Kutagara Or From Mens House To Mansion In Eastern India And South East Asia

SR No.: 269707
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: W B Bollee
Publisher: W B Bollee
Total Pages: 25
Language: English
Classification: Article
File Size: 5 MB

Page 13

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into a gold coffin, this again into a gold kutagara which was burnt on a pyre a week later.
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After this sketch of kuţâgara as a multi-purpose construction and of the semantic change involved we now turn to its geographical spread in order subsequently to occupy ourselves more closely with its possible original function. Coomaraswamy went into the former matter only in India, but he proved the existence of kutagaras all over Southeast Asia in his photographs.
When in some pre-christian period Jains and Buddhists emigrated to the West of India the kutagara as a type of building followed in their wake from the Barabar hills via Bharhut Sanci to Ajanta and Eļūra, Karl and Bhaja southwards probably first by sea to Ceylon, later overland to Amaravati and Mamallapuram.
on.
and
For us the kutagara's characteristic is the horseshoe shaped front an external mark, therefore, but to the Indians it is the kannika, i.e. the inner ring around the rafters, was just as typical, as emerges from the texts. The comparison to the horseshoe would by the way have been unintelligible to the ancient Indians because to my knowledge they did not shoe their horses. It is remarkable, though, that they did not use a term like mukha-vatti 'horizontal circle, ring; rim of a pot etc. for the kutagara's front. We shall return to this point later
At least since Jouveau-Dubreuil the kutagara's singular form has been traced back to an oblong hut with a vaulted roof common in India in pre-christian times as is shown e.g. by the st caitya hall in Karl (1-2nd cent. A.D.). Around 1910 the Toda tribe on the Nilgiri plateau on the southwest coast still used this type of hut "at the roof ends of which vertically implanted