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The kutêgara or, from men's house to mansion in eastern India and South-east
Asia.
When one looks up kūţâgāra in the Dictionaries one will find in Monier Williams for the few real Sanskrit references existing the meanings 'an upper room, apartment on the top of a house.' These only tell us something about its location and function, not about its form though the compound kūțâgara itself points to it. This information subsequently came from Rhys Davids and Stede who for their Pāli-English Dictionary had many more references at their disposal because we probably have to do with a kind of building which has its origin in the eastern part of India. They give as meanings 'a building with a peaked roof or pinnacles, probably gabled; or with an upper story.' They could have been more explicit had they known Jouveau-Dubreuil's Archéologie du Sud de l'Inde as this scholar had worked already before 1914 extensively on the development of the kūțâgāra restricting himself to pure history of art.
This induced Coomaraswamy, about 1930, in the frame of his studies of architectural terms, also to deal with the facts with which the Middle Indo-Aryan texts he had to hand at the time provided him. The translators of these texts, however, hardly took any notice of his works - the last to be written on the subject to my knowledge.
Taking this fact as an opportunity once more to revert to the kuțâgara I should like to first sum up Coomaraswamy's results and add some observations of my own in order eventually to
The French original of this paper will appear with more notes in the Bulletin d'Etudes Indiennes'in Paris (1987 ?). I should like to thank Professor T.S. Maxwell and Mrs s. Zingel for making adjustments to my English phraseology. - For illustrations see P. Brown, Indian Architecture. Bombay, 1976.