Chariots of the Moon

The Moon Chariots of Udupi

The most unique feature of the Hindoo cultus to be found at the sacred town of Udupi on the west coast of the Indian sub-continent are elaborate rites in which cult objects – statues of deities – are placed in massive “chariots” and dragged by devotees around a fixed circuit. The present author was privileged to watch the entire procession from start to finish a few nights ago and has since been pondering the symbolism of the event. 

As always in India there are centuries and even millennia of overlays obscuring the original cultus – Hindooism is especially organic and relinquishes nothing to time – but the essentials of the rites have not changed and can be made out with careful observation and a discerning sense of the symbolic. There are always keys with which even the strangest and most opaque mysteries can be unlocked. Even if those who maintain the rites today have lost sight of their origins, they will usually preserve and guard the essentials – at least in an integral and living tradition such as Hindooism. 

In the case of the rites at Udupi there is a single and somewhat obvious key to what otherwise are peculiar but spectacular events. There are three temples at the site, each of a different age and a different layer of history. It is an ancient site, but it was expanded as recently as the XIIth century when it became one of the foremost centres for the veneration of the avatar Lord Krishna in all the lands of Hindoostan. Each evening – or at least on certain evenings, and certainly at festivals – the image of Lord Krishna, along with an image of Lord Shiva, is removed from its home in the temple and placed in massive four-wheeled wooden constructions which are designated as “chariots”. 

These vehicles are highly decorated, most notably with horse figurines, and function, in fact, as types of temples on wheels. Then they are lit up, blessed and dragged by thick ropes around an elongated pathway. The route is marked by two large guardians, namely men in over-sized costumes with each wielding a sword and a shield, who spin around in circles as they lead the procession. There are starts and stops and fireworks and candles along the way. When the chariots have completed the circumabulation the cult statues are removed and put back into their respective temples in the usual place having gone, it seems, for their nightly jaunt around the track. The photographs on this page illustrate the rites. 

The key? Clearly, the entire event is an enactment of the movement of celestial bodies around the circuit of the heavens. All the details of the rites become explicable in light of this fact. Specifically, one “chariot” – painted gold, as it happens – represents the Sun, and another – balloon-like - represents the Moon. The circuit, which is oriented exactly east-west, represents the ecliptic. The array of torches, fireworks and candles around the pathway represent the background of the stars. The whirling guardians armed with swords and shields represent the nodes that define the limits of the ecliptic. We can be sure of this key since the very name of the town, Udupi, means “Lord of the Stars” and the myths and legends concerning the founding of the site are all cosmological in nature. Moreover, as the present author noted in a previous post, the town is a veritable centre of the astrological sciences; the Hindoo religion takes a particular astrological form here. The entire history of the place has to do with the stars and stellar religion. 

The thing that obscures this key to the symbolism of the Udupi complex is the association of Krishna with the site. Udupi is now known as a centre of devotion to Lord Krishna, and in this sense there is no obvious and direct stellar dimension to that cultus. Indeed, the usual explanation given for the nightly rounds of the chariot is that Krishna was a charioteer, most famously in the Bhagavad Gita. Why is the cult statue of Krishna taken from its temple, placed in a chariot and dragged around its circuit every night? There is a mythological reason: it enacts the scenes of the Gita in which Krishna rides in his chariot. 

But, in fact, this is the most recent layer of symbolism – an overlay on top of the older rites. Before Krishna, the site was sacred to Shiva, and specifically to Shiva as a Moon god. This is plain if one ventures into the sanctuary of the oldest Shiva temple on the site, the Chandramauleshvara Temple. There Shiva is represented, not by the usual lingam, but by an image consisting of a bright round silver face. Chandramauleshvara means, literally, Moon-crowned, or Moon-faced. Shiva, then, was the original passenger in the celestial chariot, the chariot of the Moon. The Krishna cult is a late arrival. Krishna has been added to the temple complex in the XIIth century on the basis of the simple association of chariots. Since this was already a place featuring sacred chariots, the cult of Lord Krishna, the charioteer, found a ready home here. But one needs to look beyond the associations with Krishna to the earlier Shaivite layer of rites in order to understand them correctly. 

Many other strange details of the rites become clear once one applies the key. The whole complex, in fact, its history and its rituals, deserves a thorough study – more thorough and comprehensive than can be offered here. In each of the temples in the complex there are further stellar motifs. The more time one spends there, the more the cosmological character of the cultus becomes clear. 

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As an aside, the structure, purpose and symbolism of the lunar chariots of Udupi invite comparison with the Chariot Trump in the Tarot cards of western esotericism. The resemblance is striking. The present author has long noted that while most occidental literary references to celestial chariots have a solar symbolism - Phaethon's chariot in Greek mythology, for instance - the Chariot Trump of the Tarot is, even in the earliest designs, lunar. The author has had the problem of explaining this lunar chariot symbolism. The problem is resolved in Udupi. Here we have lunar chariots, and they take a form that is strongly reminiscent of the Tarot Trump. 

See the design of the A.E. Waite deck below. Ignoring the pseudo-Egyptian sphinx motif, note the lunar and celestial symbolism throughout. It is exactly this chariot that one encounters in the great temple of Udupi in western India. Most remarkable is the winged (phallic) device in the centre of the card. In the large lunar chariots used in the sacred parades in Udupi, exactly this motif is displayed during the period that the chariot is on the move. Thus, not only is there a general similarity, there is a consonance of details. Note also, if readers care to look closely, how the chariot-riders belt is the celestial ecliptic. The conclusion is inescapable: this Tarot design refers to the very same traditions that are given expression in the rites of Udupi. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

The Rehabilitation of Buddhism

Boodhism presents a challenge to many systemizations of religion. In many crucial respects it does not conform – or does not seem to conform - to the norms of most other religions. It stands apart. Most obviously, it does not posit a supreme deity as most traditions do and it appears to be indifferent to the metaphysical questions that so occupy other religious systems. Among religions, it is somewhat problematic. This has led certain parties who should know better to make extravagant and often silly statements about it. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, for example, is on record as saying that Boodhism is not a religion at all – which is demonstrable and irksome nonsense but which exploits the fact that Boodhism is different in type to religions in general. Even such an authority as Rene Guenon, the French metaphysician – who, frankly, had a deeper knowledge of these matters than the present Dalai Lama - dismissed it as a “Hindoo heresy” and was reluctant to accord it any serious status as an integral tradition. More generally, for the Perennialist school of thought, guided throughout as it is by the work of Monsieur Guenon, Boodhism remains an uncomfortable fit in its model of orthodoxy which is based upon Platonic/Advaita Vedanta standards.

The present author (whose sympathies are somewhat consonant with the Perennialist school and are certainly Platonic) readily admits that he has had great trouble coming to terms with Boodhism, try as he may. To some measure this is because he has had far too many encounters with the half-baked sentimentalized post-modern pseudo-psychology that is passed off as Boodhism (with much encouragement from the Dalai Lama) in the spiritual wastelands of the West. But even during his many travels in India and Asia, with visits to temples and gompas and conversations with Lamas and Ahats, priests and laymen both, it has never really gelled. The only exception has been the Shin Boodist (Pureland) tradition of Japan, which does make sense to him, but only because it itself deviates from most of the norms of the wider Boodhist fold. He has read books, studied texts, seen movies – but the zest of Boodhism escapes him. Even on his current extended tour of India and Asia, made for the very purpose of becoming more familiar with the Indo-Asian traditions, he takes to Shaivism, Samkya, and other forms of Hindooism without trouble, but his encounters with Boodhism leave him unmoved. 

During his visit to the great Boodhist shrine, the Mahabodhi, at Boodha Gaya in the state of Bihar, however, he was able to witness certain rites that restored Boodhism to the forms of what he calls the alchimie primordiale. As related in previous posts, Boodha Gaya is a small town built around the restored temple that marks the site of the Boodha’s enlightenment. The ancient temple is huge and beautifully reconstructed in modern times, much to the credit of the lenient objectivity of the British Raj. In the rear of the temple court, in the west, stands the Bodhi Tree, the tree under which the Boodha, they say, sat and came to his spiritual realization. Around the temple complex are various sites marking the seven weeks that the Boodha then spent there following his enlightenment, those sites being points of devotion for the thousands of pilgrims who venture there every year. The tree, and under it, the diamond throne, are the very centre of the Boodhist world. It is believed that all Boodhas at all times were enlightened on that exact spot, and that, moreover, that spot was the first point of creation and will be the last point remaining at the end of time. 

The sacred place at which Boodhists press their forehead. Behind it the Bodhi Tree. 

This, in itself, rehabilitates Boodhism to some extent. Many authorities – and conspicuously the Dalai Lama – would have us believe that Boodhism is a system without a cosmology and without a fixed centre. For those of us accustomed to the Platonic/Advaita Vedanta model this supposed formlessness is both irritating and incomprehensible. A religion with no centre? No god? No creation? No start or finish? The Boodhist is urged to not fix upon a centre but to drift like a rudderless dinghy in an endless sea of vague nothing. How is that, one wants to know, a spirituality? 

But one discovers at Boodha Gaya that that is not really the case. Boodhism does have a centre. And a cosmology. And a point of start and finish. This was not explicit and concrete in the many centuries during which the Boodha Gaya temple complex was lost and forgotten in the forests of Bihar, but it is made clear again today. This author spent many hours over many days sitting in the shade of the Bodhi Tree watching the pilgrims come and go. Contrary to the psycho-babbling shapeless mush, the spiritual custard, served up by wide-eyed Boodhist Modernists in the West, and the evasive double-talk one often hears from Boodhists in the East, the very concrete religious mechanisms of Boodhism are perfectly apparent at Boodha Gaya, and they are pretty much identical to those of any other religion.

Some years ago the present author, in his academic guise, published an article on the symbolism of Islamic prayer. The prayer, he related, is a centering exercise that brings the devotee back to the spiritual centre that is, at once, the earth and the deepest reality of his or her inner state. This state, he argued, is Adamic, and he sketched the ways in which the prayer expresses the alchemical theme of autochthony. The full text of the article can be found here. In practice, the devotee – taking the place of Adam, formed of clay - stands in the Edenic sacred space marked by the prayer mat, the prayer mat traditionally decorated with a stylization of the Tree of Life, and proceeds to press his forehead to the point of sajda – annihilation – on the earth, the point where full submission transmutes the clay of his creation to the gold of spiritual fulfillment (the extreme malleability of gold being the operative metaphor for submission to the Divine Will.) Moreover, in a related article, the present author has added to this some observations concerning other peculiarities of the Islamic prayer ritual, specifically the way in which devotees arrange their feet in order to place pressure upon the liver, that organ having an important (but long forgotten) place in spiritual alchemy.

The Boodhist rites at Boodha Gaya conform to these practices exactly. The symbolism is the same. The author sat there watching these rites and suddenly recognized the ways in which the Boodhist spiritual economy is precisely consonant with that of Islam as he had sketched it on those articles. 

Pressing the forebead to the frame behind which is the Bodhi Tree. The frame and the surrounding walls are coated in a gold film. 

Boodhism, that is, is no different. There is, of course, a different arrangement of symbols, but the symbols themselves are the same, operate in the same way, and towards the same end. The state of fana – annihilation, submission – that is the objective of the Muslim prayer is exactly the same as this “Void” or “Nothingness” with which Boodhist double-speak so often confounds us. And what is the Bodhi Tree but the Tree of Life? And what is Boodha Gaya – the first and last – but Eden? What is it but the qibla of the Muslim, with the profound emptiness of the Kaaba in Mecca a symbol of that same Boodhist Void and Nothingess? 

But whereas the Muslim observes the prayer in the canonical manner at the appointed times each day, the Boodhist observes exactly the same in his pilgrimage to the Bodhi Tree, for there one can witness Boodhists in Islam-like prostration, turning to the Diamond Throne, falling to their knees and pressing their forehead to the earth in the gesture of sajda. Indeed, many of them adopt the same peculiar feet arrangement that is common in Islam and about which this author has written previously. 

Prostration towards the Bodhi Tree, along with the distinctive Muslim-like arrangement of the feet. 

It is a remarkable coincidence of practices and symbolisms. More than that, as the long procession of Boodhist devotees files past the place of the Throne under the Tree (the Tree in the Midst – to stress it again, precisely the same symbolism as the Tree in Eden) they turn and press their foreheads to a particular point on the fence that surrounds the sacred place. This point is framed by a rectangle that is much the same size as an Islamic prayer rug and which itself frames the sacred Tree behind it – so here we have an exact visual duplicate of the prayer rug with the Edenic Tree and that point, that centre, where the inner and outer worlds meet. 

Even more startling, the alchemical symbolism of that configuration of symbols is perfectly explicit because the surrounding fence, including the point where the Boodhist presses his forehead, has been painted with a film of pure gold paint. When he presses his forehead to the designated point the gold paint – peeling from the wear of years and the constant touching of the devoted – flakes off leaving a spot of pure gold on his forehead over his ‘third eye’. Devotees walk away from their devotions with a mark of gold on them – the Adamic gold of the autochthon on their forehead. In other words, these Boodhist rites exactly conform to those alchemical aspects of the Islamic rites – and so are united therein – that the present author explicated in his writings years ago. 

Needless to say, for someone looking for a solid foothold in the formless and featureless path of Boodhism, this came as a very welcome revelation. Boodhism is not so different after all. The view that it is different can largely be attributed to the intensely annoying habit of Boodhists to obfuscate and insist on exceptionalism. There are numerous commentators of a 'Perennialist' flavor, and other students of that disreputable shibboleth called 'comparative religion', who have attempted to explain how Boodhism 'approximates' other traditions. These efforts, usually highly theoretical, are not very helpful either. Instead, one needs to witness the living practices - read fewer books and see with eyes that can see what is plain to see. Boodhism isn't a centreless swamp of vapid nothingness after all. In its central rites, restored in Boodha Gaya just over a century ago, Boodhism is very obviously just another expression, a different configuration, of the alchimie primordiale, whatever Boodhist themselves might say.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Danielou's Shiva & the Primordial Tradition

Often counted as a “soft” Traditionalist after he became a sympathetic reader of some of the works Rene Guenon in the 1940s, the French musician and teacher Alain Danielou spent most of his adult life living in the Asi Ghat area of Shiva’s sacred city, Benares, where he adopted Shaivite religion and lived as a Shaivite Hindoo. The present author has just spent over a month in the same city trying his best to come to terms with Shaivism and towards that end purchased and read a copy of Monseiur Danielou’s Shiva & the Primordial Tradition from the Asi Ghat bookstore hoping that it might shed light upon the key aspects of Shaivism and, as the title promises, its place in the ‘Primordial Tradition’ of integral religions. Regrettably, the book does neither to any depth. It is a strange and disappointing work. Danielou presents Shaivism as a type of Dionysian phallicism and by the ‘Primordial Tradition’ he largely means the doctrine of the Four Yugas. The book does not go much further than that but is padded out with chapters, not always entirely relevant, on diverse topics such as dream interpretation, poetics, music theory and homosexuality. It offers, that is, a view of Shaivism very much through the prism of Danielou’s own personal preoccupations. At its core, though, is his account of Hindooism in a broad sweep, its origins and its history, and this, at least, is worth considering, even if one suspects it is highly stylized and warped in favor of his particular preferences. Certainly, there are very different accounts available; Danielou presents a French convert’s partisan Shaivite version of the roots of the Hindoo faith.

By his account, there are two ancient indigenous traditions in the Indian sub-continent: Tantric Shiva worship, which he presents as an animistic and “shamanic” nature religion, and Jainism, which he presents as an atheistic ethical system. According to Danielou, these two streams represent the authentic genius of India, but they have, he asserts, been distorted and befouled throughout the centuries by overlays of intruding traditions, most notably Vedic religion and then, more recently, Mahometism and British/Western culture. In this sweeping history he presents Buddhism as a mutation of the Jainist stream which was then re-Hindooized in its Mayahana forms and proceeded to colonize the souls and minds of Asia, all the way to Japan. Back in the sub-continent he portrays Vedic religion as an alien, authoritarian creed that secured, he asserts, only a nominal place in the evolving Hindoo mix; in fact, he says, a resurgent Shaivism reconquered India and left Vedism as a fake veneer. Shaivism – and its Samkya cosmology, which includes yoga – is, he insists, the real Hindooism, even when it is dressed up in Vedic forms. Vedic religion invaded, caused its mischief, but was re-Shaivized in subsequent revivals of the underlying indigenous cultus. He is equally dismissive of the manifestations of Vishnu worship, the cults of Krishna and Rama, which take the form of bhakti spirituality, a sentimental and exoteric form of religion which, he says, misrepresents Hindooism in the modern West.

All well and good. It is an intriguing if contentious overview. Its effect is to make ancient Dravidean Shiva culture the original India and the Vedic Aryans hostile intruders. For Danielou, Shaivite Tantra is a means to return to the authentic and autochthonous layers of Hindoo spirituality – and anything that ever went wrong in India was, by his account, imposed by outsiders. This includes traditional Indian aversion to homosexuality, a subject obviously close to his heart because he was himself a homosexual and it was with his partner Raymond Burnier, that he first travelled to Benares and decided to make home there. Although he mentions in passing that Jainism (which, remember, was one of the two ancient, original streams of Hindooism) has a strong taboo against homosexuality, and he also notes that all forms of oral sex are regarded as unclean in India, he says that homopobia is a trait of the “anglicized upper class” and spends a whole chapter setting out Lord Shiva’s homo- and bi- tolerant credentials. One gets the impression, in fact, that this is in large measure a reason for his embrace of the Shaivite creed, just as it is a reason for his undisguised disdain for the Catholicism into which he had been born. It is obviously important – crucial – for Danielou that Shaivism is, in his experience, pro-sexual while Catholicism (and European culture generally) is not.

This general bias goes further. Not only does Danielou characterize Shaivism as Dionysean – a cult of ecstasy – but his homoerotic interests are to be seen in his particular focus upon Shaivism’s phallic nature. The present author spent weeks in Benares being assured by priests and devotees alike that Shaivism is not “phallic worship” and that this is a shameful misconception entertained by sex-obsessed Westerners, and yet upon opening Monsieur Danielou’s account he reads that the Shaivic creed is phallic worship pure and undisguised. “The symbol of Shiva, the Creator of the world, the image worshipped in his temples, is the erect phallus,” he writes. And elsewhere, “The phallus is the emblem, the sign of the person of Shiva, of whom it is the image." This is no doubt true on an immediate level, but Danielou gives no thorough account of the further symbolism of the lingam and the many filters of piety through which the vast majority of resoundingly conservative Hindoos view it. The present author wrote about this in a recent post. Danielou’s Shaivism, certainly, is a long way from what this writer witnessed in the temples of Benares. Although he dresses it up as an esoteric “primordialism” Danielou presents a sexo-yogic version of Shaivism that is much nearer to the doctrines of Rajneesh and the neo-tantric New Agers than anything one is likely to see in the actual religious life of Benares as it is practiced today. One wonders what the decent pious Hindoo families that line up outside the Golden Temple in Benares – the very centre of the Shaivite world – would make of Danielou’s assertion that "It is in the region of the sexual organs that one attains pure knowledge,” or “The godhead can only be perceived through… its linga.”

It is all somewhat twentieth century. One can hear prefigurings of contemporary neo-tantra in such assertions as:

Tantric rites and practices, open to all without any restriction of caste, gender, or nature, are meant to permit anyone to draw closer to the divine through these three passages - on the levels of existence, consciousness, and sensual pleasure.

The book is further marred by quite unnecessary and inflammatory tirades against what Monsieur Danielou calls “monotheism”; there is an entire chapter in which his contempt and lack of feeling for the whole Abrahamic tradition is on display. The idea of the personal god, he writes, is nothing more than the cosmic inflation of human egoism, the poison of egoism writ large. “The notion of a god,” he writes, “a divine personage, is a projection of the notion of individuality, of a being that says "I." Monotheism is merely the deification of the notion of individuality.” He sets this ego-worship against the true religion of phallic worship. “Worshipping the linga means acknowledging the presence of the divine in what is human,” he writes. “It is the opposite of anthropomorphic monotheism that projects human individualism on to the divine world.” Once again, one feels that Monsieur Danielou’s own homoerotic obsessions and his own revolt against his Christian upbringing have been cast as an esotericism that he discovered in mystic India. “Associating the demoniac with the sexual,” he says, “is peculiar to the Christian world.” And therefore “Churches,” he declares, “are conservative and not liberating.” He projects this view back as a conspiracy theory that may have been daring once but which is today drearily commonplace:

The history of the Christian world is sadly filled with witchhunts that have served as a pretext for attacking initiatic organizations.

By “initiatic organizations” he means those that understand and maintain the worship of the sacred phallus. This is the cornerstone of his account of Western spiritual history:

Numerous sects did their utmost to maintain a Dionysian type initiatic tradition in the Christian world but were ferociously persecuted for political reasons, which have nothing to do with truly religious values. Organisms whose aims are purely spiritual are thus persecuted when civil and ecclesiastical authorities seek to establish their total hegemony over souls. The Catholic Church has played this sinister role throughout the ages…

But what of the good elements in Christianity and other religions? He is only able to reconcile himself to certain aspects of other religious traditions by proposing a general thesis that attributes all good things to Shiva worship. “In the final analysis,” he writes, “all initiation is ultimately connected with Shaivism, or with its kindred Dionysian or Sufi forms. Traces of such an origin can be detected in authentic initiatic groups in the Christian, Vedic, Taoist, Buddhist, and Islamic worlds.”

In many places these arguments become nothing less than outlandish. At one point he speaks of a mysterious and unnamed political cohort of “… India persons clothed in the monastic dress, of astonishing intelligence and culture, who, [have]… set up a traditionalist party… against Gandhi, Nehru, and the Indian Congress Party… which, at the right time, will take power and reestablish the traditional order…” Worse than this fantasy, in the chapter on music – an art to which he devoted his life - he argues that the Shaivite esotericism – his “primordial tradition” - is today found in the decadent fervor of discos and rock concerts! He writes:

… in the modern West, music with certain features close to those of ecstatic music is no longer found in places of worship, but in quite different places like discos, where dancers experience the kind of hypnotic isolation that is needed for mystical experience... The gods are much closer in the exaltation of rock concerts than in the faded canticles of the churches… just as vagabond hippies are much closer to the mystical wanderers… than frustrated monks snug in their… monasteries.

Vagabond hippies as the new Traditionalists? By this stage the present author had realized that Shiva & the Primordial Tradition was not going to offer the sort of penetrating and insightful introduction to Shaivite spirituality he had hoped. Rather, this was a tome that instead explained a great deal about the disaffected, resentful, unkempt, lazy, ill-educated and bedraggled feral youths from Germany and France - with their Om tee shirts, dreadlocks and degrees in Queer Studies - who laze about in the cafes of the backstreets of Benares smoking pot, torturing a sitar and taking yoga classes – these, apparently, are Danielou’s cherished inheritors of Shaivite primordiality, by his account the great indigenous treasure of India.

Needless to say this has nothing to do with the ‘primordial tradition’ of Rene Guenon. Nor does it have much to do with the Shaivism one can witness as a living tradition in the temples of Benares and on the ghats of the River Ganges. Alain Danielou and his boyfriend spent forty years living in the sacred city. He taught at the Benares Hindu University, and in the schools established by Rabindranath Tagore, and was decorated by the government of India for his services to music. On the evidence of this work, though, his Shaivism was a very personal avant-gard creation – largely a construction of his own prejudices and demons - the shortcomings of which has been badly exposed by the passage of time. The title promised so much more. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Portals at Hauz Khas

People, they say, like to live in large cities but want it to feel like a small village. Surprisingly, this optimum arrangement is possible even in an ugly crowded polluted sprawling foul megatropolis like modern Delhi. There, right amidst the mess, is the village enclave of Hauz Khas – a small cul de sac closed off from the insane traffic, a place that houses artists, poets, nightclubs and fashionable eateries. It is a remarkable thing to discover in such a city. Unfortunately, it is no longer a secret and so Delhi’s rising middle class are moving in rapidly and will, inevitably, ruin the village ambience within a few short years.

Originally Hauz Khas was a former incarnation of Delhi itself. It was once the centre of the city under the pre-Moghul Delhi Sultanate in the thirteenth century. The ruins of the city are the structural basis of the modern “village” which hugs the stone walls of the old city. The Sultan, Firoz Shah, had constructed a “tank” – in fact a sizeable lake – at the site, along with mosques and a large madrassa. When the Mongols sacked Bagdhad, this place – the Hauz Khas madrassa – became for a while the premier learning centre of the entire Mahometan world. It is built in the rough-hewn style of the Delhi sultans, that is, quite distinct and noticeably more unadorned and more primitive than the later Moghuls who brought a more sophisticated Persian influence to northern Hindustan, but this roughness – virile, solid - has a beauty and charm of its own.

The present author spent a pleasant afternoon exploring the ruins of the madrassa and the tombs of the sultan and his sons, along with the modern village, several weeks ago.

For photographic purposes the outstanding feature of the ruins are the extant portals and gateways – something that always attracts this author in any case. Portals – doorways, gateways, passageways – are always of interest because, of all architectural features they tend to last longer than roofs and walls and windows, and, of course, they have an enduring symbolic significance. A portal is a mystery. What lies beyond? Spatially it signifies the passage from one world to another. Temporally it signifies the passage from one phase or condition to another. It is a place that inherently signifies transition, transformation, initiation. Its celestial archetype is the portal of the sun, the gates of the solstices and equinoxes – with the ‘watchtowers’ either side - through which the sun (along with the planets) passes on its journey. 

* * * 

Below are some of the portals to be found in the ruins of Hauz Khas:

The tomb of Sultan Firoz Shah

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black

Edwin Landseer Lutyen

A painting depicting the collected works of Sir Edwin Lutyen, by Carl Lauben. It features all of Lutyen's major works, including, prominent in the centre, the unbuilt masterpiece the Liverpool Cathedral. 

There is possibly no other city on earth that can be said to be the product of a single creative mind to the same extent as New Delhi - the creation of Edwin Landseer Lutyen. He is often described as the greatest British architect of the modern era by those not infected by the democratic evils of modernism; he had a profound impact upon the building of the new capital of British India, New Delhi, throughout an extended period in the 1920s and 30s.

For a range of reasons, the British had found it prudent to move the capital of the Raj from Calcutta in 1911. They then set about constructing an entire new city among the previous six incarnations of the city of Delhi on the Jamuna River, and the task of designing it along with its grand imperial architecture fell to Lutyen. New Delhi today - where this author has recently arrived, his third visit - is still often referred to as "Lutyen's Delhi" and - leaving aside the appalling pollution and the even more appalling degradations of commerce, visual pollution on an epic scale - still largely conforms to Lutyen's grand vision. There is a large area of wide avenues and colonial buildings - deliberately contrasting to the tangled laneways of the old city - where nearly everything, from the broad sweep of the urban plan to the street lights, were designed by Sir Edwin "Ned" Lutyen. 

It is unfortunate that most of his grandest buildings in Delhi are now occupied by the various arms of the government of the Indian Republic, and so for security reasons are closed to the public. The great Viceroy's Residence, the 'Rashtrapati Bhavan' - now the residence of the President of India - and its vast formal gardens (designed by Lutyen), are only open to the public for several days in a year. Other nearby structures are occupied by the Indian Ministry of Defense and are permanently out of reach. When the author visited this area in recent days even the famous India Gate - a memorial the Britishers constructed to honour the Indian soldiers who had fought and died for the Empire in the Great War - was closed to public access with all approach roads manned by teams of heavily armed soldiers at road blocks. (You can stop and take photographs for two minutes and are then moved along.) 

It is difficult, therefore, to obtain a full appreciation of Sir Edwin's vision of the city in its totality, and especially difficult to obtain a proper sense of his genius for interior design. For, as well as grand architecture, Lutyen also designed furnishings, lighting and the other trappings of interiors, all the way down to the vegetable racks in the kitchens. His art and his vision was comprehensive and marked by a complete attention to detail. He was a style in and of himself. 

Happily, Lutyen's work is characterised by his rejection of modernism and his embrace of the classical. He is a shining light of sobriety and mathematical integrity in an age of dreadful buildings. His later buildings have a strongly neo-Romanesque solidity - a heaviness of the walls, small windows, domes, round arches. His work falls into two phases, the second of them entailing a detailed exploration of classical (Graceo-Roman, and especially Roman) themes. He devoted his life to the rediscovery of the classic. He loved the purity of the classical order and classical proportions. "When they are right," he wrote, "they are curiously lovely and unalterable like a plant form." Accordingly, modernist critics hated him. He defied the age of the "masses and the machine." Many older books on modern architecture routinely sneer at his work and wrongly dismiss it as "historical pastiche". 

It is an undeniably Imperial architecture that we find in Lutyen's Delhi. In the main structures he chose to build in the local red sandstone, the same stone from which the earlier monuments of the city, especially in its Moghul incarnation, are built - the Jama Masjid, the Red Fort, and so on - and this provides a strong sense of continuity and belonging - and yet in other respects his buildings speak of the British Empire's conscious sense of a reprise of Roman Imperial strength. Lutyen avoids the pointed arch and most other oriental motifs; his buildings are strongly and adamantly occidental: austerity, power, solidity, weight, permanence, endurance, immovability, masculinity. There is some irony in this. His buildings are about the eternal British Empire and of India's enduring place in the British dominions, the jewel in the British crown. 

Some of the author's photographs (on a day of heavy pollution):

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LUTYEN & HEMINGWAY

Lutyen was a great punster with a warm wit. There are many wonderful stories about him. One of the best is as follows:

He was once employed by Ernest Hemingway to build a house in Hemingway's ancestral home of Ilkley, Yorkshire. When accompanying Hemingway around the unfinished building, Lutyen gestured to the place where a black marble staircase would be. Hemingway protested. "I don't want a black marble staircase!" he said. "I want an oak staircase!" Lutyen looked over his round eyeglasses and said, "What a pity." When the house was completed, however, there - sure enough - was a black marble staircase. Hemingway protested again. "I said I didn't want a black marble staircase!" he said. "I know," said Lutyen,"and I said, 'What a pity.'" 

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Below is a representative selection of some of the furniture designed by Lutyen. We can see, especially, his love of the circle (along with, by extension, the octagon) as the basic unit of classical (especially Roman) forms. 

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black