Ebook: Essays in early Indian architecture

With minute filigree and a staggering vision, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), limned the art and culture of South Asia for a world of readers in the 20th century. His penetrating attention to both the mind and soul of India's great civilization has provided a model for generations of Asian and Western scholars. The Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts has initiated a project to bring out the complete Collected Works of Coomaraswamy in thematically arranged and re-edited volumes, of which this volume of Essays in Early Indian Architecture, edited by Professor Michael W. Meister, is the fourth. Coomaraswamy's contribution to the history of Architecture in India was limited but profound. In particular, his probing analysis of texts and sculpted reliefs in order to reconstruct the extraordinary wooden architecture of early India was an act of great scholarship and a foundation on which further histories of India's exceptional architectural tradition have all been constructed. That three of Coomaraswamy's essays were published in a journal, Eastern Art, that ceased publication after only three issues, and that an important fourth essay on "Huts and Related Temple Types" survived only in manuscript, have made access to Coomaraswamy's accomplishments in this area difficult for most students and scholars. This volume for the first time brings together these four major essays along with Coomaraswamy's analysis of "Indian Architectural Terms." An Introductory essay by Michael W. Meister on "The Language and Process of Early Indian Architecture" connects Coomaraswamy's foundational essays with more recent scholarship on the origination of India's vast tradition of temple architecture. An Afterword, with Joseph Rykwert, on "Adam's House and Hermits' Huts," presents a Conversation with a major Western architectural historian concerning Coomaraswamy and the profound utility and significance of his work.