The continuing architectural tradition of India that safeguards in stone the spiritual heritage of Hinduism and resists its extinction at the hands of invasive proselytising cultures of the world, specifically those pertaining to the Semitic religions, Christianity and Islam.
Rooted in the soil thus, architecture -- which in Goethe's poetic description is frozen music -- stands as the glowing testament of the cultural history of a people and its persistent presence in the mind of posterity even when the race that wrote its narrative in stone is dead and gone. Thus lives on ancient Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia, and so does India of distant dreams, lived and relived from time immemorial till this day, without rupture enough to extinguish the very fire that on the banks of the Sarasvati and the Sindhu was lit, whose flames rose to engulf the Gangetic plains and the whole of the Himalayas, for ours is a continuing civilisation since antiquity unlike the extinct ancient civilisations elsewhere.
And this history is held vibrant in these stone pillars, in these domes and arches, figures and figurines of gods and divinities that even today give us lasting linkages to the lives lived by our ancestors aeons ago. This is the legacy left in stone, in marble reminiscent of a beauteous dawn of yore, in granite redolent with the memories that never fade, of kings and queens, of gods and goddesses, sages and saints, of princes and peasants, and of incarnate divinities and insignificant folks, but all of whom have formed the fabric of our motherland and laid down their love's labour to leave for us this beautiful land we call our own.
Glory unto the architects of culture! Glory unto every dust particle that united to be shaped in the hands of the master masons and the seminal sculptors into eternal temples to Time!
Written by Sugata Bose
Photo, courtesy, Sharmistha Chatterjee : Naulakha Mandir.
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