Hindu temples within Mughal gardens

When BAPS Swaminarayan Akshardham opened in Delhi in 2005 it was hailed as a triumph of Hindu civilisation The sandstone shikhara the handcarved pillars the bronze elephants all sourced from the iconographic repertoire of classical India And then surrounding this monument to Hindu authenticity were lawns Trimmed mowed geometrically edged lawns Sacred waters from 151 rivers of Bharatavarsha contained in a rectangular reflecting pool A lotus garden shaped from above like a lotus mdash because a real lotus pond with muck and frogs and seasonal flooding would be unacceptable to the aesthetic that actually governs these spacesThat aesthetic has two parents and neither of them is the VedasThe first is the Mughal charbagh The defining grammar of Mughal garden design mdash quadripartite symmetry axial water channels walled enclosure geometric order imposed on landscape mdash was a PersianIslamic cosmological statement the four rivers of Quranic paradise the garden as earthly representation of divine perfection BAPS does not reproduce the charbagh literally but it inherits its fundamental premise that a sacred precinct must be ordered symmetrical visually legible and immaculate The Narayan Sarovar is not a temple tank in any traditional sense It is a reflecting pool performing precisely the function that water channels performed in Humayunrsquos Tomb garden mdash producing a mirror image of the monument and heightening its grandeur through axial reflectionThe second parent is the British colonial park The Mughal gardens were orchards full of fruit bearing and flower bearing trees creating a heady scent through the seasons The English landscape garden arrived in India through the treeless maidan the cantonment garden These spaces institutionalized a particular idea of what a wellgoverned landscape looks like clipped weedfree patrolled by gardeners with shears After independence this aesthetic migrated into the idiom of Indian institutional respectability The Birla temple lawn announces in the same register as a Raj Bhavan garden we are orderly we are modern and we are not a jungleThe irony is that the jungle mdash the sacred grove mdash is exactly what the Hindu tradition actually produced and sanctified The devavana the devrai the sthala vriksha managed not horticulturally but through taboo Certain trees could not be felled certain animals not hunted certain water bodies not drained The Vrindavan of the Bhagavata is a dense riparian forest The Aranyakas locate the deepest Vedic knowledge beyond cultivation in the untamed vana A traditional temple grove supported dozens of native species recharged groundwater and sustained pollinators The marble temple campus is an ecological desert dressed in green mdash monoculture grass ornamental exotics stone paving that prevents water percolation Its grounds are indistinguishable ecologically from a suburban corporate parkThis is not incidental to what such new organisations are These new organisations are part of a twentiethcentury reinvention of the Advaita monastic guru parampara mdash cults with a centralized hierarchical celibate swami order providing spiritual services to a predominantly mercantile diaspora It is modern in every structural sense incorporated branded globally franchised with a communication apparatus and volunteer mobilization that any NGO would envy Its theology is devotional but its organisation is managerialPrecisely because of this its discipline its clean campuses its lawabiding politically unthreatening profile it has become the governmentrsquos preferred model of what Hinduism should look like spectacular but orderly proudly ancient but fully compatible with the aesthetics of the Indian corporate campus The devavana wild and unincorporated was never going to be that model The lawn wasThe author writes and lectures on the relevance of mythology in modern times Reach him at devduttpattanaikmiddaycom