NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 10 End of chapter — Questions and activities

The width: about 13 to 14 metres.

Compared with your classroom. A typical classroom is about 7 to 8 metres long and 6 metres wide. So one wall of this Mohenjo-daro house is about twice the length of your classroom, and its ground floor alone would hold roughly four classrooms — and there was another floor above it.

The staircases: at least three can be made out. A staircase is drawn as a run of close parallel lines — the treads — on a sloping surface. Looking for that pattern, you can find:

• one in the front-left part of the house, rising in a narrow space beside a room;
• one at the front-centre, rising out of the paved courtyard into a room;
• one at the back-left, near the passage where the plan steps up towards the higher block.

A fourth flight can be argued for on the right-hand side, so a count of three or four is defensible — say which ones you found and where, rather than just giving a number.

What the ground floor was for. The text says that ‘while the servants lived downstairs, the owners probably lived upstairs, where they would be less exposed to the dust and noise from the streets around’. That tells you what belongs on each level. Downstairs would hold:

• the entrance and gate room, where visitors and deliveries were received;
• the service rooms — kitchen, grinding and cooking area, and the servants’ own rooms;
• storerooms for grain, oil and large water jars, which are heavy and were best kept at ground level;
• the bathing area and drain — the chapter notes that almost every Mohenjo-daro home had one, and used water was taken out through the city’s drains, so it had to be at street level;
• the courtyard itself, for all the work that needs daylight and space — washing, drying, sorting, perhaps a workshop or storage of goods.

The two pictures look similar — both are curved roofs — but they are made by exactly opposite methods, and that is the discovery your group should arrive at.

1. The dome at Sanchi (Fig. 3.8): you add, ring by ring.

First, an important observation. The aṇḍa of a stupa is not hollow. It is a solid mound over the relic chamber — a dome-shaped structure, faced with brick or stone over a core of rubble and earth. That single fact removes the hardest problem in building: there is no empty space to span, so you need no centring, no wooden formwork and no keystone.

2. The ceiling at Ellora (Fig. 3.12): you remove, from the top down.

Here nothing is placed. The vault, the ribs across it, the pillars, the aisle, the stupa and the Buddha are all what is left after the surrounding rock is chipped away. So the group would: mark the arch full size on the rock face and cut that profile; make a wooden template of the curve; drive the cave backwards into the hill, keeping the template against the ceiling to check the profile; mark where each rib goes; and then sink the surface between the marks, leaving the ribs standing proud. Only when the ceiling is finished do you cut down the walls and floor beneath it — because you have been standing on that rock.

Because in both structures the water level is not fixed. A tank whose level rises and falls needs an approach that works at every level — and a stairway is the only kind of approach that does.

Fig. 3.15 — a tank at Shringaverpur. These reservoirs were fed by a channel from the Ganga during the river’s seasonal flooding. So the water is deep in one season and almost gone in another. Flights of brick steps at several points and several heights mean:

• you can reach the water in the wet season and in the dry season, without a rope or a bucket;
• people can spread out instead of wearing away one path — important, because the lining is brick;
• when the tank is empty, workers can get down to desilt and repair it. The first reservoir or two were designed to let the silt suspended in the water settle, and settled silt has to be dug out by hand, or the tank slowly fills up;
• the reservoirs were interconnected, so people had to move between different tanks and levels to manage the flow.

Fig. 3.17 — a puṣhkariṇī at Vijayanagara. Here the steps do two jobs at once.

• Access for ritual and use. A temple tank was used for water-based rituals and for drawing water. Identical stepped flights on all four sides mean the descent is the same wherever you come from, and many people can use the tank at once without crowding a single stair.
• Structure. Look at the shape: the tank is built as tiers of steps stepping inward and downward, like an inverted pyramid. Each tier of stone steps holds back the earth behind it, and its weight presses down on the tier below. The stairway is the retaining wall. Building a single sheer stone wall to the same depth would need far bigger blocks and would be far more likely to be pushed in by the soil and groundwater behind it.

The Bishnupur pillars in Fig. 3.27 are easier — but not because terracotta work is crude. It is easier because of how the decoration is made, and above all because a mistake there is cheap.

Common features — the parts that ritual requires

• A garbhagṛiha, the innermost chamber holding the mūrti, and a tower or raised roof directly above it so that the sanctum is visible from outside.
• One or more maṇḍapas — pillared halls in front of the sanctum — through which the worshipper passes.
• A clear axis, generally east–west, with the garbhagṛiha facing east.
• A path for pradakṣhiṇa, inherited from the stupa and the rock-cut cave.
• A movement from the outer world to the inner, marked by an entrance — a gopuram in the south, a toraṇa in some northern temples.
• Enclosures (prākāras) and secondary shrines in the larger complexes, which grew steadily after the 10th century.
• Carved surfaces telling stories, often a water reservoir attached, construction following śhilpaśhāstra, and no cement mortar.
• Roles beyond worship: learning, literature, sculpture, dance, music and painting, and centres of social and economic life.

Differences — the parts that geography and history decide

No — because the courtyard is designed to receive that water and get rid of it. Collecting the rain in the middle of the house is the point of the plan, not an accident of it.

Four details make it work, and you can see three of them in Fig. 3.47.

• The court is sunk below the rooms. Look at the pale central floor in Fig. 3.47: it sits a clear step below the pillared verandah around it. Water that falls in the court therefore stays in the court. The rooms, the verandah and everything stored in them are on higher ground.
• The court floor is laid to a fall. It is paved and given a gentle slope towards one corner, where an outlet — a drain, a covered channel or a soak pit — takes the water away, often into the household well or a storage tank. The courtyard is a rainwater-harvesting basin with a spout.
• The roofs deliberately slope inward. All the roof water is delivered into that one paved, drained place rather than being thrown onto the street or against the outer walls. That also keeps the roof spans short, since each roof only has to reach from the outer wall to the courtyard edge.
• A kerb and deep eaves keep the verandah dry. A raised edge at the courtyard rim stops water spreading sideways, and the projecting roof over the verandah keeps the splash off the floor where people sit.

The method first. Ten is a very small number, so a good selection must be governed by a rule, not by favourites. The strongest rule is: one monument for each kind of building the chapter identifies, then check that the ten also spread across period, region, material and religion. If two candidates say the same thing, keep only one.

How to classify a building. Do not begin with the name or the date — begin with what you can see. Run through these five markers in order, and the type usually declares itself.

1. Purpose. Worship, water, defence, burial, dwelling or government? A prayer hall, a sanctum, a tank, a rampart, a tomb chamber and a courtyard are each unmistakable.
2. Plan. Is there a garbhagṛiha with a maṇḍapa in front? A prayer hall oriented towards Mecca with a mihrab niche in one wall? A symmetrical building set in a divided garden? Rooms around a central courtyard? Walls following a hilltop?
3. What covers the top. A stepped vimāna, a curving śhikhara, a dome with minarets beside it, a curved Bengal roof, a sloping tiled roof, or a flat terrace.
4. How the openings are spanned. A flat lintel on two posts (older Indian tradition), a pointed arch, or a corbelled ‘arch’ made by stacking blocks in a staircase pattern.
5. Material and ornament. Stone, brick, terracotta panels, timber, or marble with inlay; figure sculpture, jālis, calligraphy, floral motifs, frescoes. Then ask whether the material comes from nearby — if it does not, someone paid a great deal to bring it.

How to run it so it actually works.

1. Divide by type, not by monument. Give each group one of the chapter’s categories that exists in your region — for example: places of worship · water structures · forts and defence · houses and havelis · colonial or civic buildings · memorials and cenotaphs. This way the exhibition tells one connected story instead of showing six unrelated buildings.
2. Every group produces the same four things, so the panels can hang together: (a) one clear photograph or drawing; (b) a rough plan sketched on squared paper with a scale bar — even a paced-out plan is fine; (c) a caption of about eighty words; (d) a small ‘material and technique’ box: what it is built of, where that material comes from, how the openings are spanned, whether there is any cement.
3. Use more than one kind of source. The building itself is the first source. Then an inscription or a plaque on it; then the local ASI or state archaeology board; then a district gazetteer or a local history book in the library; then, valuably, an older resident who remembers the building being repaired or used differently. Note on each panel where each fact came from.
4. Invite the expert early, and send your questions in advance. A scholar who has seen your draft panels will correct them; a scholar who arrives cold will only give a lecture.
5. Add one honest panel on condition. For each monument, one line on how it is faring — cracks, encroachment, water dumping, whitewash over old carving, or good recent repair. This turns an exhibition into a small piece of documentation that the town does not otherwise have.

The threats, roughly in order of how much they actually destroy.

How we protect it.

• Record first. Photographs, measurements and condition notes — including by school groups — because an unlisted, undocumented monument has no defenders.
• Repair with matching materials and trained craftsmen. Lime where there was lime, the same stone where stone has failed, and reversible work wherever possible. Funding the crafts is funding the monuments.
• Use the law, and use it on the surroundings. The Taj is the model case: expert committee → public interest litigation in the Supreme Court → a mid-1990s ban on polluting industry in the area. The threat came from outside the boundary wall, and so did the remedy.
• Give buildings a life. Mehrangarh’s museum, the Victoria Memorial Hall, havelis as hotels — reuse pays for upkeep, provided the original fabric is not cut about and the public can still get in.
• Bring back the community. The chapter notes that environmentalists, locals and NGOs sometimes join hands to preserve water structures. Local guardianship works because local people are there every day, which no inspection schedule can match.
• Behave well as visitors. Do not carve, do not litter, do not climb on carving, and do not buy antiquities.