Archaeologists, Historians, Architects Before commencing this tour, however, I would like to challenge two long-held and widely accepted assumptions regarding the intentions and the identity of the Kailas’s designer. The first of these, initially presented by the renowned British scholar and art historian James Fergusson in the 1870s, is that its designer chose to carve the temple downward from the top of a cliff, rather than build it conventionally from the ground up, because it was cheaper to do it that way. My second challenge aims to clarify an issue of semantics. Its purpose is not to quibble over grammar, but to put to rest a near universal—and I believe an inherently misleading—scholarly mindset as to who it was who actually designed the Kailas. In his History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, Fergusson wrote “Almost everyone who sees [this temple] is struck with the apparently prodigious amount of labour bestowed on their excavation, and there is no doubt that their monolithic character is the principal source of the awe and wonder with which they have been regarded, and that had the Kailas been an edifice of masonry situated on the plain, it would scarcely have attracted the attention of European travellers. In reality, however, it is considerately easier and less expensive to excavate a temple than to build one…The excavating process would probably cost about one tenth of the other [but as a result] the whole has necessarily been placed in a pit.” Fergusson assumed, as is evident from this statement, that placing the temple in a “pit” was a purely economic decision on the part of its sthapati, and that this technique, while cost-effective, was in itself an architectural disadvantage. This assumption has since been echoed by many other scholars: his colleague James Burgess, who regarded the “pit” as an “artistic mistake;”1 by art historian Percy Brown, writing in the 1920s, who found the temple’s appearance in a “pit” “a disadvantage from which the Kailas obviously suffers;”2 by art historian Benjamin Rowland, who asserted in the 1930s “the disadvantage of this technique is that the temple is left enshadowed at the bottom of a deep pit.”3 Many other scholars, perhaps in awe of their great predecessor’s academic stature, have simply accepted 12
The KAILAS at ELLORA
