Digital Rare Book:
Indian Architecture According To Manasara-Silpasastra
By Prasanna Kumar Acharya
Published by Oxford University Press, London - 1931
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The Mānāsara, also known as Manasa or Manasara Shilpa Shastra, is an ancient Sanskrit treatise on Indian architecture and design. Organized into 70 adhyayas (chapters) and 10,000 shlokas (verses), it is one of many Hindu texts on Shilpa Shastra – science of arts and crafts – that once existed in 1st-millennium CE. The Manasara is among the few on Hindu architecture whose complete manuscripts have survived into the modern age. It is a treatise that provides detailed guidelines on the building of Hindu temples, sculptures, houses, gardens, water tanks, laying out of towns and other structures.
The word Manasara is a compound of Sanskrit māna (measurement) and sara (essence), meaning "essence of measurement" states P.K. Acharya – the scholar who discovered the complete manuscript (70 chapters) and was first to translate it into English in early 20th-century. While the text is now commonly referred as simply Manasara, the Sanskrit manuscript title is Manasara Shilpa Shastra (मानसार शिल्पशस्त्र).[6] Based on the early verses of the partial manuscript (58 chapters) studied in early 19th-century, Ram Raz suggested that the term "Manasara" is better rendered as "the standard measurement" or "the system of proportion".
Manuscripts and date:
Indian manuscripts that have survived into the modern age suggest that there once existed a large collection of treatises on architecture, design, arts and crafts. Many are referred and cited in surviving text but they are lost to history or yet to be discovered. Some have survived in portions, over hundred of which PK Acharya has listed in his Encyclopedia of Hindu Architecture. The Manasara is one of the few that have survived in full and has been completely translated.
Like manuscripts on many notable subjects, the Manasara was believed to have been lost by the 19th-century. Fragments of 58 chapters of the Manasara manuscript in Sanskrit had been found in early 19th-century. Ram Raz had studied these, and published his summary notes in English with interpretations of implied archictecture drawings for the western audience.
The British India official Austin Chamberlain had a keen interest in Indian heritage and his efforts to locate ancient Indian manuscripts in early 20th-century resulted in the discovery of 11 Sanskrit manuscripts of Manasara in five Indic scripts, in the archives of Hindu temples, only one of which was complete. This complete manuscript found in Tamil Nadu, along with the fragmentary manuscripts, were studied by the Sanskrit scholar Prasanna Acharya to create and publish a critical edition of Manasara manuscript along with a separate glossary of architectural terms. Few years later, in 1934, he published the English translation of the critical edition.
Acharya relied on manuscripts that had no bhasya (commentary) and drawings.However, with assistance of K.S. Siddhalinga Swamy – a traditional shilpin (artist and architect) in South Indian architectural traditions and S.C. Mukherji – another shilpin fluent in Sanskrit and trained in the North Indian traditions, Acharya combined the text with a study of major temples, and then published 121 drawings to go with his publications.
Date and author:
The Manasara is an ancient text, states Acharya, which was likely in its final form by about 700 CE, or by other estimates around the 5th-century CE. Tarapada Bhattacharya, a historian specializing in Indian arts and crafts, in his book published in 1963, states that the Manasara is best viewed as a "recension of recensions" text that organically evolved over the centuries.[13] It is the work of no single author, and has layers of verses which are from the Gupta period and even more ancient. Other verses and some chapters were likely added to Manasara in later part of the 1st-millennium CE and the 11th-century CE as Hindu temples grew in their grandeur. Bhattacharya admits that this hypothesis can neither directly be disproved or proved, but submits that this can be inferred from the fact that the architectural teachings in Manasara borrow from and are identical or essentially similar to those found in Sanskrit Puranas, Agamas and Brihatsamhita that have been dated by scholars to about mid-1st millennium CE. It is likely, states Bhattacharya, that the complete surviving manuscript of Manasara is a recension produced in South India around or after the 11th-century based on major treatises that now exist only in fragments.
George Michell, an Indologist known for his many books on Hindu temples, art and architecture, dates the text to 7th to 8th-century CE.
Source: Wikipedia
Image:
Photograph from the Elgin Collection: 'Autumn Tour 1895. Vol II'of the southern gopura of the Minakshi Sundareshvara Temple at Madurai, taken by Nicholas and Company in the 1890s. The Minakshi Sundareshvara Temple was built under the patronage of Tirumala Nayak (1623-1659). The temple is dedicated to Shiva and his consort Minakshi. The complex is within a high-walled enclosure and has eleven huge towers and four entrance gopurams. Inside this enclosure there are columned mandapas, tanks, shrines and the two temples of Shiva and Minakshi. This view shows the south gopura, one of the four gateways to the temple, that reaches 60 metres. By Nayak times, these imposing gopura were a typical feature of south Indian temple architecture. They rise from a granite base in numerous diminishing storeys with curved profiles and end with a barrel-vaulted roof. They are completely covered with brightly coloured stucco sculpted figures of divinities, celestial guardians, musicians, monster masks and animals.
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