India Discovered by John Keay Page B

Ancient and Remarkable Building near Bhilsa’ was Captain E. Fell. He had made the sixty-mile trek out from Bhopal in 1819 on the recommendation of a friend. Doubtless he had some idea of what to expect; and he was far from disappointed.But how to convey to the readers of the Calcutta Journal some idea of even the main stupa, or tower?
On a tableland of a detached hill & is an ancient fabric of a hemispherical form, built of thin layers of free-stone, in the nature of steps, without any cement and, to all appearances, solid; the outside of which has been faced throughout with a coat of chunam mortar & The monument (for such I will call it) is strengthened by a buttress of stone masonry, twelve feet high and seven broad, all around the base, the measured circumference of which is 554 feet.
    It was really a sort of circular pyramid, and Fell thought that it might not in fact be solid. If there were any hidden chambers they might prove ‘highly interesting and worthy of being examined’.
The monument is surrounded by a colonnade of granite pillars, ten feet high, distant from each other a foot and a half, connected by parallels also granite, of an elliptical form, united by tenons & At the East, West and North points are gateways [the south gateway had already collapsed], plain parallelograms, the extreme height of each of which is forty feet and the breadth within the perpendiculars nine feet.
    It wasas if Buddhist architects had been determined to do everything the hard way. Where several small stones would do the job of one big one they chose the one big one. They whittled temples out of rock, erected pillars that looked as if they had been turned on a lathe, and here they were again treating sandstone as if it were wood. The rails of the colonnade were jointed to the uprights by mortice andtenon, and the lintels of the great gateways were shaped as if to anticipate bowing.
    But Fell, like every subsequent visitor, was soon absorbed by the carving.
The perpendiculars of the gateways are divided into four almost equal compartments. In the lower are statues of door-keepers & In another compartment is a representation of the monument [the stupa] surrounded by figures in groups, some standing, others sitting cross-legged, others bowing, all with joined hands, and in the act of worship & In another is a small convex body in a boat, the prow of which is a lion’s head and the stern the expanded tail of a fish, over which is suspended a long cable. In the boat are three male figures, two of whom are rowing and the third holding an umbrella over the convex. The vessel is in an open sea, in the midst of a tempest; near it are figures swimming and endeavouring by seizing piles to save themselves from drowning. One, on the point of drowning, is making an expiring effort to ascend the side; the features of all fully portray their melancholy situation. In another compartment is the sacred tree and altar, surrounded by groups of figures, both male and female, some beating tympans, others playing cymbals, others dancing; & in short it is hardly possible to conceive sculpture more expressive of feeling than this.
    Fell did his best; but how could someone ‘inexperienced in the power of description,’ give even a very faint idea of the magnificence of such stupendous structures and exquisitely finished sculpture? He was not even sure to what religion the site belonged. Thehill-top was strewn with statues. He thought he had recognized Brahma of the Hindus and Parasnath of the Jains, but the predominant figure was certainly the Buddha. If Sanchi was Buddhist though, where were the Buddha’s followers today?
    The answer was almost everywhere – Ladakh, Nepal, Tibet, China, Burma, Thailand and Ceylon – except India. Buddhism encircled the subcontinent, but in India itwas unknown. To Jones and his colleagues, immersed in their Sanskrit studies, it had looked as if Hinduism must have pre-empted the country. Stupas were thought to have been