Hindu Iconography in the Gor Khatri Temple (Peshawar): Sacred Imagery Painted in the Śaiva Shrine

Abstract

The work in hand is a primary attempt to explore iconography of divine images painted on mural surfaces of the Śaiva (or western) shrine in the Gor Khatri temple (Peshawar). Some of these images have gone due either to weathering condition or human vandalism, while there still survive a good number, although in a poor state of preservation, which need proper analysis in terms of their iconographic attributes leading to their identification. Quite in line with the thematic arrangement of these paintings, the temple was originally decorated with godly figures in stucco together with the now missing stone Śivaliṅga. This sacred decoration once imparted dazzling beauty to the entire temple complex.The paintings, forming the subject-matter of this work, were executed in tempera technique using variegated colour scheme, which closely compare with painted decoration of nineteenth/twentieth-century mosques and mausolea in and around Peshawar. It appears that the guilds of artists felt no reluctance in earning their subsistence to decorate religious buildings of the Muslims or the Hindus as their ancestors did long ago at changeover from Buddhism to Hinduism. This study is important with a view to preserve iconographic features of the surviving sacred imagery whatsoever for the coming generations.