Logo

 

My talk to you today is really more like a jour­ney, m search or some­thing that may have never existed - but the very notion of which raises issues of crucial relevance to our contemporary world.

 

We commence this journey by recog­nizing what History seems to demon­strate so persuasively: namely, that our attitude to the landscape is fundamental to existence, and the great civilizations of the world have almost all produced vital traditions of landscape architecture - which have become axiomatic of that culture. Thus the gardens of Fontainebleau and Versailles, with their exquisite geometric patterns laid out like giant carpets, tell us much about the great power and centralization of France, and its extraordinary ability to take pleasure in - and exert great control over - Na­ture. Here plants, hedges and trees are carefully nurtured and manicured to form pre-conceived geometric shapes.

 

In an extraordinary tour-de-force. Yet however beautiful these gardens might be, one cannot help but think of Le Corbusier when he returned Lu his Paris apartment after 'World War 11 had finally ended. With his absence over three years, the small terrace garden he had always tended so diligently was Unrec­ognizable. The grass had grown wild, to a height of over two metres. In his jour­nal, Corbusier notes dryly: "How we fal­sify nature!"

 

To me, as an architect, this comment has indeed Profound implications. For just as Louis Kahn asked himself the fundamental question: "What does a brick want to become'?" so also we could ask ourselves: "What does grass want to become?" When we cut and prune, chop and change. are we not falsifying its true nature beyond recognition? And yet in the name of treasuring it…!

 

The English garden seems different - yet is it! Here also, Nature is manipu­lated - though not, it's true, into unrelent­ing geometric patterns. No. here the control is far more ingeniously exercised, for the visual vocabulary is drawn from Nature herself. (the cows in the meadow, the copse of trees on the hill). but in a manner that subtly, yet irrevocably, in­tensifies this imagery. So however "natural" the English garden may seem, you know you are looking at a mise-en-s­ce’ne. Once again nature is being ma­nipulated for man's own purposes. (Ap­ropos of such landscaping, I believe it was the great landscape painter John Constable, with his masterful rendi­tions of the English countryside, who said : 'There is nothing more odious than a Gentleman's gardens').

 

So we return to our own quest: which is to find the Hindu garden. Now there are of course wonderful gardens in In­dia -and today, after all these centu­ries, many have taken deep root in the Indian terrain, and in our psyche. Yet almost all came into being through out­side interventions, in fact through in­vasions for the must part.

 

 

A Discourse under a Barh tree 

 

 

 

Thus when the Moghul Emperor Babar, the scion of the dynasty that created the ineffable gardens at Shalimar and in Kashmir, first arrived with his conquering army lie wrote back to Kabul asking not just for more troops, but for gardeners! As he trav­elled across the rich and fertile plains of the Punjab, with its abundance of wells and water, he could not believe that lie had not seen a single garden.

 

How could the great civilization of In­dia, with its prodigious and sophisti­cated accomplishments, (ranging from mathematics to metaphysics, and including all the arts: sculpture. painting, architecture. dance, etc.). not have shown the slightest interest in gar­dens' Perhaps the answer is a relatively simple one: in Hinduism. Nature is Sacred-so any attempt to manipulate Nature just for human pleasure is something which I believe would be quite anathema to Hindu philosophy-or Buddhist or ,lain, as well. Do not forget that the Lord Bud­dha found Enlightenment while sitting under a pipal (Fictus religiosa) tree - and to this day, all over India the pipal tree is held to be sacred. For the most part, no one, anywhere, will ever touch such a tree - leave alone prune it to make it look better!

 

Could we in India have developed a land­scape tradition despite this? Well, there is of course the example of China - with its peerless gardens. The Chinese gar­den is of course marvellous and rather different from the English model, which it is believed to have influenced deeply. To begin with, the Chinese garden makes no attempt to appear "natural", but on the contrary, revels in its highly stylised renditions of nature. And it uses these stylized images to set up a dialectic be­tween the two fundamentallv different ways we experience space: viz, the Narrative and the Holistic. Both these paradigms can also exist in Architecture - for a building can be designed as an unfolding narrative, like the successive episodes of a television soap opera or the brilliant series of set-piece scenes that make up the Chinese garden.

 

The Japanese garden is, to me at least, an even more beautiful version of its Chinese prototype. because the elements here are more natural (the moss-cov­ered stones, the gnarled tree roots, etc. ) - but this, in a way, is counter produc­tive, since the sensuous pleasure of ac­tually being there becomes its own re­ward. I do not see these gardens as be­ing particularly Buddhist, but to the ex­tent that they express the wabi-sabi tra­ditions of Japan, they can be called Zen. Yet I would venture to suggest that the primordial roots of their Chinese proto­types might have been derived from pre ­Buddhist times. The Buddhist reverence for the inviolate sacredness of Nature would never conceive of such manipu­lation. No, what is more intrinsically Buddhist is something like the Deer Park at Nara in Japan. Here nature is not ma­nipulated, but is experienced in its natu­ral and sacred state.

 

How is this achieved? In Sanskrit, the word for garden, vatu, involves re-cap­turing a space or a tree with an enclo­sure, or fence, to make it sacred. It is the transformation of profane space into a sacred space that makes vata. There is also in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism the concept of the chaitya - vriksha, liter­allv 'tree-temple', where a tree itself is converted into a shrine by means of erecting an enclosure, or a even a elabo­rate temple, around it. Here, it might be mentioned that trees (when turned into a garden in the sense of vata) are believed to be the abode of innumerable spirits and genii. Cutting them would render these spirits homeless and therefore hos­tile to humans. As a Rajasathani tribal once exclaimed to a friend of mine: "The trees are always singing!"

 

In India, the notion that Nature is sacred has in turn generated the belief in a Sa­cred Geography. Thus geographic hap­penings -- such as the confluence of two rivers, a mountain range, the mother lake of Mansarovar (which is the mys­terious source of the three major rivers of North India)-are greatly revered and have attracted vast numbers of pilgrims of centuries.

 

Now Sacred Geometry exists in almost all belief-systems, including Hinduism ­as witness, the many different Yantras and mandalas all across the land. Like a belief in Sacred Geography. it comes about through a deep and compelling awareness of the unseen forces, of the invisible, that inform our everyday lives. In other words: of the non-Manifest world, which under-lies the one we see.

 

This notion of Sacred Geography, in the framework of Sacred Geometry. indi­cates the process by which Nature be­comes Art - a transformation which is not merely narrative. but conceptual. In this construct, Architecture is conceived as a Model of the Cosmos - with its pri­mary aim being to express not Beauty, but Truth. And so the first piece of archi­tecture the Buddhists built, viz. the Stupa at Sanchi, is a direct three-dimensional representation of the cosmograph - an iconic circular diagram depicting the Buddhist world-view, with the mythic Mount Meru as the axis mundi at the centre. Or again, consider Borobudur in Indonesia, with its seven levels repre­senting the seven stages of Nirvana -a structure that Andre Malraux deemed to be the most perfect building in the world because it so clearly expressed the beliefs of the society that built it. (The only equivalent in the West, lie felt, might be the great Cathedral of Chartres).

 

 

Aerial view of Borobudur,

a 9th-century Mahayana Buddhist monument in Indonesia

 

 

Thus, too, a Hindu temple is really a Model of the Cosmos, based on the sa­cred vastupurush-Mandala a matrix of squares. in which each god has a spe­cial place, with a void at the centre wherein is located Brahman, the all-per­vading principle of the universe. Even the water tank in front of the temple for pilgrims to bathe is in the form of a sa­cred pool called a kund a stepped well which some believe to be an inverse model of the cosmos.

 

Today, living in our contemporary world, it is difficult for us to understand all this, because ever since the Gothic gave way to the Renaissance, architecture has in­creasingly celebrated the physical world in which it exists (Commodity, Firmness, Delight). Thus today, any attempt at metaphysics seems quite incomprehen­sible. Yet in India, these Hindu and Bud­dhist beliefs are still very prevalent. So when we lay out a garden today, one can­not help but wonder: instead of trying to cannibalise quasi - Moghul traditions or faux-English ones, could we not just go back to the basic principle that Nature herself is sacred and inviolate? This is not such an arcane approach as might appear, for today it connects directly to Our passionate espousal of environmen­tal and ecological issues -- as for instance, for the astonishing rain forests of Brazil and Malaysia, whose unique beauty is generated, we have begun to realize, not just by their impact on our visual senses but by our instinctive understanding of their intrinsic nature.

 

 

A rain forest