Making of a sacred terrain: Nachiket Chanchani’s ‘Mountain Temples & Temple Mountains’
Author: Nachiket Chanchani
Raaja Bhasin
UNLIKE many other mountain systems in the world that have traditionally been looked at with awe, even fear, and as the home of demons, trolls and evil spirits, the Himalayas have never had that drape of trepidation around them. These mountains have been considered as benign, life-giving, home to various deities from the Hindu pantheon.
That said, great archaeological finds, long-lost architectural specimens, artworks, stolen and stashed, have more often than not come to light serendipitously or through a painstaking process of search and discovery. It is rare that something remains in plain sight for centuries and does not go through rigorous processes of fieldwork and scholarship. While there has been no dearth of study on the temples of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, ‘Mountain Temples & Temple Mountains’ is a rare piece that first widens the scape, locates the dots, and then connects them.
Nachiket Chanchani is an art historian and associate professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In this book, he dissects a relatively unexplored area of study, examining the sacred structures and steles of the Central Himalayas, especially Uttarakhand. While he establishes the significance of well-known centres of pilgrimage and grand edifices, he also steps away from the beaten path to look at the numerous, almost-unknown, places where individual temples or clusters lie forlorn and abandoned. Sacred structures that speak of a creative impulse that need not necessarily have been continuous, but may well have been sporadic. As this study establishes, the supposed truth of who the builders were need not necessarily be true, but may well stem from the error of equating conjecture with reality.
Chanchani seeks to address two fundamental questions — how did the Central Himalayas emerge as ‘Dev Bhoomi’, land of the gods, and how did this shape into a sacred terrain to be venerated by almost an entire nation? Most devout Hindus try and make a pilgrimage at least once in their lives to the ‘Char Dham’, the four sacred centres located in the Central Himalayas. They come from all corners of the country as they have been doing for centuries. Why?
Stemming from these two issues raised by Chanchani emerge other points. Between the 3rd and 13th century, which is the millennium under this scholarly scanner backed with extensive fieldwork, what were the processes and what was the movement of ideas, political forces and architectural and art identities? How have these states of Uttarakhand and Himachal remained at the core of idea of Indian nationhood? Unlike some other hill states, these two have never spoken of separation from the country. The hill people have asked for and received statehood within the Indian Union and have emerged as some of its staunchest supporters. Is there a connection with this, and the architecture, art and perceived sanctity of this montane landscape? Or is that too tenuous and specious an argument to posit? How does art and architecture provide linkages with some other parts of the country? Can parallels be drawn from defined, recognisable and exalted sacred architecture in distant sites?
This study, supported by extensive photographs, establishes the movement of classical sacred architecture across the country and how the Central Himalayas may be placed at the heart of a body of temple architecture in the country. The approach is scholarly, the arguments Chanchani presents are cogent and the narrative precise yet delicate. Escaping the danger of being ponderous, his descriptions of various classical forms of temple are replete with detail that comes from close-observation backed with a rare but requisite vocabulary.
