Konark Temple Quotes

Mumbai is the sweet, sweaty smell of hope, which is the opposite of hate; and it's the sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love. It's the smell of Gods, demons, empires, and civilizations in resurrection and decay. Its the blue skin-smell of the sea, no matter where you are in the island city, and the blood metal smell of machines. It smells of the stir and sleep and the waste of sixty million animals, more than half of them humans and rats. It smells of heartbreak, and the struggle to live, and of the crucial failures and love that produces courage. It smells of ten thousand restaurants, five thousand temples, shrines, churches and mosques, and of hunderd bazaar devoted exclusively to perfume, spices, incense, and freshly cut flowers. That smell, above all things - is that what welcomes me and tells me that I have come home. Then there were people. Assamese, Jats, and Punjabis; people from Rajasthan, Bengal, and Tamil Nadu; from Pushkar, Cochin, and Konark; warrior caste, Brahmin, and untouchable; Hindi, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Jain, Parsee, Animist; fair skin and dark, green eyes and golden brown and black; every different face and form of that extravagant variety, that incoparable beauty, India.

They speak of the triumph of the faith, the destruction of the idols and the temples, the loot, the carting away of the local people as slaves. … The architectural evidence—the absence of Hindu monuments in the north—is convincing enough. The conquest was unlike any that had gone before. There are no Hindu records of this period. Defeated people never write their history.’15 In the same interview, Naipaul argues that the Muslim conquerors succeeded in ‘the grinding down of Hindu India’. The loot and plunder and destruction, and their religious hostility to non-believers, was not restricted to the original foreign invaders, but a feature of the entire period of Islamic rule. He cites the example of Vijayanagara in this context. ‘Let us consider two last dates. In 1565, a year after the birth of Shakespeare, Vijayanagara in the south is destroyed and its great capital city (Hampi) laid waste. In 1592, the terrible Akbar ravages Orissa in the east. This means that while a country like England is preparing for greatness under its great Queen, old India in its sixth century of retreat, is still being reduced to non-entity. The wealth and creativity, the artisans and architecture of the kingdom of Vijayanagara and Orissa must have been destroyed, their lights put out.’16 Naipaul’s larger point is that such depredations dealt a body blow to the creative impulses of the Hindu civilisation. ‘This is where we come face to face with the Indian calamity. When places like Vijayanagara and Orissa were laid low, all the creative talent would also have been destroyed. The current was broken. We have no means of knowing what architecture existed in the north before the Muslims. We can only be certain that there would have been splendours like Konark and Kanchipuram.’17 In an article in the UK newspaper, the Guardian, writer-historian William Dalrymple attempts to rebut Naipaul’s outspoken views. Naipaul’s ‘jaundiced’ view, he argues, was due to the influence of the ‘imperial historiography of Victorian Britain’, where the British sought to paint the Muslims as plunderers to bring out their own ‘civilizing mission’. Vijayanagara, he says, was ‘heavily Islamicised by the sixteenth century’. This can be inferred by the fact that ‘the Hindu kings of Vijayanagara appeared in public audience, not bare-chested as had been the tradition in Hindu India, but dressed in quasi-Islamic court costume’, symbolic, according to him—on the authority of American Sanskrit scholar, Philip Wagner—‘of their participation in the more universal culture of Islam’.