When the sense of distinction
and separation is absent, you Nisargadatta
06 VELLORE
FROM SPACE TO CONSCIOUSNESS: INDIC ARCHITECTURE – I
SHONALEEKA
KAUL
art of a quest for a culturally rooted
P
practice of architecture is asking
fundamental questions such as
what did the act of building truly
I
mean? ‘Architecture’, from the
Greek architecton (‘prime builder’),
is fundamentally articulated space.
Or, as Aldo van Eyck evocatively
called it, “outlined emptiness”, the
outlining performed via the action
of building, which encloses and
contains space.
In Indic conceptions, however,
right from the first millennium
BCE, the word for space is akasha,
which implies vastness, transcend-
ence and a phenomenon as all-en-
compassing as the sky. Clearly then,
space as akasha was the opposite of
anything finite, bounded or en-
closed. So in this understanding,
architecture would be the paradoxi-
cal attempt to limit the limitless,
enclose the unenclosable. Which
begs the question: Is architecture a
contradiction in terms?
And yet, humankind has been
building and enclosing space for
millennia. So what does this transi-
tion from the unlimited to the lim-
ited, from the transcendent to the
contingent, do to space? In generat-
ing an interior and an exterior, does
building not also generate an artifi-
cial divide and duality or splitting
asunder of experience? In forcing a
separation between the world with-
in and without, and ushering with-
in the built interiors the bulk of our
activities, has civilisation and its
THURSDAY
Associate Professor, Centre for Historical
Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University
prime force, architecture, contract-
ed and narrowed down rather than
expanded our lives and our sense of
reality? This is a question of both
physics and metaphysics. Ultimate-
ly, however, it is perhaps a question
of ethics: What is the practice of
architecture meant to effect in hu-
man terms? A separation or a con-
tinuum? A split or equipoise? Al-
ienation or belonging?
These are questions that have
agitated the minds of some thinker-
architects in the West like van Eyck
and Christopher Alexander, who
perceived a growing crisis of mind-
lessness and disembeddedness in
contemporary architecture, and
went on to exhort a style of con-
struction that felt like a built home-
coming, “places where we can be
what we really are”, or that tapped
into the eternal truth in the ordi-
nary and every day.
In doing so, these architects right-
ly apprehended the connection be-
tween the surrounding built envi-
ronment and the psycho-social life
of the individual. They believed in
the transformative potential of ar-
chitecture in facilitating the over-
coming of contradictions that peo-
ple and indeed societies felt within
themselves, and their attainment of
a relaxed equipoise instead. They
emphasised the overcoming of du-
alities—the forced separation of in-
terior from exterior—as the key to
wholesome and harmonious build-
ings and communities.
11 11 2021
l l
These issues are as relevant to
modern India where building ap-
pears to be a heedless, profiteering
business. Indian urban architec-
ture today displays an overwhelm-
ing functionalism and monotony,
apart from a confused poverty of
form—the predominant impression
one gets from the mushrooming
jungle of skyscraper-slums that the
urban core and peripheries alike
have become. While there is noth-
ing wrong with function and it is a
necessary and sufficient impetus
for building, the question really is
what is the nature of function that
is aimed at. Is it that of mere utility
or is it that of purpose, a “lasting
human validity”; the two are vastly
different in terms of their social
and spiritual potential.
What may ancient history tell us
in this regard? Scholars speak of
two broad functions performed by
public architecture: sacred and sec-
ular. To these the great temples and
stupas of early India and the cities
and palaces, respectively, can be as-
signed. However, this binary is it-
self a separation imposed by Euro-
pean modernity, which expects the
sacred nowadays to have a minimal
role and the secular, perhaps, mini-
It is to make manifest a culturally validated
idea of reality that most knowledge systems
of early India strove in great epistemic
unison. ... Vastu texts ... were ultimately about
architecture ... as meditation on the true
nature of reality. Thus whether it was building
an altar, a temple or a city, architecture at its
highest became an instrument of liberation
mal soul. This may not be quite how
the ancients thought. They pro-
fessed perhaps far more integrated
life-goals.
In early India, form and con-
sciousness were considered insepa-
rable, regardless of the character
of the building, and their union in-
vested with cultural meaning and
efficacy. Architecture was a self-
consciously undertaken project
which, like a yajna, was believed to
be transformational, both for its
practitioners and clientele. This
two-part series draws on a couple of
central concepts of space from ear-
ly India, mandala and mandara, to
explore how form and spirit fused
synergistically with a view to trans-
forming the individual partaker
and ultimately the community.
Returning then to the concept of
akasha, while retaining its essen-
tial qualities of infinitude and tran-
scendence, it could be of three dif-
ferent kinds: in the middle,
citakasha, mindspace that gave rise
to all activity and perception; above
it, paramakasha, the infinite space
of nameless consciousness; and
deep within, hrdayakasha, the
space of the human heart. What’s
more, appearing to confound all no-
tions of scale and hierarchy, para-
makasha was exactly replicated in
hrdayakasha, or rather it reposed
deep within the latter.
In the Taittiriya Upanishad (cir-
ca 1000 BCE) this was expressed as
nihitam guhayam parame vyoman:
“deep within the cave [-like heart]
of man lies infinite consciousness”.
Here was the microcosmic paradox:
the secret of outermost space is to
be found in the innermost! As the
Chhandogya Upanishad described
it: “within the city of brahman (in-
finite consciousness) is a small lo-
may call it love Maharaj
tus flower. Within that is a still
smaller space, the human heart (hr-
dayakasha). Within that space is
the deepest truth.”
In metaphysical terms, the indi-
vidual atman (soul) mirrored the
universal brahman (pure conscious-
ness), and true knowledge was the
realisation of their unity, or the true
nature of reality was their unity. In-
deed moksha (liberation) was not
some other-worldly pursuit but
jivan mukti (liberation in one’s life-
time) or the realisation in the here
and now of that state of bliss arisen
from union with the infinite. Known
as advaita (non-dualism), this trans-
sectarian philosophy established
itself as influential from very early,
finding expression first in the Upan-
ishads, then the syncretic Bhagavad
Gita (2nd century BCE), down to Adi
Shankara and Vedanta (9th century
CE onwards) and the nirguna bhak-
ti saints (14th–17th century).
Of course one does not have to be
an advaitavadin to see that it is to
make manifest a culturally validat-
ed idea of reality that most knowl-
edge systems of early India strove
in great epistemic unison. Archi-
tecture was no exception. Vastu
texts from the first and second mil-
lennium CE, in the midst of the
plethora of technical specifications
they offer, were ultimately about
architecture as a means to an end
greater than itself—architecture as
meditation on the true nature of
reality. Thus whether it was build-
ing an altar, a temple or a city, archi-
tecture at its highest became an in-
strument of liberation.
(To be continued)
(The author is editor of Eloquent
Spaces: Meaning and Community
in Early Indian Architecture)
(shonaleeka@mail.jnu.ac.in)