Indian Antiquary Vol 05

Author(s): Jas Burgess
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 19

JANUARY, 1876.]
NOTES ON THE AHMADNAGAR COLLECTORATE.
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the bordering band is chiselled out, and then and the same in maximum diameter, and formed it resembles the exterior of a dangoba in low of two pieces, the upper fitted over the lower. flat relief, with ears' at the spring of the This vessel is said to have been found in a dome on each side. On other stones the sur- Brahman's stackyard, and brought to its present face is again cut away inside, leaving a very place by a former Mamlatdar. It is very rough, fair representation of the chaitya, or some simi- and its simple decorations do not correspond lar arch. In every case the top of the device with any of the other remains, and it might have is carried up to, and joins, the border, so that been made at any period by the stone-cutters one cannot tell how the object represented was who hew out oil-presses. But it probably had finished above. The original roof of the tem- sacred uses, for no domestic purpose could plo is entirely gone; no image remains but the be assigned to it; and I found the lower half of linga in its pit-like shrine, and a broken bull in a similar vessel among the ruins of a small a pit lined with modern rubble masonry, over temple (apparently of the same style as Tryamwhom the villagers have piled, in the form of a bakeśvara) four miles off on the Kanbûr road. rude dome open at the top, some fragments The few remains of another temple of the same either of his former pavilion or of the ruined class lie under a tamarind-tree halfway on the porches. One of these, now called a linga, seems road to Supe, in the opposite direction; and at to represent a bunch of grapes turned point up-|| Palshi, twenty miles to the northward, some wards, and may have been a finial of the roof. stones built into, and lying in front of a small Another is a piece of a cornice, and corresponds rude temple between the town-gate and the river, with one or two others lying about, and with show the same scanty ornaments (especially the some built upside down into the wall by the peculiar dome or arch) as the temple and reJunnar Gate of the town, balf a mile off. servoir at Pärner.
A large burao, or reservoir, at the other side The only evidence supplied by these ruins of the town also shows the chaitya-like decora- themselves as to the external form of the roofs tion; and a shrine at one side of it has pillars is that given by the few pieces of cornice like those of the temple. It now belongs to a remaining about Parner; but some clue is mean-looking mosque. Probably it was for- afforded by the gokhles, or niches, in a large merly part of the surroundings of another tem- reservoir at Nighoj, twelve miles west by ple, for the number of columns and cornices south of Pärner. These appear to represent the lying about the town, or built into various struc- exterior of a temple of Dravidian style, with tures (some themselves of respectable age), is cornices which resemble those at Parner. It is greater than could have been furnished by the permissible to suppose that the architect imitated porches of Tryambakeśvara.
in them some larger building, a conjecture which A wretched little modern temple in the centre is strengthened by the form of the reservoir. Its of the town has several, --some corresponding to surface-plan is the ground-plan of a mandap,those of the surviving temple, others much the regular broken square; three large stairplainer, more slender, tapering, and showing in cases replace the porches; and the pier of the section the broken square.
mot (leathern irrigation-bucket) occapies the In front of this temple, under a pipal-tree, position of the shrine. In short it is a mandap several fragments of sculpture are heaped to turned upside down. The construction is highly gother. One is a gargoyle in the shape of a archaic. Each course of the largo blocks of monster's head, and must have belonged to a hewn stone is set a little back from the next large building, as it is three feet long by two below, and firmly imbedded in a hollow cut for deep from poll to chin. Beside it is a great it. There is no mortar anywhere, and the use stone ranjana, or vase, of a form familiar to of a few iron clamps in the steps is probably a modern Dekhani potters,--that of an egg trun. piece of modern repairs. There are no decoracated at both ends. It is 4 feet 6 inches high, tions except the niches mentioned above, from
& Something like the upper half of such a vessel appears only "welve miles distant from it. This barao is larger in the foreground of plate Ix. of the Archeological Report than that of Nighoj, and differa in surface-plan, being on West. India for 1874.
rectangular; but the structure of the masonry in reoeding A better example of this sort of work is to be found courses, each firmly imbedded in its inferior, in the same in a reservoir at Belhe, in the Junnar tåluki of the and can be better seen here, as the sloping site necessitates Pani district, but in the same valley as Nighoj, and an exterior as well as interior exposure of the walls on