Class 8 Social Science Chapter 10: A Journey Through Indian Architecture

What architecture is evidence of

A building is a decision somebody could afford to make and had the authority to enforce. Read that way, a street plan or a drain is political evidence, which is why this chapter begins with cities rather than with monuments.

Planned, not grown

The Harappan cities were laid out before they were built. Their streets follow a plan, their water is managed, and their civic arrangements are standardised from one city to the next. A settlement that grows by itself does not come out looking like that.

Why brick

Clay. Most Harappan cities stood on alluvial plains, where clay is abundant, so brick was the obvious material. That is a decision made by the ground rather than by the builders.

And why Dholavira is different

Dholavira, in the Rann of Kachchh, used stone extensively, because stone was available locally there. The rule is the same in both cases: build with what lies nearby. Only the geology changed.

Mohenjo-daro's streets

The city covered a lot of ground. Its broad streets, and the lanes running off them, lie close to north-south and east-west. Densely inhabited areas sit beside them. The orientation matters: somebody chose north before any house went up.

What the drains prove

Almost every home had a bathing area, and the water it used ran away through a drain network that served the whole settlement. That is not a domestic detail. Water leaving the whole settlement by plan means a decision taken for the settlement as a whole.

A house that tells you about its people

The plan of one large house at Mohenjo-daro suggests the servants lived downstairs while the owners lived above, where there was less dust and noise from the streets. A floor plan has turned into a fact about social arrangement.

Dholavira's Castle

The highest and most fortified part of the city carries that name. Its stone blocks are dressed smooth. A large room beside the gateway was almost certainly where guards screened people moving in and out, and two pieces of a stone pillar, polished smooth, still stand in the middle of it.

What a guarded gate means

Somebody had the authority to decide who entered. The sentinel room is as much a political fact as an architectural one, and it sits inside a city whose fortified divisions, straight streets and cut reservoirs were all planned together.

A new kind of building

From the fourth or third century BCE, as Buddhism rose, new architectural forms appeared in north India and spread slowly to other regions. Thousands of stupas were built, in brick or in stone.

What a stupa is

A dome-shaped structure housing relics of the Buddha or of revered monks. It is solid. There is no inside to go into, which makes it unlike almost every other religious building a student will have seen.

So how is it used

By walking round it. The worshipper passes through a gateway and circumambulates the dome within an enclosure of railings, called a vedika. The building is a thing to circle rather than a room to occupy.

When they grew complex

The larger stupas became full ritual centres: railings, gateways, and elaborate carved panels, many of them narrating episodes from the Buddha's life. A panel at Bharhut shows people worshipping the stupa there, which means the sculpture records its own use.

The Buddha without a face

At this early stage he was not shown in human form at all. He was represented by symbols instead: footprints cut in stone, the wheel that stands for dharma, or the mound itself. The human figure belongs to a later phase.

Sanchi

The main stupa at Sanchi in Madhya Pradesh was originally commissioned or patronised by Ashoka, and it represents the earliest phase of monumental religious building in stone in India. Earlier work was in brick and timber; this is where stone begins at that scale.

The toranas

The massive ornamental gateways at Sanchi are carved with many scenes, and the scenes are not all religious: urban and village life appear on them too. A worshipper entering through a torana passed a record of the ordinary world on the way to the sacred one.

Why stone matters as a change

Before Sanchi, religious building at scale had used brick and timber, neither of which lasts. The shift to stone is why we can still read this phase at all, and it is also why the carvers copied timber forms into rock.

What the two halves of this topic share

Both are about reading intention off a surface. A drain tells you a city was organised; a torana tells you what its carvers saw every day; a solid dome tells you the worship happened outside the building. In each case the structure is the document.

Scenario:

Imagine walking up to the highest and most fortified part of Dholavira, the area archaeologists call the Castle. The blocks of stone on either side of you have been dressed smooth. On your left is a large room set into the gateway. Two polished segments of a stone pillar still stand in the middle of the entrance. Behind you the city spreads out in fortified divisions, with streets laid in straight lines and reservoirs cut into the ground. Nothing here happened by accident.

Analysis:

A gateway with a guard room is a political fact as much as an architectural one: somebody had the authority to decide who entered. Read that way, the smooth stone and the straight streets are evidence of a society that could organise itself at scale.

Activity:

Draw the gateway from the description and label the sentinel room and the pillar segments.

Title:

Match the material to the ground

Safety:

No safety concerns; this is a paper exercise.

What You Notice:

The last step is the point. The same rule that decided between brick and stone four thousand years ago still decides what your own neighbourhood is built of.

Almost every home in the dense part of Mohenjo-daro had a bathing area, and the used water was carried out of the city through a network of drains.

The earliest Buddhist art avoided showing the Buddha as a person, using footprints or the wheel of dharma instead.

Sanchi's gateways carry scenes of ordinary urban and village life alongside the sacred ones.

Why brick or stone — LOOK DOWN BEFORE LOOKING UP — The material of a Harappan city is decided by the ground it stands on: clay on the plains, stone in the Rann of Kachchh.

How a stupa works — AROUND, NEVER IN — The dome is solid, so the worshipper passes a torana and circles it within the vedika rather than entering anything.

Architecture by subtraction

Every other building in this chapter is assembled. A rock-cut cave is the opposite operation: the shape that remains after rock has been taken away. Nothing is added, and nothing can be put back.

What that costs

Cutting the Kailasha Temple at Ellora free meant removing rock by the thousand tonnes, chisel by chisel, along with the Buddhist, Hindu and Jain caves around it. The scale is the achievement. So is the fact that no error could be corrected.

Where the caves begin

Among India's first are the Udayagiri and Khandagiri caves near Bhubaneswar in Odisha. Carving there began in the second century BCE under royal patronage. Most of those caves housed Jain monks, and one shelters the famous inscription of Kharavela.

Maharashtra's complexes

Ajanta and Ellora are renowned for their massive scale and the fineness of their craftsmanship. The technologies involved in cutting them are harder to imagine than the sculpture itself.

Inside Ellora's cave ten

A huge seated Buddha, hands in the teaching gesture, leans back against a stupa. The proportions of the hall are enormous. The stupa indoors is worth noticing: the dome from the last topic has moved inside a carved room.

The ceiling that pretends

The cave's arched roof imitates timber beams. Real buildings in the cities of the time had such beams, and the carvers copied that ceiling into solid stone where it holds nothing up at all.

Why a fake beam is good evidence

Those urban buildings have not survived. Timber rots. So the stone copy is our best picture of what an ordinary roof looked like, preserved precisely because somebody imitated it in a material that lasts.

The aisle, and a habit that lasts

Outside the row of pillars runs a corridor, and monks walked round the stupa along it. That practice is pradakshina, moving clockwise around something sacred. It began at the stupa, continued in these caves, and carried on into the classical temples of the next topic.

What the caves cost in labour

There were no machines. Hammers and iron chisels did all of it, and the work had to proceed downwards, because the carvers stood on the rock they had not yet removed. The ceiling therefore came first and the floor last.

Turning to water

The second half of this topic is about holding water, which is the other thing Indian builders did at enormous scale and which gets far less attention than temples.

Shringverpur

In Uttar Pradesh, this is the Shringaverapura of the Ramayana, described there as the place where Rama, Sita and Lakshmana crossed the Ganga at the start of their exile. Excavation has revealed a series of large interconnected reservoirs.

How that system worked

A channel fed them from the Ganga when the river flooded each season. The first pond or two let the silt suspended in the water settle out, which is a fairly common design. The precise working of the whole complex has still not been established.

Wells, in many shapes

They were built from brick, from stone, or from rings of terracotta, in many sizes. The Harappan well used bricks shaped as trapezoids, which lock into a circle without mortar. The shape is the whole trick. A rectangular brick cannot close a ring, and a wedge can, so the circle holds itself together under its own pressure.

Stepwells

In classical times Gujarat and Rajasthan developed a tradition of stepwells, called vavs or baoris. Many are engineering works and works of art at once. Rani ki Vav has several pillared levels and hundreds of statues.

What a stepwell is also for

Sitting in. Besides harvesting and storing rainwater, a stepwell gave people a shared space, cooler than the surface, where they could sit together and exchange the news. A building that is both a reservoir and a meeting place explains why so much sculpture went into one.

Temple tanks

Temples often had reservoirs attached, called pushkarinis. They served water harvesting and water-based rituals alike, and many were works of art themselves, with numerous stairways built into them.

And their condition now

Many of these traditional water structures suffer from depleted sources, maintenance problems, pollution and dumped waste. Environmentalists, local people and NGOs sometimes work together to preserve them. A great deal remains to be done.

What both halves have in common

Each is a case of enormous labour spent on something a modern reader might overlook. A cave is a sculpture the size of a building. A stepwell is a water tank with hundreds of statues in it. Neither makes sense until you see that the function and the art were never separate.

Scenario:

You have hammers and iron chisels and nothing else. A hillside of solid rock has been chosen. You are to leave behind a hall with rows of pillars and a dome-shaped stupa at the far end. The ceiling must be ribbed like the timber roof of a city building. Every piece of rock you remove is gone for good. The hall must be entered from the hillside, so you cannot work from above. The ceiling is the hardest part, because you will be standing beneath whatever you are cutting.

Analysis:

This is the exercise the chapter sets, and the answer explains the scale of the achievement: a rock-cut cave is a sculpture the size of a building, executed with no margin for error, and the Kailasha Temple at Ellora was left standing by removing many thousands of tonnes of stone.

Activity:

Write the order of operations you would give your team, in five steps.

Title:

Find the water structure near you

Safety:

Do not climb into or near a well or tank. Observe from a safe distance, and go with an adult.

What You Notice:

The chapter's point is that these are working structures in trouble, not ruins. Your list is the same list the conservationists are working from.

The Harappan well was built from trapezoid-shaped bricks, which lock into a circle without any mortar at all.

Rani ki Vav has several pillared levels and hundreds of statues, which is a remarkable amount of sculpture for a structure whose job is holding water.

The precise working of the reservoir complex at Shringverpur has still not been figured out.

What a rock-cut cave is — TAKE AWAY, NEVER ADD — The cave is what is left after the rock is removed, which is why nothing can be corrected once it has been cut.

Why a fake beam matters — WOOD ROTS, THE COPY LASTS — The timber ceilings of ancient city buildings are gone, so the stone imitation at Ellora is what tells us how they looked.

Where the temple comes from

Not from nowhere. Its antecedents are the two forms already covered: the stupa, which gave it the practice of circling something sacred, and rock-cut architecture, which gave it the pillared hall carved as a single conception.

What a temple was for

Worship, certainly. Also learning, literature and art, which here means sculpture, dance, music and painting. Also social life, and economic life. A temple was the institution a settlement organised itself around, not only its place of prayer.

When they appear

Classical temples emerge during the Gupta era. Many were built through royal patronage, which inscriptions record, and also through endowments from a range of other donors. That mixture is why building and upkeep could continue across reigns.

There were rules

Construction followed principles and techniques set out in the treatises of shilpashastra. That body of knowledge covers craft and making, building and carving above all. Regional variety sits on top of a shared body of rules.

Why that matters to a reader

Because a person who learns the order of the parts can walk through a temple anywhere in India and know what comes next. The plan is not a local invention each time.

From outside inwards

A ceremonial entrance comes first: a gopuram in south India, or a torana in some northern temples. Then one or several mandapas, which are pillared halls. Then, at the centre, the garbhagriha, the innermost room that holds the deity.

And around it

A corridor for pradakshina, so the circling practice from the stupa survives inside the building. Secondary shrines. Amenities. Enclosures called prakaras, which in the largest cases produced complexes the size of small towns.

Why the smallest room is the tallest

The garbhagriha carries the main tower above it. Height marks the centre, so the most important space in a classical temple is also the smallest and the darkest, with the most structure piled over it.

Brihadishvara at Thanjavur

Rajaraja Chola I built it around 1010 in Tamil Nadu. It has vast mandapas and a vimana over sixty metres high. A huge Nandi, the sacred bull, cut from one block, faces the shrine from a pavilion of its own. The granite carries intricate carving across the whole structure.

Lingaraja at Bhubaneswar

Built early in the eleventh century, so within about fifty years of the other. It has three large mandapas used for different purposes, and it is built from sandstone and laterite found locally, with ornate carving.

The comparison worth making

Both are dedicated to Shiva. Both have secondary shrines to Parvati and other deities. Both were built within half a century. And they look quite different, because they belong to distinct regional traditions: notice the pyramidal vimana at Thanjavur against the curving shikhara in Bhubaneswar.

Dilwara at Mount Abu

Five Jain temples in Rajasthan, built between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries by the Solanki or Chaulukya dynasty. They are white marble, brought from the Aravalli hills nearby. Delicate carving of tirthankaras, deities, dancers, musicians and ornamental pattern covers every surface.

Bishnupur in Bengal

A completely different style, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These are brick structures with elaborate decoration on square panels, many showing themes connected with Radha, Krishna or Rama, and also scenes of everyday life. The terracotta panels were carved by hand first and then fired in a kiln, precisely.

What decided all that variety

Mostly the ground. Thanjavur is granite country and Bhubaneswar has sandstone and laterite. Mount Abu sits below marble hills. Bengal's delta gives clay and no building stone at all, which is why its temples are brick and terracotta.

The detail nobody notices

None of the structures in this chapter uses cement mortar. The blocks are shaped and placed so that weight and fit hold them. A temple sixty metres high stands up because its stones were cut to agree with each other.

Beyond the famous names

The chapter is careful to say its selection leaves out thousands of monuments. The Jageshwar group in Uttarakhand has about 124 stone temples, associated with the Katyuri, Chand and Gurjara-Pratihara dynasties between the eighth and eighteenth centuries. The Hidimba Devi temple at Manali, built in the sixteenth century, is dedicated to Bhima's wife from the Mahabharata, with a nearby shrine to their son Ghatotkacha.

And one that is a ruin

Sharada Peetha in Jammu and Kashmir was a renowned centre of learning, flourishing between the sixth and twelfth centuries, and important in the development of the Sharada script. It drew scholars from across India and beyond, and it gave Kashmir the name Sharada Desh. It is in ruins now, and still part of India's heritage.

Scenario:

A photograph shows a temple complex you do not recognise. There is a tall gateway in the outer wall, carved all over with figures. Inside it, a courtyard runs round the building behind a low enclosing wall. The building itself begins with a hall whose roof rests on rows of pillars. Beyond the hall, a small dark room sits at the centre, directly beneath the tallest tower of the whole structure. Several much smaller shrines stand against the enclosure. A rectangular tank of water lies to one side.

Analysis:

The sequence is the point. Because temple construction followed shilpashastra, a reader who knows the order of the parts can walk through a temple they have never visited, anywhere in India, and know what comes next.

Activity:

Sketch the plan from the description, labelling four parts.

Title:

Compare two towers

Safety:

No safety concerns; this is a paper exercise.

What You Notice:

Both are dedicated to Shiva and both were built within about fifty years of each other, which is what makes the difference in their shapes a question worth asking.

The Nandi facing the main shrine at Thanjavur was carved from a single stone.

The Jageshwar group in Uttarakhand comprises about 124 stone temples, built across the eighth to eighteenth centuries.

Sharada Peetha gave Kashmir the name Sharada Desh, and was important in the development of the Sharada script.

The parts in order — GATE, HALL, ROOM — The gopuram or torana is the gate, the mandapa is the pillared hall, and the garbhagriha is the innermost room with the tower above it.

Why materials differ — ASK THE GROUND, NOT THE STYLE — Granite at Thanjavur, sandstone and laterite at Bhubaneswar, marble below the Aravallis, and brick in the Bengal delta.

Reading a building for who made it

The last topics read buildings for what they were for. This one reads them for whose hands were on the stone, which turns out to be a different question with a more surprising answer.

The mosque at Ahmedabad

Sultan Ahmed Shah I built it in the fifteenth century, in yellow sandstone. Fine arches run across its facade, and two minaret bases stand on it, whose upper portions were brought down by earthquakes and survive only in a sketch.

What the stonework gives away

Intricate stone jalis, which are latticed screens. Pillars of the same kind found in some temples, though without the decoration. Detailed carving. Scholars conclude from this that Hindu and Jain craft workers of the district, masons and carvers alike, helped build the mosque.

Indo-Islamic

That is the name for the blend, and it is not unusual. Its features include domes, arches both pointed and corbelled, jalis, and floral motifs. Corbelled means built by stacking blocks in a staircase pattern, which is a different way of spanning a gap from a true arch.

In Rajasthan, builders worked in local features: jharokhas, which are overhanging balconies, and chhatris, which are pavilion domes. A building type can arrive from elsewhere and still end up looking like the place it stands in.

The Jama Masjid

India's largest mosque, built by Shah Jahan in the middle of the seventeenth century, after shifting his capital from Agra to the new Shahjahanabad, which is now Old Delhi. He wanted one great mosque in which the whole city's Muslims could assemble. About five thousand workers were put to the task.

Red sandstone with white marble decoration, three large entrances, and two minarets forty metres tall flanking it. Three large domes cover the main prayer hall. The red-stone courtyard holds up to twenty-five thousand people. Calligraphy of verses from the Qur'an decorates the walls and arches, and a niche called the mihrab marks the direction of Mecca.

What a fort was for

Protecting a kingdom from invaders, which is why forts sit beside the main roads or the sea lanes, and often on a height that looks over the plains. That much is obvious.

What else a fort was

A place where power lived. A fort held the houses of the ruling families and the army officers, sometimes a royal palace, and in some cases an entire city, depending on size. That is why forts and palaces belong in a single category.

Mehrangarh

Construction began in Rajasthan in the middle of the fifteenth century, and Rajput rulers went on expanding it for roughly two centuries. It overlooks Jodhpur, built from massive blocks of red sandstone sourced locally. Inside the complex a large palace has areas for the royalty and separate quarters for men and women.

Agra Fort's fountains

The river runs below the fort, so the water had to go up before it could come down. Persian wheels lifted it from the Yamuna into tanks on the walls. From there it ran through terracotta pipes and emerged as fountains, and the moving water cooled the air. In the nineteenth century British troops of the East India Company destroyed many of the fort's buildings.

Orchha

The Bundela Rajput kings built this fort-palace complex in the middle of the sixteenth century, on the banks of the Betwa in Madhya Pradesh. Three palaces stand there: Rai Praveen Mahal, Jahangir Mahal and Raja Mahal. Jahangir Mahal, raised to mark that emperor's visit, blends Rajput and Mughal styles, with ornate chambers, carved stone and courtyards. Chhatris stand along the riverbank.

Mysuru Palace

Also called Amba Vilas, and a prominent example of Indo-Saracenic architecture. The Wadiyar family lives there. The present building went up early in the twentieth century, after fire destroyed the wooden palace before it. Carved wooden doors, painted ceilings, stained glass, and a golden throne shown during Dasara. Nearly a hundred thousand lights illuminate it on Sunday evenings and at festivals.

Why some faiths left no royal tombs

Because the practice follows the religion. Islam and Christianity bury their dead, so mausoleums were built for rulers, royal households and renowned mystics, and they also made a political claim about a dynasty's greatness. Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism cremate their dead, so no ancient tombs of such rulers exist in India.

What appears instead

The cenotaph, from medieval times, especially in Rajasthan and central India. It marks the place where a king or a member of his family was cremated, which is not the same thing as a grave.

Humayun's Tomb

Architects from Persia designed it, and the taste they carried with them became part of the Mughal tradition. Humayun's chief wife, Bega Begum, commissioned the tomb in 1558. Its architecture embeds strict symmetry, extending to the gardens around it. The complex also holds the tombs of several Mughals, Dara Shikoh among them.

Houses, and the climate

Havelis in the Shekhawati part of Rajasthan are built round a central courtyard, their walls covered in painted frescoes. They belonged to the nobility and the rich merchant class. Many are now hotels or museums, because they are hard to maintain. Teak came from Burma and marble from Italy, so the materials of these Tamil Nadu houses were drawn from far away. Their owners were Chettinadu merchants whose trade in rice, spices and gems ran to Southeast Asia. Their central courtyard served rituals, gatherings, and the sun-drying of papads and chillies.

Churches

Tradition holds that the first were built on the coast of Kerala. Some imitate classic European styles. Others, especially in Kerala, take in local traditions: a stambha, or flag post, borrowed straight from temple architecture, and sloped tiled roofs.

Indo-Saracenic

The colonial style that flourished from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, under the British Raj. It blended Islamic, Hindu and Gothic elements, with domes, pointed arches, minarets and decorative patterns drawn from Mughal and Rajput work. The Madras High Court, completed in 1892, and the Victoria Memorial Hall in Kolkata are examples.

What this chapter will not claim

That its selection is complete. What India has built is as rich and as varied as anything anywhere, and thousands of astonishing monuments in many styles are left out. Many lesser-known ones are in a state of neglect, and preserving them is genuinely difficult.

Scenario:

Agra Fort had many fountains, and the problem was getting water to them. The Yamuna runs below the fort, so the water had to go up before it could come down. Persian wheels lifted it into tanks built on the walls. From those tanks it ran down through pipes of terracotta and emerged as fountains inside the buildings. The moving and evaporating water cooled the air around it. In the nineteenth century, British troops of the East India Company destroyed many of the fort's buildings.

Analysis:

The fountains are a worked example of building with the climate instead of against it: no fuel, no machinery beyond a wheel, and a result that modern buildings now spend electricity to achieve.

Activity:

List three features of a building in your area that cool it without using power.

Title:

Spot the blend

Safety:

No safety concerns; this is a paper exercise.

What You Notice:

The name is Indo-Saracenic, and the exercise is to arrive at the idea before the label: a building can belong to three traditions at once without belonging to any of them completely.

About five thousand workers were put to building the Jama Masjid, whose courtyard can hold twenty-five thousand people.

The Chettinadu houses of Tamil Nadu used teak from Burma and marble from Italy, and their courtyards dried papads and chillies.

Nearly a hundred thousand lights illuminate the Mysuru Palace on Sunday evenings and during festivals.

Why some faiths left no royal tombs — BURY AND BUILD, CREMATE AND MARK — Islam and Christianity bury, so mausoleums were built. Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism cremate, so cenotaphs mark the place instead.

Agra Fort's fountains — UP BY WHEEL, DOWN BY PIPE — Persian wheels raised the Yamuna's water into tanks on the walls, and terracotta pipes brought it down as fountains that cooled the air.