An architect’s rebuttal to another architect on why it’s outrageous to make a case that Hindu dharma has never been about grandness
“Let him [who would be an architect] be educated, skilful with the pencil, instructed in geometry, know much history, have followed the philosophers with attention, understand music, have some knowledge of medicine, know the opinions of the jurists, and be acquainted with astronomy and the theory of the heavens.
? Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, The Ten Books On Architecture, Chapter I, Sec. 3 (15 BC)
“Nothing should more deeply shame the modern student than the recency and inadequacy of his acquaintance with India.
? Will Durant, Our Oriental heritage
I come from a field where the West is looked upon as the leader of the craft. However disturbing it may seem, we must take it with not just a pinch but with a bag full of salt.
Hence when it came to rebut a piece from celebrated architect and writer Gautam Bhatia, I begin by quoting Vitruvius, the Roman architect from the pre-Christian era, who is seen in highest of esteem once it comes to look upon at pioneers of architecture, at least in the Indian schools of Architecture, where I graduated from.
Vitruvius talks about the importance of history and philosophy for an architect, and Will Durant (quoted second) explains how modern students are clueless about India. Reading the piece of Bhatia, I could see Durant’s assertion getting louder with each passing line. At once I was baffled because the reality of history seemed too distant in each claim that he made.
Approach 1: Rejection of Mughal Contribution
Bhatia drags in PN Oak, pointlessly. The primary sources show quite well that even the Taj wasn’t something of a great architectural contribution of Mughals and this claim stands well without even going into Oak’s thesis of it being a “mandir” in reality. Let’s concentrate on the Taj. It is recorded that when the Taj Mahal was built (1631 AD), it cost 41.8 million silver rupees (Nogu?s). To set things in perspective, I am providing some mathematics for the readers. An average mean income of a single family of farmers was “One Dam (Copper Coin) per day”. One silver rupee was equivalent to forty Dams (Moosvi, 2015) which would get you around two hundred and eighty kilogrammes of general grade rice during the reign of Shahjahan
Same was the period when the great Deccan Famine (1630-31 AD) had occurred and around 7.4 million people (R. Winters, 2017) had succumbed to the same. It may sound strange, but this famine was created by Shahjahan himself. In the year 1631 AD, the army under Shahjahan marched to Malwa to teach a lesson to a rebel commander who had joined hands with Adilshahis of Bijapur and Nizamshahis of Hyderabad. The Moghuls extracted an annual revenue of not less than ten million rupees from the Malwa province in the seventeenth century (Thomas, 1871). The rebellion had put an eclipse on this massive income and hence the attack on Malwa as well as Deccan was inevitable. This trend to ravage Malwa had begun a lot before this campaign as a couple of years ago, commander Khwaja Abu Hasan had invaded Malwa. These acts briefly led to the massive famine of 1630-32 (L?hor? p. 12).
The Shahjahan’s regal armies’ destruction of crops in Malwa and Deccan has been well recorded by the Moghul court chroniclers as well as by foreign travellers. For example, Inayat Khan talks about how Shahjahan had ordered the imperial army to “ravage the country from end to end” in Shahjahanama. The order of Shahjahan was carried very comprehensively and Inayat writes, “There is scarcely a vestige of cultivation left in this country”. It was during his campaign of Burhanpur that Mumtaj Mahal died from a postpartum hemorrhage after struggling for thirty hours to give birth to the fourteenth child. And it was here that he decided to create the Tomb for her corpse that came to be known as the Taj Mahal (?In?yat Kh?n, 1990 pp. 251-2) (Kumar, 2014). The scarcity of rain coupled with devastations brought by Imperial Timurid (Moghul) Army to give the great famine of 1630-32. The regions affected were Gujarat, Malwa & Deccan.
Just to set a perspective, we read about the devastating Bengal Famine of 1943 that killed around three million people, and Winston Churchill is held accountable. When it comes to the Deccan famine of 1630-32 that killed more than twice that of the former, it gets whitewashed at ease by singing the glory of the beautiful “Taj Mahal”.
The Moghul court chronicler Abdul Hamid Lahori didn’t roll a carpet over it as he writes as below (L?hor? p. 12): “Inhabitants were reduced to the direst extremity. Life was offered for a loaf, but none would buy. Dog’s flesh was sold for goat flesh. The pounded bones of the dead were mixed in flour and sold. Men began to devour each other, and the flesh of a son was preferred to his love. The number of deaths caused obstructions in the roads. Those lands which had been famous for fertility and plenty of resources retain no traces of production.
Peter Mundy, the British traveller, and merchant who visited the region in the period of famine writes in his diary (Mundy, 1907 pp. 40-48): “Surat (Gujarat): Great famine, highways unpassable, infested by thieves looking not for gold but grain; Kirka: Town empty, half inhabitants fled, another half dead; Dhaita: Children sold for 6 dams or given for free to any who could take them so they might be kept alive; Nandurbar (Maharashtra): No space to pitch a tent, dead bodies everywhere. Noisome smell from a neighbouring pit where 40 dead bodies were thrown. Survivors searching for grains in the excrement of men and animals. Highway stowed with dead bodies from Surat to Burhanpur.”
He gives complete details about how the Timurid (Mughal) lords were treating people. He writes: “In Bazar lay people dead and others breathing their last with the food almost near their mouths, yet dying for want of it, they not having wherewith to buy, nor the others so much pity to spare them any without money. There being no course taken in this country to remedy this great evil, the rich and strong engrossing and taking perforce all to themselves.”
“There was no food but there was some at someplace. Whereas the entire province was on death bed, Shahjahan’s camp of war was in fair shape. It was spacious & plentifully stored with all provisions. The camp was receiving supplies from all the corners, far and near (Mundy, 1907, p. 50).”
Not only did Shahjahan ensure the wrath of famine to barge upon people, but the great Timurid prince was also extorting to create the tomb for Mumtaj. Taxes in the Timurid empire established by Babur were known to be collecting the highest taxes in the world. The estimates tell us that they used to take a share of more than half of what peasants produced (Moosvi, 2015) in contrast to the Hindu Kings like that of Vijayanagar Empire who charged almost four times less than Timurids.
I even came across the revenue utilisation done by Shahjahan. He invested a little more than one-third of the revenue on the sixty-eight princes and Amirs. One fourth of the revenue went for his officers, whose numbers have been counted as five hundred and eighty-seven. This implies that almost sixty-two percent of revenue was spent on merely six hundred and sixty-five Elites of the court (Habib, 1982 p. 242).
Anyone with thorough reading around the subject can’t help but to conclude that Shahjahan brought the wrath of famine over Gujarat, Malwa and Deccan by ravaging the cultivation completely and then diverting the revenue to build the Taj. Of course, it was coupled with the scarcity of rain too. Around eight million people succumbed to famine. This number is well attested in a letter written by a Dutch East India Company (VOC) lawyer (R. WINTERS, 2017). I’m always in aghast that one comes with all praise to the Taj as the architectural masterpiece, when the truth of the matter is that it was built by the Indians at the cost of blood of as many as eight million who scummed to the great famine.
The architect in Bhatia should also have thought what went wrong, that these people who came from Uzbekistan could never create such a masterpiece (if Taj be) in their hometown, but it took them to do so only in India. Even the G?r-i Am?r, a mausoleum of Timur, is less than half the height of Taj and the area.
This question is very well answered by Babur in Baburnama. He laments about his poverty when not in Hindustan (Babur, 1922 pp. 157-8) and tells us how gold and silver were easily available along with the workforce in Hindustan. He writes in Baburnama (Babur, 1922 p. 520): “Mull? Sharaf, writing in the Z?afar-n?ma about the building of T?m?r Beg’s Stone Mosque, lays stress on the fact that on it 200 stone-cutters worked, from ??arb??j?n, Fars, Hind?st?n and other countries. But 680 men worked daily on my buildings in ?gra and of ?gra stonecutters only, while 1,491 stone-cutters worked daily on my buildings in ?gra (…)”
Well, I am surprised that Bhatia is failing to understand that we celebrate the “Jewish Museum” by Daniel Libeskind as one of the best architectures not just because of its terrific morphology but the purpose and the emotion it carries. It would be so lowly of an architect in me to see a piece (Taj) as a great example of architecture given that its each stone cries aloud the saga of millions dying in the great Deccan famine.
Approach-2: Saraswati River Myth
Bhatia also intellectually mocks the Indian government’s attempt to put across research on the Saraswati river. His argument is clear that Saraswati is a mythical river and hence any funds allocated to research around it is worthless. But the truth of the matter is that it is proven by scientific studies that a river certainly ran through the channel which is said to be that of Saraswati. Even Upinder Singh, the celebrated historian and daughter of our former PM, Manmohan Singh, uses the term “Saraswati-Sindhu Civilisation”. Historian Michel Danino has presented an almost non-refutable case for the existence of the Saraswati river and the Harappan civilisation being Vaidik in nature. Should Bhatia be interested in seeing his assertion of Saraswati being mythic being accepted he will need to refute Danino’s book The Lost River: On the trail of the Sarasvati. That is not all.
The Initial studies suggested that the Sutlej and Yamuna changed the course around 4.5-3.9 KBP (thousand years before present) because of the “tectonic events resulting in the drying-up of the Hakra in the Thar desert”. Here Hakra has been identified as Saraswati (Sharad K. Jain, 2007 pp. 311-2) (McIntosh, 2008 pp. 20-1) (Gupta, 1995 pp. 49-50) (Bhan, 1972) (Bhan, 1973 pp. 252-63) (Bhan, 1975) (Banshelkikar, 1980) (Bryant, 2001) (B.B.Lal, 2002) (D. S. Mitra, 2012) (Possehl, 1997) (J.M.Kenoyer, 1997) (Anirban Chatterjee, 2019). Apart from the citations stated here, there are many more which talk about a river that existed and dried from the region where Saraswati is supposed to have existed. As per the latest research, it is well established that Sutlej and the Yamuna shifted course a lot before the Harappan times. They left the monsoon-fed Ghaggar-Hakra (Saraswati) which finally dried-up during late Harappan times (Clift, et al., 2012) (Nitesh Khonde, 2017) (Liviu Giosan, 2012).
This paper (Clift, et al., 2012) interestingly gives us the dating of zircon sand grains. Major results are as below: “Subsurface river channels near the IVC sites in Cholistan immediately below the presumed Ghaggar-Hakra channel show sediment affinity not with the Ghaggar-Hakra, but instead with the Beas River in the western sites and the Sutlej and the Yamuna in the eastern ones. It means that the Yamuna itself, or a channel of the Yamuna along with a channel of the Sutlej may have flowed west sometime between 49-12 KBP. The drainage from the Yamuna may have been lost from the Ghaggar-Hakra well before the beginnings of Indus civilisation.”
Although the current Ghaggar-Hakra is an intermittent river passing through India and Pakistan the satellite images lying with ISRO & ONGC reflect that the major course of a river ran there. The report of ISRO, was based on a terrific work published in an International Journal of Remote Sensing.
For an architect to choose a dogmatic view over established scientifically proven facts vis-?-vis a certain subject is problematic. So, in my opinion, the government’s approach for investing in research on the Saraswati river is a great idea.
Approach-3: Act of Monumentalis
The author takes a dig at the approach of Hindu-centric infrastructure development. He specially targets the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor and the Highway Constructions. He mentions the demolition of around three hundred existing structures with a quest to revive existing mandirs in the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor project.
The fact of the matter is that the habitable condition of the place was extremely painful. The light didn’t reach the habitable zones and the sanitation was nowhere close to make the place be recognised as habitable. The existing houses which have been removed got substantial compensation and certainly an opportunity to place themselves in habitable order. Earlier the corridor which led you to the mandir was merely 15-feet wide, which as per Building Codes would have been able to take care of only 500 people during the case of stampede. Just to give you a perspective, the driveway of parking in apartments itself is 15-18 feet wide. Which architect on earth would be peeved by the uplift of the habitable condition? Will Bhatia ever design a house with such conditions in the name of “re-living the Kashi as he sees?”
That apart, the place had a purpose and a traditional significance. It is the pivot of the idea of “moksha” and the flawless connectivity between Ganga and Mandir Dwar was of utmost importance. As an architect, my heart bleeds that we had suffocated the heritage value of this tradition through encroachments and no architect ever raised a voice around this. The Harappans are known to be the first people to have developed a flush based toilet system and certainly the depilated sanitary system in the gone-by Kashi Corridor didn’t reflect our ancientness.
As far as the highway connecting Char Dham is concerned, the Supreme Court dictated that the wide highway was very much needed with respect to the National Security, given the threats we face for the hostile neighbour in the North-East. Wider roads would help the Army mobilise well in the period of concerns. The funniest part is that it is NGT which is making the most noise with regards to matter. It is the same body that had once proposed a lake buffer (no construction zone) of 75.0 metres and now has brought it down to 30.0 metres. Did they ever clarify whether they were wrong with the lake-buffer being twice more than what it stands as today? There are many such cases where NGT seems to have turned merely into propaganda machinery.
Approach-4: Act of Monumentalism
The author then questions the acts of building Hindu centres, mandirs at monumental scale and zooms down especially at the Ram temple being built at Ayodhya. Well, then isn’t Bhatia rebutting his own stand? Recall how he praises the Mughal monuments and seems dismayed when people bring proofs for them being made from destruction of Hindu mandirs. We have always been known to build great monuments. The Kailasha Temple and many more are great examples of architecture at monumental scale. There seems to be no reason why the grand monument should not be dedicated at the birthplace of Shri Ram. He is the “Maryada Purushottam” and certainly deserves perhaps way more than done so far. Shri Ram is the icon of Bharat.
How mean it appears to be for us to have not raised a brow when so much land was given away for the Samadhi of Mahatma Gandhi and others from the Nehru Parivar. By the Gandhian thought as idealised, his Samadhi should have been the smallest and simplest possible but here too hypocrisy is the deal of the ages.
The civilisation of Bharat has been long shadowed by the acerbic useless tonics down our throats by Brown Sahibs. We must stop living the ghosts of ages when the Prime Minister of India was so disheartened with the renovation of Somnath Mandir. Jawaharlal Nehru who was peeved to see President Rajendra Prasad attending the Bhumi-Pujan.
Conclusion
I am completely in sync with the last part of Bhatia’s article. He raises the important point that the government must not ignore taking care of those smallest of mandirs with lots of paramparas, anecdotes related to various Sampradayas. They are needed to be preserved, conserved with the same vigour as are the large ones like Kashi Vishwanath being done. But Bhatia’s take to bring the government’s investment for taking care of churches and mosques is highly problematic, given the fact that state controls only mandirs while waqf board and churches are becoming too rich with the property quantum they have.
But Bhatia’s piece focuses merely to make a case that Hindu Dharma has never been about grandness and whatever the efforts are being today are just an overdone exaggerated fa?ade. This certainly is an outrageous opinion and I have tried best to bring a substantial rebuttal for the same.
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