Review: Temples of the Indus: Studies in the Hindu Architecture of Ancient Pakistan, by Michael W. Meister

Abstract

Michael W. Meister Temples of the Indus: Studies in the Hindu Architecture of Ancient Pakistan Leiden: Brill, 2010, 85 pp., 149 b/w illus. $132, ISBN 9789004186170 Masonry temples built in the sixth to tenth centuries in what is now northwest Pakistan remain neglected in the historiography of South Asian temple architecture. In exploring a group of monuments built in the Salt Range and along the Indus River, Michael Meister’s monograph draws attention to a significant architectural experiment with the North Indian temple form called Nagara. The experiment produced a distinct regional variant of Nagara using architectural vocabulary and building techniques from previous Buddhist monastic structures of the greater Gandhara region, of which the Salt Range is a southern periphery. More importantly, Gandhara-Nagara architecture provides missing links for understanding the earliest evolution of this major North Indian temple form. The book is put together like a puzzle, worked out from inside out. It represents the author’s fieldwork in the Salt Range in the 1990s, including two seasons of excavation in 1996 and 1998 in close collaboration with scholars from the Peshawar University, the Pakistan Heritage Society, and the Department of Archaeology of the Government of Pakistan. The project overlaps the author’s engagement with a multivolume Encyclopedia of Indian Temple Architecture , now a standard reference for describing religious structures according to architectural continuities instead of shifting political boundaries of successive dynasties of rulers in different regions.1 The present volume brings the Salt Range within the framework of the Encyclopedia , and applies a technical vocabulary for describing architecture from the point of view of local and regional designers developed for the Encyclopedia from a synthesis of Sanskrit architectural treatises by the eminent Indologist, M. A. Dhaky. Sanskrit terms are explained in a separate glossary, and placed within the narrative to encourage a student to learn them in relation to the architectural logic for structural components and surface ornaments being developed in each chapter. For forty years, …