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Constructing the guru: ritual authority and architectural space in medieval India
Art Bulletin, The, March, 2008 by Tamara I. Sears
16. V. V. Mirashi, Inscriptions of the Kalachuri-Chedi Era, pt. 1 (New Delhi: Archaeological Survey of India, 1955), no. 44, 198-204.
17. The Mattamayuras have received limited attention in scholarship. They were first discovered by F. Kielhorn in 1892 ("A Stone Inscription from Ranod [Narod])," Epigraphia Indica 1, 351-61), but they did not really garner broader attention until V. V. Mirashi synthesized the inscriptional material in the 1950s, with "The Saiva Acaryas of the Mattamayura Clan," Indian Historical Quarterly 26 (1950): 1-16; and Inscriptions, cli-clviii. Since then, work on the Mattamayuras has focused on the inscriptional material. See V. S. Pathak, History of Saiva Cults in Northern India (Allahabad: Abinash Prakashan, 1980); R. N. Mishra, "The Saivite Monasteries"; idem, "Pontiffs' Empowerment in Central Indian Saivite Monachism," Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bombay 72 (1997): 72-86; and Richard Davis, "Praises of the Drunken Peacocks," in White, Tantra in Practice.
18. Here I diverge from some earlier scholars who have pushed the date of the Mattamayuras back as far as 675 or 725 CE; see Pathak, History of Saiva Cults, 31; and Mishra, "The Saivite Monasteries," 108-9. My own assessment of the architectural material coincides better with Mirashi's interpretation in "The Saiva Acaryas."
19. While it is well known that Tripuri served as the Kalachuri capital city, Gurgi and Bilhari require further explanation. Gurgi was a major administrative center located in the northern part of the Kalachuri kingdom. It was situated on an open plain near the source of the Mahanadi River, in the eastern range of the Vindhyas and upper Son valley. The archaeological remains around the site include portions of a wall that once belonged to a massive fort and many temples from the Kalachuri period. When surveyed by Alexander Cunningham in the 1880s, the wall formed a circuit of roughly 12,000 feet, or two and a half miles; see Archaeological Survey of India, Reports of a Tour in Bundelkhand and Rewa in 1883-84 and of a Tour in Rewa, Bundelkhand, Malwa, and Gwalior, in 1884-85, vol. 21 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1885), 150. When conducting fieldwork in 2000 through 2002, I noted additional fragments of sculptures and other architectural carvings scattered around the site, built into the walls of modern shrines, and housed in the Archaeological Museum at Rewa, which further attest to the significant artistic production and cultic diversity at Gurgi. Similarly, Bilhari was a major site that has yet to be critically reassessed. Located in the heart of the Narmada valley, about fifty miles northeast of the Kalachuri capital at Tripuri, the site today contains one damaged early-tenth-century temple and dozens of sculptural fragments that suggest the former presence of other temples of Shaiva, Vaishnava, and Jain affiliation. Bilhari may have served as a significant administrative and religious node in the central portion of the Kalachuri kingdom. An inscription from the site records the royal patronage of at least one tenth-century temple to Shiva, no longer standing, and a substantial Mattamayura monastic community (Mirashi, Inscriptions, no. 45, 204-24). The remains at Gurgi and Bilhari were discussed at length by the archaeologist R. D. Banerji in his 1931 volume The Haihayas of Tripuri and Their Monuments, Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India, no. 23 (New Delhi: Archaeological Survey of India, 1931), 41-47. See also Dhaky, EITA, vol. 2, pt. 3, 53-54.
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