorial Spectacle and Iconic Exhibition Value,” Aesthetics of Arrival: Spectacle, Capital, Novelty, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power (2015), https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2015.1034132; Joanna P. Waghorne, Diaspora of the Gods: Modern Hindu Temples in an Urban Middle-Class World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 9 9 Siddhi Vinayaka temple in Mumbai and the building of Hindu shrines on ancient archaeological sites of religious nature, such as at the Buddhist cave sites of Maharashtra. Emboldened by the idea that building big can be licensed and sanctioned, religious institutions across the country have been expanding their architectural footprint with ever greater ambition, often to the great detriment of the immediate environment, even as they promote new regimes of artistic creativity and production.10 The construction of large temples such as Akshardham on the Yamuna river flood plain in Delhi, a total religious complex built with a style of architecture that combines Sompura stone carvers historical craft skills and design knowledge, digital technologies for stone cutting and patronage from diasporic and domestic members of the Swaminarayan Sanstha exemplify this.11 Akshardham includes spaces for worship, pedagogy and entertainment to create a totalizing space for the internalization and aestheticization of Hindutva’s reorganization of Indian society and cultures. Today, Akshardham is an important event-place on the Delhi pilgrimage and tourism circuit and because it is such a spectacular complex, that Akshardham has attracted more scholarly attention than any other single recent temple or religious space in India.12 10 The expanding architectural footprint is of course related to a desire to encompass more of the social sphere. Education, entertainment, healthcare, horticulture are all activities have now become the remit of such institutions, partly because the state fails to serve these needs for at a standard commensurable with the needs and the aspirations many Indians . 11 Meghna Chand Inglis, “Reimagining Tradition: the Sompura Hereditary Temple Architects of Gujarat,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University, 2016, http://orca.cf.ac.uk/94669/1/PHD%20FINAL%20COLLATED%20minor%20corrections.pdf, accessed November 8, 2018 12 Jyotindra Jain, “Museum and Museum-Like Structures: The Politics of Exhibition and Nationalism in India,” 2007, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58fa260a725e25c4f30020f3/t/594ba181414fb54310f6320a/1498128 825535/11+EXH_spg11_Museum+and+Museum+like+Structures_Jain.pdf, accessed November 8, 2018; Kavita Singh, “Temple Of Eternal Return: the Swāminārāyan Akshardhām Complex In Delhi,” Artibus Asiae Vol. 70, No. 1, "To My Mind": Studies in South Asian Art History in Honor of Joanna Gottfried Williams. Part II (2010), 47-76; Christiane Brosius, “The Cultural Politics of Transnational Heritage Rituals: Akshardham Cultural Complex in New Delhi," Christiane Brosius and Karin Polit, eds. Ritual, Heritage and Identity. The Politics of Culture and Performance in a Globalised World (New Delhi: Routledge, 2011), 97-125. 10 A third and immensely significant factor, again both in the growth of temple construction and of their study, is the proliferation of popular visual culture. Sometimes it collaborates actively with or parallels Hindutva temple construction projects and in other instances, popular culture manifests in Hindu sacred space in a way that remains oblivious to or directly opposes such a project.13 Along with the availability of new materials, the general sanction of the public, built expression of religiosity that Hindutva has created and the growth of satellite television and tourism have created a powerful intersectionality with the Hindu places of worship. Looking to contribute to this growing body of scholarship, our Marg volume also seeks to expand upon and reorient the way renovated, and new Hindu temples have been studied, described and analyzed so far. First we chose to invite scholars who are largely working on much more humble structures located outside the “cow belt” (Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar) where Hindutva has been most active for many decades and has been focused on the cow as an important symbol in mobilizing Hindus and persecuting minorities. In the case of John Hawley’s essay in which the narrative is lodged at Keshi Ghat in Brindavan, a major pilgrimage center in the cow belt, the focus is not so much on a temple proper but on an important site for religious activities associated with Krishna and the Yamuna, a habitus that is now facing a profoundly uncertain future in the face of transforming religiosities, human-made environmental degradation and a public-private partnership complex that emphasizes large-scale infrastructure as the best way to solve a range of problems, including the care See Shabnam Virmani’s documentary “Kabira Khada Bazaar Mein” Journeys with Sacred & Secular Kabir Hindi & Malwi with English Subtitles, 2009, 94 minutes, for a discussion of shrines and the institutionalizaiton of worship as “adambar” or pomp. 13 11 of a sacred river and an ancient built environment.14 Such a movement away from flashpoint places and spectacles of religiosity allows us to look afresh and from a different angle, at Hindu worship spaces as objects of study. Archaeological monuments (P. Ghosh), historic worship centers (Branfoot and Shridharan), shrines built by refugees and metalsmiths (B. Ghosh) and urban temples, on the roadside and in the park (Ramanathan and Garimella) are seen by these various authors as sites of negotiating a variety of historical, social and emotional experiences that need to come into the scholar’s ambit. In the process, the temple appears as a space to care for the gods even after the glory days of royal patronage are over, as a structure where loss and grievances can be reified and as a community space made possible because two smaller groups negotiated and shared their limited resources, as an artefact of widespread disengagement with rationalist urban planning and as completely mediatic space that transforms the relationship between the artist/sculptor, the priest, the worshipper and the god. I have left the discussion of Samuel Parker and A. Srivathsan’s essays until this point so as to conclude with the very interesting questions they raise. The temple, whether a large complex or a small shrine, whether dedicated to a Puranic or a local god or goddess, has been designed and built, from the 3rd century CE onwards if not earlier, with the intention of creating a sacred space where the human and the divine enter into concentrated interactions with each other. It is has been a place for organizing human beings in relationships of power with a god, between gods and between each other. Historical human beings have sought to imagine and instantiate a space and given it the David Haberman, River of Love in an Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River of Northern India (Chicago: University of California Press, 2006). 14 12 potential to encompass, if made correctly and if worshipped and maintained with devotion, all of creation. Even as the 12th century Virasaiva poet Basava rejects the impulse for ostentatiousness behind the structural temple, he composes a relationship with the divine through his very human body that is at once an object, a space and a means for focusing upon and worshipping Shiva.15 Parker writes about a contemporary where this space in which both the human and the sacred were once integrated as now being undermined by market logic that sees both individuals and social structures such as religion as a means to achieve its ends. The temple — as an archaeological monument, as art, as a living shrine — is one more site for the market to enter and reorder in its own favor. There are many instances in this volume, such as at Keshi Ghat in Brindavan or at a public park in Bangalore, which confirm Parker’s sharp and plaintive observations. In fact, Parker’s essay seems to suggest that the contemporary temple, whether a monument or a living shrine, is produced by neoliberalism. Srivathsan writes about the contemporary temple in another way, as both posing a set of dilemmas as well opportunities to rethink tradition as not something pure and thus whole only in the past but as comprised of “continuities with ruptures” as the poet and playwright H. S. Shiva Prakash has said, following the Mexican poet Octavio Paz.16 For Srivathsan, the modern architect’s quest to build a “celebratory” space is viable and ongoing, and perhaps the quest may be a way to challenge the market logic that Parker bemoans. He seems to suggest that this possibility is not likely if architects take a A. K. Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva (New York: Viking Penguin, 1973), 19. Kamalakar Bhatt, “Writing Matters: In Conversation with H. S. Shiva Prakash,” Kitaab.org, posted August 24, 2018, https://kitaab.org/2018/08/24/writing-matters-in-conversation-with-h-s-shiva-prakash/ accessed November 8, 2018 15 16 13 recourse to a putative tradition in which the emanatory power of the sacred is locked within a particular, inherited visual language. Indeed, Srivathsan’s suggestion leads us to the idea that if architects tap into another tradition in which the Hindu temple is entrenched, one in which the reality of rupture leads to innovation in spatial organization, design and construction, then practitioners can make spaces in which the integration of the community, the temple and the sacred becomes possible in wholly original ways that respect worship as part of modern life. That is the contemporary he would like to see for the architect-designed temple. For the rest of the contributors, including me, the contemporariness of the temple is more processual. It is perhaps a matter of time, i.e. the 20th century, or the fact that the beginnings, the endings and the transformations of these shrines are happening in our own lifetimes, and thus visible in a way that is impossible when we study older structures. Or contemporariness may lie in the fact that some of us are able to stand both within and without the experience of belief and worship, so that we can attempt to grapple with the simultaneous intricacies in which a shrine lives. Finally, the contemporary that this volume identifies is one which we as editors and writers have wished to see scholars, practitioners and worshippers engage. Such a diverse set of essays begins to hint at a range of approaches to the contemporary Hindu temple which future studies can traverse. Whether looking at materiality, design, patronage, use, politics or the modes in which humans imagine sacred space, it is the researcher-scholar’s task to invest the contemporary temple with historical worth and imaginatively narrate its complexity and richness. Research is just beginning and many big issues and questions have yet to be considered and theorized. What follows 14 in this volume contributes to existing studies and attempts to demarcate fresh horizons for future studies. I would like to conclude this introduction by thanking all of the contributors and the editors of Marg, whose immense patience and diligence in working with us over several years has made this volume possible.