JOIN USTravelling to the historical site of Sanchi in Madhya Pradesh, Meera Iyer studies the ancient ‘stupas’ and ‘toranas’ of Emperor Ashoka’s era that are witness to the life and times of Buddha.
It is a little difficult to contain your excitement when you are on your way to see some of India’s earliest surviving sculptural art, not to mention its oldest standing stone structure.
Jouncing along on a road held together with potholes, we watched the milestones bouncing past us: Sanchi 10 km, 5 km, 2 km….
By this time, up on the hill to our right, we could see the famous Great Stupa, shining on the hill, beckoning to us.
A turn to the right, a short ride up the hill and then we were at the gates of Sanchi.
I had seen numerous pictures of the stupa, some in long-forgotten school textbooks, and I was fully prepared to be left speechless by my first glimpse of the real deal.
And yet, I actually felt somewhat underwhelmed.
In the slanting rays of the early morning sun, the stupa shimmered through the slight haze that still hung in the air.
This is it, I thought, this hemispherical structure is what everybody waxes eloquent about.
Surprising splendour
It was only when we went closer that its scale and grandeur struck me. Look up, and you can see the stupa stretching away into the sky.
Turn around and you will notice how delicately beautiful and extraordinarily lively the carvings on its embellishments are. Truly, it deserves the moniker Great Stupa, and not just for its size.
Sanchi’s Great Stupa was originally built by Emperor Ashoka in the 3rd century BC. It is curious that he chose this site for one of his biggest monuments because the Buddha never walked anywhere near this, the world’s oldest surviving Buddhist pilgrimage site.
When the Buddha died, his ashes were said to have been buried inside eight stupas. Legend says Ashoka redistributed those relics into 84,000 stupas that he built.
But why stupas?
Dr S V P Halakatti, a retired archaeologist from the Archaeological Survey of India, explains that the practice of building stupas over relics or mortal remains probably derived from an earlier practice of building cairns — circular piles of stones which were heaped on graves, a practice prevalent in Central India about 3,000 years ago, and still practiced in some places in the country.
Sometime in the 2nd BC, Ashoka’s mud and brick stupa at Sanchi was enlarged and encased in stone, staircases and balustrades were added to it, and a stone platform and railing placed atop it.
Around 70 to 100 years later, another dynasty added and embellished the Great Stupa with four toranas or gateways in the four cardinal directions.
The southern gateway is the main one, leading into the path that takes one around the stupa. It is also the oldest of the gateways, the other three being built within the next few decades.
An inscription on it says it is the work of a group of ivory carvers from Vidisha. Clearly, those ivory carvers were a skilled lot, for they have succeeded in imparting a vibrancy and animation even to stone.
A cursory look at the carvings on the toranas is enough to make one see why they have become the most famous and iconic symbols of Sanchi.
However, a more than cursory look is highly recommended. The gateways depict important episodes from Buddha’s life and narrate some jatakas, which are stories of Buddha’s past lives.
Interestingly, Buddha himself is never shown in human form in these sculptures. Instead, the carvings on the toranas depict the Enlightened One as a tree, a horse, an empty throne or even footprints.I was taken aback by the wealth of detail in these sculptures, and would happily have pottered about there for hours, exploring the stories behind the stories in each panel!
Capturing daily life
For instance, if your ever wondered how people lived here more than 2,000 years ago, look no further. Set as the scenes are in the towns and villages of ancient India, the carvings are also an incredible pictorial record of everyday life in those days.
You can see women chatting with each other on a balcony as they watch a parade go by on the street below; there are men fighting and riding horses, women fetching water, men praying, couples chatting with each other, couples courting in a park…
The friezes also reveal interesting details about buildings in those days of yore. You can see an entire gamut of construction ranging from humble, one-roomed, circular huts to multi-storied palaces, with walls, city gates, forts, ditches, pillared pavilions and so on thrown in.
The toranas and railings were definitely one reason that, like coffee or olives, Sanchi grew on me the longer I lingered.
The other reason was that despite being a World Heritage Site, it is remarkably free of noisy throngs.
There is a tranquillity about the place, a quiet which lets you pick out the trill of a bird in a distant tree, or silently observe the serene spectacle of pilgrims from southeast Asia walking reverentially around the Great Stupa.
If you seek greater solitude, you can always wander off into another corner of the vast site.
Over almost 1,000 years of building, Sanchi grew into a sprawling pilgrim complex.
India’s oldest structural temple stands here, built sometime in the early Gupta period, around the 5th century or so. Several small votive stupas here date from the 8th century.
The last construction here seems to have been a Buddhist temple built about the 12th century.
The site seems to have been abandoned sometime after that. The next time we hear of Sanchi, it is to the accompaniment of drills and pickaxes when British treasure hunters came calling at the site in the early 1800s.
Their modus operandi was crude but effective — drill right through the stupa, in search of relics and other treasures that were stored inside. When the treasure seekers came upon the place, the stupas were all intact and most of the toranas were still standing. By the time they were through, the stupas had almost collapsed.
It took many decades of painstaking effort by several archaeologists to restore Sanchi to its present state.
When you are done with the Sanchi hill itself, do take a look also at the museum near the entrance to the town, which has photographs from the 1800s and 1900s and a sampling of artefacts found here during excavations.