A Vastu Text in the Modern Age: Vishvakarma Darpan, 1969

VIBHUTI SACHDEV 1969 was a time of some introspection for the architectural profession in India.1 The vision of bold architecture that Nehru had nurtured so personally was now in full bloom. It was, after all, a decade since he had urged architects to break the shackles of tradition in support of Chandigarh an experiment to embolden the spirit of New India. There was a general sense of relief from professionally trained architects, because for them this political support meant that they could now do what they did best. Not out of choice, but training, they were freed from the burden of addressing tradition, and they could now address foreign design. This was also the time when many were returning home after training in European and American schools, and were putting into practice what they had learnt abroad.2 The foreign-returned were the real architects who took upon themselves the task of educating their clients, and changing the face of India. They were real also because only they had had rst-hand experience of what was being taught from books in architecture schools all over India. With scholarship schemes set up by the Nehru government facilitating architects to study in America, it was there that many young architects went to complete their education. Once back they would set their euphoria in concrete and glass. And by 1969 there were already quite a few examples of American-inspired designs in the portfolio of Modern India, and its novelty was beginning to wear off. Meanwhile, away from the mainstream enthusiasm for Modern architecture, the publication of the sixteenth edition of an illustrated text called the Asli or real Vishvakarma Darpan in August 1969, although ignored by the real architects, caught up with the popularity of American designs. Its publisher, Bhai Buta Singh - Pratap Singh of Amritsar,
The illustrations shown here reect the poor quality of the original. This article is an outcome of a workshop-based research project (2000-2001) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board of the U.K. The project, convened by Partha Mitter and Craig Clunas at the University of Sussex, was devoted to considering Textual Sources and Value Systems in the Arts of India and China, bringing together scholars engaged in developing an indigenous critical approach to Indian and Chinese art, free from Europeancentred tools and values, to share their techniques and approaches to their material. The issues raised in discussions related to professional and textual hierarchies, canons, golden ages, Sinology/Indology and Orientalism, notions of the indigenous, dominant texts and mainstream practices, relationship between theory and practice, and institutional patterns of scholarship. My article questions the model - set up by current art historians - of separate insular domains of the textual tradition of theory, and its practice; and of the various specialists that participate in the wider intellectual and practical aspects of architectural design. I question the notion of hierarchy established by identifying mainstream and dominant practices, which denies agency and authority to different streams of production. In doing so, I explore in detail a modern architectural text conceived in a stream that no longer enjoyed the privilege of institutional and political support within the prevailing architectural scenario. 2 See: Vikram Bhatt and Peter Scriver for a full account of architectural practice in the 1960s-70s in, After the Masters: contemporary Indian Architecture (Ahmedabad, 1990), pp. 15-23.
JRAS, Series 3, 15, 2 (2005), pp. 165178 doi:10.1017/S1356186305004979
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The Royal Asiatic Society 2005 Printed in the United Kingdom

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specialised in text books on subjects ranging from building construction, and drawing, to electrical guides, and manuals on how to make your own radio set. The Vishvakarma Darpan adopts the generic title of the divine architect, linking itself to the Vishvakarma School, which had produced texts since at least the tenth century. Its author, Gyan Singh Mistri, presents himself as a builder, reminding one of Mandan Sutradhar, a fteenth-century builder and writer of several texts on architecture and sculpture. Let us look briey at Mandan Sutradhars text on architecture. Called the Vasturajavallabh3 (also known as Rajavallabh), and written in Sanskrit, this work is composed of 14 chapters and also belongs to the Vishvakarma School. The topics discussed in the text follow a layout roughly similar to earlier Vastu Shastras.4 Commencing with the usual invocation of Vishvakarma among other Gods, it proceeds to discuss site-shape, declivity of site, soil tests, units of measurement, Vastupurusha Mandala, Ayadi and astrological considerations, and the construction of forts, palaces and houses. The discussion of these topics, however, benets from its writers expertise as a Sutradhar or a draughtsman/builder. In fact, he devotes a whole chapter to geometrical construction of various shapes. The typology and building materials he discusses are what he was probably using, and were prevalent at the time he was practising in the court of Rana Kumbha of Chitor, his king-patron.5 There was no such royal patron for Gyan Singh Mistri, and how does his work compare with that of his predecessor? Vishvakarma Darpan is in three colloquial languages: Gurmukhi, Hindi and Urdu. The textual part of the book is in the form of doha or couplets, chaupai or verses of four lines, and prose, without any use of Sanskrit. Opening with a long propitiation of Vishvakarma, his attributes and tools, the author then gives a brief account of the examination of soil using the standard test involving a pit of one hasta6 in width, length and depth. The declivity of the site is considered, where its slope towards the northern and eastern directions are preferred. The land is categorised in terms of the four jatis or castes according to the colour, smell, and the taste of its soil. The author recommends sites that match the owners jati. This is followed by the method of calculating the aya of the house using the owners hasta; calculation of the muhurta or the auspicious time for the laying of the foundation, and rahu vichar for placing the rst door of the house; the effect on the house of the month of its commencement; and the auspicious time for the rst entry into new and old houses. This section of the text, albeit concise, has a strong resonance with other texts of the Vishvakarma school, such as the Rajavallabh. Next, he tabulates the weight of materials such as bricks, timber, concrete, plate glass and steel, in the unit of pounds per square foot; and the compressive and tensile strength of materials. He then explains briey the techniques of stone and brick masonry; plastering; ooring of brick, Agra stone and timber; roong; and the calculation of rates per volume of mud and concrete. He ends the text with recipes for the preparation of varnishes and paints.

Ramyatna Ojha (ed. and tr.),Vasturajavallabh,II edn. (Kashi,1934) See: Vibhuti Chakrabarti (Sachdev) for an overview of Vastu Shastra texts in, Indian Architectural Theory: Contemporary Uses of Vastu Vidya (Surrey, 1998). 5 See: Rima Hooja for more on Mandan and his patron in Of Buildings and Books: The Theory and Practice of the Architect Mandan in Stones in the Sand: The Architecture of Rajasthan.Edited by Giles Tillotson, (Mumbai, 2001), pp. 12-27. 6 Hasta or forearm is a standard measurement unit of about eighteen inches.

3 4

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Fig. 1. Tools.

Fig. 2. Ganesh Chaal Dordaar.

What follows is the major part of the Vishvakarma Darpan, numerous illustrations, some competent and some weak. There are thirteen plates of illustrations of tools for building construction (Fig. 1), and how to use them. This is followed by sixty-six plates showing the geometric construction of motifs (Fig. 2). Each of these plates is divided into three horizontal sections, with Vishvakarma positioned in the top section with his tools and holding the Vishvakarma Darpan in one of his four arms. The middle section has the motif in its various stages of geometric construction, and the lowest section has the generic name of the motif with the rules of its construction in three languages. For example, the pattern of Ganesh Chaal Dordaar is explained in a drawing, that shows the various stages of its construction, and the rules of its subdivision are explained in the text in the lower section of the plate. The name of the pattern is a standard reference to a particular design also indicating, to those familiar with the indigenous terminology, a specic way of subdividing space. So this is an illustration of the method of a pattern, which could respond to the dimensions of any given space. Next, are ve plates of naag chakras motifs of intertwined serpents (Fig. 3), arranged within the same format of three sections. The next twelve plates of wooden joinery (Fig. 4) have no textual explanation, and the various timber joints are in isometric drawing, in the style of modern building construction books. This is followed by ten plates explaining the design

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Fig. 3. Naag Chakra.

Fig. 4. Wooden Joinery.

of borders, twenty-ve plates of various owers, and a lions head, some indigenous names are included. Some of these borders and stylised owers are standard features of traditional design, and their names represent the technical vocabulary followed by craftsmen of northern India today. For example, pohchi (Fig. 5), or lower border is used as a plinth marker (Fig. 6); while a motif called the chugga ka phool (Fig. 7) is a particular ower that marks the centre of an arch. Then, there are six plates of decorative door surrounds (Fig. 8); ten plates on the headboards of beds, and chairs and their backs (Fig. 9). The author resumes the earlier format of three horizontal sections with textual explanation of rules for the next eighteen plates on pinjara or jaalis (Fig. 10). The next nine plates are on door panels and ventilators (Fig. 11); followed by twenty-four plates on chairs, tables, bureaux, and fancy furniture (Fig. 12); one plate on tools for laying oors, and seven plates on ooring patterns; seven plates on tools for masonry and on brick masonry. All these are arranged in a loose format with minimal textual explanation. The next sixteen plates on the construction of arches (Fig. 13), and the thirty-two plates on building features make use of both text and drawing, and of indigenous names. There are two plates on replaces (Fig. 14), and six plates on staircases and railings. The next section

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Fig. 5. Pohchi.

Fig. 6. Pohchi and Chugga in the Ramachandra Temple, Jaipur.

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Fig. 7. Chugga Flower.

Fig. 8. Door Surround.

is largely of text and a few drawings on carpentry (Fig. 15), lathe work and the preparation of colours, followed by ten plates on the art of drawing (Fig. 16). Next, are eight plates on building elements such as an angrezi (English) window (Fig. 17), brackets, and a curious clock tower with a cross, called a bangala. The illustrations culminate in a series of forty-four plates on American designs in perspective and plan, fullling the promise made on the cover of the book included in this edition are many new American building designs (Fig. 18). The degree of competence with which Gyan Singh Mistri explains the designs seems directly proportional to his familiarity with the subject, and to some degree captures the aspirations of local builders looking up to the trained Modern architects. He has included examples of wooden joinery imitating details in building construction books, fancy furniture, an English hearth, and around four dozen examples of modern American buildings. In dealing with these less familiar subjects, Mistri adopts an isometric view for illustration and avoids any discussion of their method of design. It would be near impossible for any aspiring builder to learn about foreign design from these illustrations, although their inclusion may provide a touch of Modernity for builders working on the fringes of urban architectural practice.

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Fig. 9. Chair.

Fig. 10. Pinjara.

Books like the Vishvakarma Darpan are still in circulation amongst some carpenters and masons. Not everyone in India can afford the services of an architect, or feels the necessity to employ one. Often in the urban fringes, the mason in consultation with the owner of the house is the designer, which is where such reference manuals are used. For the practitioner this collection of drawings works both as a catalogue of possibilities, and a portfolio of his expertise, giving him credibility and association with the Vishvakarma school. The text under discussion was in use in 1995 by a builder, originally from Rajasthan, constructing a house in Delhi. His client, who was not familiar with indigenous traditional design terminology, could, by referring to the book, understand what the builder meant if he said, for example, that he could make the trellis in Ganesh Chaal Dordaar . Therefore, the purpose of the text is three fold: dissemination, promotion, and discussion. This is very similar to what the Bombay architect Claude Batley had imagined the role of his published album on Indian architecture to be.7 In 1934, he and his students produced a collection of measured drawings in an endeavour to meet a need which everyone who has set out to study the elements of Indian Architecture must have felt. Moreover, the
7

Claude Batley, The Design Development of Indian Architecture, (London, 1973) (Ist edn. 1934).

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Fig. 11. Trellis for light.

Fig. 12. Fancy Furniture.

album was to provide inspiration to architects practising in India, by treating the subject not from an archaeological, but from the architectural or constructional viewpoint.8 The drawings are of a superlative quality, and the plates provide plans, elevations and sections of various Hindu and Mohamedan buildings drawn to scale in feet and inches. Plate 47 (Fig. 20) is composed of 12 panels of patterns in elevation and plan from the so-called Raja Birbals house in Fatehpur Sikri. The patterns are similar to those used for the pierced stone jails throughout India by the Mohamedans.9 These are very accurate pictures of the panels, but for an understanding of the derivation of the patterns the reader will have to infer and speculate, because the drawings do not explain how these patterns were arrived at. The emphasis is on accuracy and appearance and not on method of design, so that the inspiration it promises to provide could barely stretch beyond imitation. Incidentally, most of these designs are included in the Vishvakarma Darpan, with the indigenous names of the patterns and their derivations. Although not of comparable quality, Gyan Singh Mistris drawings succeed in the aim of imparting the method of design, which is what Batleys compilation falls short of.
8 9

Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 35.

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Fig. 13. Arches.

Fig. 14. Angrezi Angithi.

Before Batley, Swinton Jacob had compiled a portfolio of building details from the region of Jaipur, the famous Jeypore Portfolio (18901913). The aim which the Vishvakarma Darpan achieves without a conscious assertion was that of educating the craftsman, and presenting drawings of parts of old buildings that could be used in new design. Jacobs portfolio is invaluable as an accurate documentation of building details in the units of feet and inches, but lacks any engagement with the design method and theory that produced the wonderful examples of buildings he so admired. Through their drawings, Batley and Jacob engaged with Indian architecture from within the prevailing mainstream and that is clearly visible from their tools of documentation. Their level of engagement with traditional architecture, in so far as it tells us anything about the method of design, is similar to Mistris engagement with modern design. Like Batley who hoped to inspire architects through images that evoke surprise and amazement, Mistri too hoped to astonish and amaze his colleagues with American design. Each worked within their individual streams of Modern architecture and Vastu Vidya respectively. If the mainstream is to be determined by the institutional and the political support that a professional practice enjoys, then Gyan Singh Mistris work is easily ignored. The information on Modern architecture that he projects in his book is ill-digested, useless as

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Fig. 15. Carpentry.

Fig. 16. Art of drawing.

a tool for training in Modern design. But the work is mainstream if what is considered is the stream of Vastu Vidya. The chosen format with a clear echo of Rajavallabh and other texts of the Vishvakarma school indicates Mistris bid to place himself in the centre of that mainstream and to include the latest developments and trends of Modernism around him. It is a measure of Mistris training in Vastu Vidya as the prevailing mainstream that he can make a space within it for new fashions of design. There are many masons in India who are not trained as architects, many who have learnt their skills from master craftsmen, trained within the world-view of Vastu Vidya, who are hopeless at pouring concrete but remarkably dexterous at carving intricate panels, who are successful in satisfying their near-rich clients catering to their architectural fantasies, who are not a threat to architects monopoly over the profession, but who have the potential to ower if allowed to work on their own ground. It is the needs of such fellow builders that this book addresses. So, what kind of buildings do these fellow builders build? The architect and writer K.T. Ravindran eloquently sums up their architecture as a monster baby of the popular paradigms of the main city and a fractured version of the traditional sensibilities with its own characteristic vocabulary drawn from the immediate historic and cultural contexts. It ranges

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Fig. 17. Angrezi three sided window.

Fig. 18. American Design with plan.

from the most boring, drab nondescript box to a celebration of kitsch and bizarre . . .10 But that is not how their clients would describe them, who after all have commissioned these designs. To them it is an extension of their hopes and aspirations. These buildings respond to the images of Modern design, disengaged from its language images that are collated by them in their trips to the city, from architectural journals, and locally from the written and professional works of fellow builders. Their practice of modern design is no more bizarre than the cultivated responses to traditional architecture that their city-counterparts exercise. But, just as not all Modern design is about sticking jharokhas and chhajjas over a clean concrete box, so not all of Mistris works are about rendering a cacophony in a modern manner. With the guild system collapsed, and the demand for old style low, work is hard to come by. Once in a while, in the context of a conservation project, one can witness the talents of a Mistri shine. One can see them slake lime so ne that it takes over six months to prepare. And, when a lack-lustre dado panel is revived to its former glory and polished with coconut oil, the result is a nish that competes in brightness with the glitter of hope. In two closely studied conservation projects in Amber and Jaipur in the 1990s, I found that the craftsmen involved in restoring the buildings used terminologies and processes, some of which are elaborated
10

K. T. Ravindran, Indigenous India, The Architectural Review, CLXXXII. 1086 (London, 1987), pp. 63-64.

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Fig. 19. American Design with plan.

in the Vishvakarma Darpan. It is not as if they were referring to the text on-site to remind themselves of the vocabulary, but it indicates that the text shares the same knowledge-base that they had internalised through their training. It does not make the text redundant but enhances our chances of understanding those buildings. For us, it adds another source of learning that complements the buildings themselves and the practitioners. For the buildings of the more remote past, it is not possible to speak to their creators, and in that context, it makes the role of the available texts even more valuable, if not fundamental, to our study of pre-modern design. Apart from the role of such texts today, Vishvakarma Darpan sheds light on the role of Vastu Shastras in general. The inclusion of drawing as a part of the text, though novel for its genre, is facilitated by the ease of printing, and compensates for the growing lack of a shared visual language. It questions the model that Vastu Shastras are written by Brahmins in a secret code of Sanskrit to be shared with other Brahmins. Of course, Brahmins may have been the writers of some of the Vastu Vidya texts, but Mandan Sutradhar, like Gyan Singh Mistri, was rst and foremost a builder. Texts on the ritual ceremonies conducted during various stages of building are as much a part of the corpus of Vastu Vidya as are texts on the

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Fig. 20. Plate 47 (Batley, 1973).

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construction of houses. Their authors may not have understood each other, or may not even have read each others work, but they are both equally valuable as writers on architecture. After all, how many building contractors understand the nuances of a post-modern design even if they are involved in building one? Equally, how many architects would be able to install electrical ttings into the buildings that they, themselves, design? Each has a different role in the profession, and if they are also writers, may write different types of texts. A text by a Sutradhar is not more important than a text by a Brahmin scholar, but may emphasise different aspects of the practice. Therefore, a hierarchical view of a body of texts on a shared system of architecture misreads the nature of the profession, and misjudges the relationship between theory and practice. This is not to suggest that one can project the use of a text like the Vishvakarma Darpan11 onto the uses of the texts of the past. But, if what links the theory and practice is the knowledge base of their expressions as texts and buildings, then there remains little ground for dismissing the role of one or the other in our understanding of architecture of any period. And if against all odds of political and institutional marginalisation, a text like the Vishvakarma Darpan is, with whatever degree of success, able to carve a niche for itself, then the chances are that in a climate of a shared world view and under a strong patronage, the role of theoretical texts in the past will have been no less important. References
Bhatt, Vikram and Peter Scriver, After the Masters: Contemporary Indian Architecture (Ahmedabad, 1990). Batley, Claude, The Design Development of Indian Architecture (London, 1973), III edn., Ist edn. (1934). Chakrabarti Sachdev, Vibhuti, Indian Architectural Theory: Contemporary Uses of Vastu Vidya (Surrey, 1998). Hooja, Rima, Of Buildings and Books: The Theory and Practice of the Architect Mandan, in Stones in the Sand: The Architecture of Rajasthan, ed. Giles Tillotson (Mumbai, 2001). Jacob, Samuel Swinton, The Jeypore Portfolio of Architectural Details (London, 189093). Ojha, Ramyatna (ed. and tr.), Vasturajavallabh, Kashi (1934), II edn. Ravindran, K.T., Indigenous India, The Architectural Review, CLXXXII. 1086 (London, 1987). Sachdev, Vibhuti, In a Maze of Lines: the theory of design of Jaalis, South Asian Studies, Vol. 19, (2003). Singh, Mistri Gyan, Vishvakarma Darpan (Amritsar, 1969).

11 For a study of three other indigenous texts on Jaali patterns (Jaal Kaumudi,1891; Geometrical Patterns, 1893; Jaal Vigyan, 1953), see Sachdev, 2003, pp. 141-155.