By
P. R. RAMACHANDRA RAO, M.A., B.L.
If
the Krishna river valley project at Nandikonda goes through, in another five
years, the subject of this article will have been irretrievably lost to the
world. Because, the project, in its fulfillment, will completely inundate the
valley of Nagarjunikonda, and the most extensive remains anywhere of the
international heritage of Buddhism will have become one hopeless reservoir of
water, a three-mile stretch from hill to hill.
For,
Nagarjunikonda is not merely the treasure-trove of our national culture; it was
the focus, in its time, of the pursuit of Buddhism of the entire arc of
countries from Ceylon through Burma, the East Indian Archipelago, Thailand and
Indo-China to China. The art of Nagarjunikonda was the farthest amplitude in
India of the art of Amaravati, and it was from Nagarjunikonda that this
gloriously indigenous art sailed forth to inspire the national arts of East
Asia. We are therefore, as regards Nagarjunikonda, custodians of an international
trust in very much the same way as towards Ajanta, Sanchi, Sarnath and Buddha
Gaya.
In
the lengthening shadow of the threatened submergence, Dr. R. Subrahmanyam of
the Archaeological Survey of India and his willing band of workers are striving
against odds to salvage what they can of this priceless heritage against the
deadline of five years. It seems to have been assumed by the Government of
India that within these five years (the time-limit set for the Nandikonda
project) the remaining monuments of Nagarjunikonda may be dug up and stowed
away in some museum of antiquities. Unfortunately, this assumption is
thoroughly wrong.
Because,
the previous excavations from 1926 to 1931 of A. H. Longhurst (handicapped by
paucity of funds) and, from 1938 to 1940 of T. N. Ramachandran (cut short by
the second World War) touched only the fringe of the exploration, of which the
most part yet remains to be done. Those pioneer excavations were largely
experimental and informed by an obvious readiness to achieve results and
establish hypotheses. Funerary mounds (stupas) were
assiduously sought and central shafts driven through them to probe lurking
reliquaries of Buddhism. And, in the process, monasteries (viharas) were
ripped up and very tentative conclusions drawn from naturally limited
discoveries.
At
every fresh discovery, even since the present phase of exploration which is
hardly four months old, the theories of yesterday come toppling down. And,
there is the vast charted city of Vijayapuri, the capital of the regnant
Ikshvaku dynasty, which has yet to be excavated, not to speak of countless
uncharted mounds, the debris of some seventeen hundred years, encrusting a
buried civilisation. Assuredly, this can be no task of five years, nor can it
indeed be set to any time-schedule. And how can any one think that the
monuments of Nagarjunikonda, the chaityas and viharas can be
transported? Can you transport Sanchi or the Taj Mahal and stow them away?
Unfortunately
for Nagarjunikonda, it has become mixed up in the public mind with the
Nandikonda project, with the politics and the economics of the Andhra State.
The Andhras, normally a people with a tremendous pride in their past, have been
sedulously misled by the politicians to set the heritage of Nagarjunikonda against
the contingent benefits of the Nandikonda project, and a plea for the
preservation of Nagarjunikonda has, by a strange perversity of logic, been
equated to an act of hostility towards the Andhra State. This is, of course,
ridiculous, for Nagarjunikonda can certainly co-exist with a beneficent project
of the Krishna valley, and there can be no implied antagonism between the two,
involving a sacrifice of the welfare of the Andhra State.
The
obvious solution to the problem lies in an alternative site to Nandikonda: I am
told that one certainly exists at Dommarlagondi, further up the stream,
although it may involve a further (but in the supreme context, a very
justifiable) charge on the national budget. For instance, the defence of
culture is, in the perspective of history, not the less important than the
defence of national territory. No people in the present can plan for the future
without an awareness of the measure of their past and the irreverent present
will itself soon pass by, a mockery of its hopes, unhonoured by tomorrow.
It
is, therefore, the imperative responsibility of the Government of India to
preserve Nagarjunikonda for posterity, to employ the ingenuity of their
engineers towards this end. It is a great pity that neither Pandit Nehru nor
Maulana Azad, the Minister for Culture, has yet come by the way of
Nagarjunikonda to realise its tremendous import to Indian history. This history
was not until long ago written up entirely from upwards of the Vindhyas, of the
rise and fall of the empires around Delhi; that the Deccan enshrines a more
ancient culture, with important consequences to the civilisation of Asia, has
been a very much later dawning.
And
incidentally, some one in the Government of India has, I hope, figured out the
consequences to the lower Krishna region from a river valley project around
Nandikonda. Since the Tungabhadra project dammed up the outflow of its water,
the Krishna has been so far depleted that the second crop in the Krishna
District has had to be watered by the release of the storage water in the
Tungabhadra dam. The projected harnessing of the Krishna water about Nandikonda
may very nearly dry up the now prosperous area in the reaches of the lower
Krishna.
The
river Krishna, in its passage to the sea, drops into a magnificent bowl of
hills at Nagarjunikonda; an offshoot of the Nallamala range of the Eastern
Ghats, they enclose the valley in a formidable natural fortification. And, in
this fastness flourished in the third century after Christ, the city of
Vijayapuri, capital of the Ikshvaku Kings, feudatories first and then
successors to the Satavahanas (225 A. D.) The city, contemporaneous with
Amaravati by its inscriptions, lay to the west of the hill Sri Parvata (known
to Hiuen-Tsang) but which Fa hien, by a mishearing of the component as par
(a) vata, curiously rendered into a pigeon!
It
is from this hill that the puranic synonym Sri-parvatiyas for the Ikshvakus, is
derived; but the hill is also renowned in history, for it was here in a
monastery, by an ancient Tibetan tradition, that Acharya Nagarjuna, the
celebrated founder of the Madhyamika school of Buddhism, lived toward the
evening of his life and was interred. (This Nagarjuna is not to be confounded
with his namesake of three centuries later, the Tantric Siddha and
master of “Mayuri-vidya”, who, to add to the confusion, also gravitated
to Sri Parvata from Jaggayyapeta, another Buddhist settlement by the river).
By
the Tibetan tradition, Acharya Nagarjuna ruled the Buddhist church for some
fifty-seven years after 137 A.D. and may, therefore, have been contemporaneous
with five successive Satavahanas, Vasishtiputra Pulomavi II (123), Sivasri
Pulomavi III (156), Siva Skanda Satakarni (163), Yajnasri Satakarni (166) and
Vijaya (195). But, the indigenous Lilavati-katha would make him minister
to the earlier Hala Satavahana, the famous compiler of the “Gatha-sapta-sati”.
Nagarjuna is credited by Taranatha, the Tibetan historian, with procuring
the erection of the sculptured inner rail at Amaravati, and his royal benefactor
is very likely, by Hiuen Tsang’s account, to have built a “sangharama” for
Nagarjuna, tunnelling Sri Parvata, although the Chinese pilgrim makes the
Satavahana the king of Dakshina Kosala (Chattisgarh today), which also
undoubtedly he was.
Hiuen-Tsang’s
description of the monastery is memorable: “In the midst of long galleries with
caves for walking under and high towers, the storeyed building reaches to the
height of five stages, each stage with four halls and viharas enclosed.
In each vihara was a statue of the Buddha cast in gold, of the size of
life, wrought with consummate art and singularly adorned.”
The
Ikshvakus, a dynasty of great antiquity (mentioned in the Rig and Atharva Veda
and the “Satapatha Brahmana”) claimed descent from the royal house of Kosala
(Ayodhya) and probably originated from the region of the upper Indus or even
further eastwards. The puranic accounts make forty-eight out of the hundred
apocryphal sons of Ikshvaku rulers of Dakshina (Deccan), and their southerly
progress was doubtless influenced by the rising empire of Magadha, under
Bimbisara, overshadowing Kosala: Although, of the two sons of Sri Rama, Lava
remained to rule Uttara Kosala from Sravasti, the other, Kusa, by the “Padmapurana”
moved southwards to establish Kusasthalipura, named after him, at the foot
of the Vindhyas and reigned over Dakshina Kosala. And. it was two Ikshvaku
princes, Asmaka and Mulaka, who founded the two contiguous kingdoms, bearing
their names, on the Godavari, corresponding to the Aurangabad and Nizamabad
districts of the Hyderabad State today.
At any rate, the inscriptions of the Ikshvakus, discovered at Nagarjunikonda, seem to suggest a south-westerly direction in their migration to the Krishna valley; the language of the inscriptions, described archaically as “a normalised semi-literary Prakrit” was probably used by a people whose home-tongue was Dravidian. These inscriptional finds, limited as yet to Nagarjunikonda, Jaggayyapeta, Ramireddipalli, Goli and Gurazala, have spelled out a very tentative table of the Ikshvaku dynasty at Vijayapuri, liable to be upset by any chance epigraphic discovery yielding another king. The established kings are in the line of succession, Rudrapurushadatta, Vasishtiputra Sri Kshantimula, Mathariputra Sri Virapurushadatta and Vasishtiputra Sri Bahubala (preferably to Dr. Vogel’s “Ehuvula”) Kshantimula. Their matronymic prefixes are clearly modelled on the practice of the Satavahanas, to whose political and religious traditions the Ikshvakus were the natural successors.
Of
these, the second “Ikshvaku-svami” Vasishtiputra Sri Kshantimula would seem to
have risen to sovereign power eclipsing the effete Satavahana, Pulomavi IV, at
Amaravati, less than sixty miles by a crow’s flight from the Ikshvaku capital.
The aspiring Ikshvaku promptly affirmed his overlordship of his outlying
domains by the Agnihotra, Agnishtoma, Vajapeya and Asvamedha sacrifices, which
he revived after more than a century of disuse. He was by the inscriptions
“Savathesu apatihata sampakasa,” (Sarvartheshu apratihata samkalpa) a man of
unconquerable will and of unimpeded purpose; “hirana-koti go-sata-sa-hasa
hala-sata-sahasa padayisa,” the giver of crores of gold, of a hundred thousand
cows and a hundred thousand ploughshare worthy lands, signifying an
unprecedented reclamation of cultivable land. He was, importantly,
“Virupakshapati-Mahaseha-parigahatasa,” (Virupakshapati Mahasena parigrahita),
a devotee of Skanda.
The
successors of Vasishtiputra Sri Kshantimula were, like him, protagonists of Vedic
Brahmanism; but, such was the spacious catholicity of the times that the royal
ladies were, surprisingly, very devout votaries of the Buddhist faith. To their
munificence and especially to that of another outstanding benefactress, not of
ruling house, Bodhi Sri, the shining monuments of Nagarjunikonda are almost
entirely due.
Mathariputra
Sri Virapurushadatta succeeded to an established, and obviously prosperous
empire; he further consolidated it by regions of influence, promoted by
matrimonial alliances. He married the Ujanika-maharajabalika, Rudradharabtrattarika,
daughter of the Scythian ruler (Rudrasena I?) of Ujjain; his own daughter, Kodabali
Siri (Kundavalli Sri), Virapurushadatta married to the Maharaja of Vanavasa
(Banavasi). He forestalled domestic rivalries to the throne; his sister Prithvi
(preferably to Adavi) Kshanti Sri, became the wife of the commander of the
imperial forces. “Mahadandanayaka” Skanda Visakha Naga of the Dhanakas
(just as a sister of Vasishtiputra Sri Kshantimula, Kshanti Sri, had married Mahasenapati
Mahatalavara Maha Skanda Sri of the Pugiyas).
Of
the five queens of Virapurushadatta, the chief, Mahadevi Bhattideva, a
Vasishti princess, was the mother of his successor, Vasishtiputra Sri Bahubala
Kshantimula; three were his own cousins, daughters of his father’s sisters;
Kshanti Sri, the Pugiya princess, daughter of Brahma Sri, and
Rudradharabhattarika, the Scythian princess.
The
imperial consorts achieved renown by their monumental benefactions to the
Buddhist church, and a fanciful attempt has been made to credit them, from a
misreading or isolated sculptures at Nagarjunikonda, with converting their
Brahmanical lord to the Buddhist faith. These sculptures undoubtedly represent
the “Mandhatu Jataka” and not, as incorrectly surmised, the king
Virapurushadatta stamping out the Brahmanical “linga” in the bigotry of the new
convert to Buddhism, or attaining the wishful finale of the rununciation of
worldly dominion.
Of
the royal benefactresses, the foremost was Mahatalavari Mahasenapatni Kshanti
Sri, sister to Vasishtiputra Sri Kshantimula; in the panegyric
of the inscription, “she was the great mistress of munificence, devoted to all
the virtuous,” and out of compassion for sramanas, Brahmanas and the
miserable and the constitute, she bestowed on them a matchless flow of gifts
towards the welfare and happiness of all the world. She established chaitya-grihas
(temples), viharas, sila-mantapas (stone-halls) and chatusalas (cloisters)
for the benefit, especially of the Aparpamaha-vinaya-sailiya sect of Buddhism,
to which she was obviously affined. But, most important of all, she
reconstructed the Maha chaityas (the great stupa) and the Maha-vihara,
embellishing them further with ayaku-kambhas (votive pillars), in groups
of five at the four cardinal directions. It is on these pillars that the
inscriptions are chiefly engraved; they constitute the principal source book on
Nagarjunikonda.
Other
royal votaries were Rudradharabhattarika who gave, to raise a votive pillar,
gold “dinarimasakas” (the cameos of which probably inspired the so-called
Scythian warrior with the Roman helmet in a Nagarjunikonda sculpture); Prithvi
Kshanti Sri, Kshudra Kshanti Sri, Bapi Sri, Sashti Sri and Vishnu Sri who set
up each an ayaka-kambha to the Mahachaitya for their “welfare and
happiness in both the worlds”.
But,
the most memorable of all the benefactions at Nagarjunikonda were by the upasika,
Bodhi Sri, kinswoman of the royal treasurer, For the acharyas and sthaviras
(religious fraternities), among others, of Tambraparna (Ceylon), Kashmira, Gandhara,
China, Chilata (Kirata), Tosali (Dhauli), Aparanta (North Konkan), Vanga,
Vanavasa, Yavana, Damila (Tamila) and Palura (Dantapura?),
she provided a chaitya-griha on the Kshudra Dharmagiri, another at the Kulaha-vihara,
and a shrine for the Bodhi tree at the Simhala-vihara. She made other
endowments of pillars and prayer-halls at Maha Dharmagiri, Devagiri,
Purvasaila, Kantakasaila (Ghantasala), Hirumuthuva and Pushpagiri.
These
names are important, for Nagarjunikonda had become the focus not only of the
votaries of Buddhism from every part of India, but such was its vast renown as
a kshetra of enlightenment that acharyas and fraternities of
monks were drawn to it all the way from Ceylon, Burma, the countries of the
East Indian Archipelago, Thailand and Indo-China to China. Because, the streams
of the culture of Amaravati had voyaged, with the flourishing foreign trade of
the Satavahanas, to the countries to the west and east; the prosperous
commercial class, turned Buddhist, had helped raise the stupendous monuments of
Buddhism; and in going forth, sometimes to settle, they truly laid the
foundations of art in Farher India.
The
river Krishna, known to the Greek geographer Ptolemy as Maisols (a name
probably preserved in the town of Masulipatam), was certainly navigable, at
high tide, a long way inland, as the Buddhist settlements by the river,
Nagarjunikonda, Goli, Amaravati, Jaggayyapeta, Ghantasala, Gummadidurru, Alluru
and Bezwada, show. The river was the main artery of this foreign trade; its
principal emporium was Ghantasala (Ptolemy’s “Konta- Kossyla”), and the
earliest Andhra settlers chiefly took off from Guduru (“Kodduta” to Ptolemy) at
‘the mouth of the Krishna, although alternative points of departure may also
have existed at the estuaries of the Godavari and the Vamsadhara (at
Salihundam).
The
region of the Krishna was, as Joveau-Dubreuil has pointed out, certainly
fortunate in the confluence of the highways of Andhra history at Vengi, the
meeting-place of the ancient roads from the kingdoms of Dravida, Karnataka,
Maharashtra, Kosala and Kalinga. The early settlers, taking off from the Andhra
coast, would seem to have landed at the port of Martban in Burma and settled,
at first, in the region of Thaton and then in the deltas of the Salwin and
Irawady rivers about Pegu; later, pushing south, they probably arrived in Siam
and fanned out into the kingdoms of modern Indo-China, and thence onwards into China.
The two other routes of emigration were later; one from the port of Tamralipti (Tamluk) on the river Hoogly in Gupta times, and another, in Pallava times, from Mamallapuram to Mergui off the Burma coast, and southwards, by Tennasserim, through the straits of Malacca, to Malaya, Sumatra, Java and Borneo.
In
time, the voyages had been reversed and, with the rise of Nagarjunikonda as an
international seat of Buddhist culture, the fraternities of monks from Ceylon
to China had taken up their abode at Sri Parvata, seeking light. The heritage
of Amaravati, broadcast from Nagarjunikonda in the Mahayana phase of Buddhism,
passed into the national cultures of those countries, especially manifested in
their nascent styles of art: from Dong-duong (very significantly called
Amaravati) in Champa, present-day Annam; from the village of Pong Tuk in the
province of Ratburi and Srideb in the valley of the Nam Sak in Siam; from South
Djember in Java, Sikendung in Celebes, Palembang in Sumatra and Kota Bangoen in
Borneo, has issued Buddhist statuary which is indelibly impressed with the
sculptural style of Amaravati.
The
architecture of Nagarjunikonda is really in a process of unfoldment; but the
discovered remains fall into typical structures, of which the evolution has
been uncovered by the excavations in progress. Of these, the chaityas are
oblong apsidal temples, with a brick-roof, shaped like a barrel-vault, which
runs the whole length from the apse to the entrance, embellished by an
ornamental step of semi-circular stone which was to attain in the dagahas of
Anuradhapura and Polonnuruva in Ceylon further decorative refinements. In the
apse was a stupa, usually of stone for worship, but, statues of the
Buddha, reflecting the revolution in iconography, were not uncommon.
The
chaityas, like the Maha-chaitya enshrining the relic of the Buddha,
probably stood by themselves for the worship of vast congregations, but a chaitya
was also an invariable component of each monastic establishment. This was
conceived with a rare economy of religious purpose; in the forefront was a chaitya,
and sometimes two, with a circumambulatory passage, and then a prayer-hall
of stone-columns, flanked by a rectangular court-yard, of which the enclosing
wall of brick had built into it rows of cells, dormitories for the resident
monks, stores and refectories.
The
most significant of the establishments at Nagarjunikonda was what was
undoubtedly its University, imposing even in its ruined state. In its
department of arts, which has yielded glyptic stone of stages from the skeleton
drawing to the finished design, were probably carved the sculptures of
Nagarjunikonda.
The
stupas were not all of one design, as deduced by Longhurst and
Ramachandran, following him–in horizontal section, a wheel of standardised
bricks, with spokes radiating from a central hub, filled in with earth, to make
up an umbrella of a dome; and, at the four cardinal points, projecting altars,
buttressed, in the more outstanding stupas with
ayaka-kambhas in groups of five. That his design was not invariable the
present excavations have shown; indeed, stupas, have
been discovered of superimposed constructions, evidencing different periods in
designing, involving outright destruction of existing stupas and their
reconstruction in more elaborate patterns. One remain, especially, may prove
invaluable, as the missing link in the history of South Indian temple
architecture, because the site has uncovered what were perhaps, in embryo, the
four directional towers of the future temple, the origins of which now remain
purely conjectural.
From the absence of any remains, it has been
surmised that the railing of the Maha-chaitya may have been of carved wood,
lost to us by the ravages of climate. But, it is difficult to think that the
mature architecture of Nagarjunikonda should have reverted to wood as a
decorative medium when, in point of sculptural evolution, stone had long ago
supplanted wood. It is more probable that the stone railing (evidenced by
socketed pillars from the site), as the outermost member, was the first target
for iconoclasm or depradation, and has been irrecoverably lost.
The
ornamentation of the stupa was in stone and stucco; the sculptured stone
encased the brickwork, firmly fixed to it in mortar. This supremely glyptic
stone of greenish grey (which also composed the carvings at Amaravati) was
quarried from the vicinity of Dachepalli and transported to Nagarjunikonda by
the river. The stone was of exquisite texture, susceptible to rendering the
delicate inflexions of life, as well as the patterns of intricate forms. The sculpturing
was in bas-relief, on the several members of the architecture, on pillars and
beams and cornices, in panels of illustration of incidents from the life of the
Buddha, or synoptic renderings of tales from the “Jatakas”.
From
the references in the inscriptions to Gandhara and the finds of Roman coins (of
Hadrian especially), Greco-Roman influences in the sculptures of Nagarjunikonda
have been too readily inferred, but there is little of Gandhara in them except
it be the apparent consonance in the drapery of the Buddhist “sanghati” or
monastic robe, in its design of incised lines and overlapping ridges; but even
their lines are organised into a perfect rhythm, attuned to the movement of the
body beneath, a refinement to which the Kushan Bodhisattvas did not attain.
For,
the art of Nagarjunikonda was the final extension in India of the art of
Amaravati, which was indeed a truly national expression, affected little by the
precedent Greco-Roman or Perse-politan influences of Indian sculpture. A purely
indigenous art was in process at Amaravati and Nagarjunikonda; the art,
reflecting the contemporary religious transition, enlisted the masses in an
identity with popular traditions, leading incidentally to the beginnings of an
ingenuous folk art.
This,
in the sum, is Nagarjunikonda, the priceless treasure India bequeathed to the
world, revealed as yet in a broken arc of its magnificent conception, and its
wanton submersion would be a vandalism unparalleled, in peace time, in the
annals of history.