The grandest temples built by almost every royal dynasty in India is in their capital city — Except the Rashtrakutas. Their capital was Manyakheta; their grandest temple is in Ellora.
In every other temple, art and beauty dull the viewers’ sense of awe, at the engineering, logistics, audacity and willpower of the minds behind it.
Ellora allows no such scope. No surprise that some petty minds have attributed it to ancient aliens. Could mere mortal men with hammer and chisel, sculpt away a mountain to present a temple?
Local legend has it that even its own builders could scarcely believe they had built the temple, and murmured that surely gandharvas and yakshas had helped them when they were not looking.
The temple is 90 feet tall, 200 feet deep, a 100 feet wide; an island of art in a lake of rock.
It is, perhaps, no coincidence that its patron, the Rashtrakuta King Krishna I, shares the name of the Govardhana Giridhari.
Another legend has it that the queen mother went on a fast that she swore to end only when the kalasa of the temple was completed; the sthapathi therefore, sculpted that kalasa first, to save her life, and also built the temple top-down rather than bottoms-up.
One small story for a queen mother, one giant leap for architecture.
Unlike Kanchipuram or Pattadakkal, there are no inscriptions in this temple.
Architecture
The tri-tala Dravida vimana , with an octagonal Dravida shikhara, comparable to the Pallava Dharmaraja ratha monolith in Mahabalipuram, the Pandya Vettuvankoil monolith in Kazhugumalai, and Chalukya Mallikarjuna temple in Pattadakkal; kosthas in the paada, kutas and shaalas in the vimana, leave us no doubt.
So, art historians suspect this temple was inspired by Pattadakkal Virupaksha temple.
The garbhagruham is surrounded by an open circumambulatory passage, punctuated by five parivaara shrines, three of which have octagonal Dravida shikharas, and the other two wagon-shaped shaalaakaara shikharas.
A sukhanasi, which spans the antarala/ardha-mandapa fronts the main vimana.
A marvellous set of four roaring lions tops the massively pillared sabha-mandapa. The body of the lions point in the cardinal directions, while the faces are turned towards the sub-directions.
The sabha mandapa has spacious porticos on north and south, and a large covered one at the entrance. This leads forward to a nandi mandapa, with a magnificent Nandi facing his master.
Porticos in the sabha-mandapa are clearly a continuation of Chalukyan architecture; they are also a feature of the Maaru-Gurjara category of Nagari architecture — the most famous examples of these are in Khajuraho.
Staircases fall away on either side of the sabha-mandapa entrance. Yes! – the whole temple is designed as a two-storey structure. The adishtaana is the lower floor, above a upapitha featuring majestic elephants, symbolically bearing the weight of the temple.
Damsels, sometimes lions, feature between the elephants.
The remnant walls of the hill serve both as a praakaara wall and as an intermittent maalika of different shrines, in one, two, or three floors. These include:
· A mandapa for Ganga, Yamuna, Sarasvati.
· A chitra mandapa on the first floor, in the northern wall, with extremely beautiful sculptures.
· A pillared mandapa in the eastern wall, with various murtis on the back wall.
· A mandapa in the southern wall, with sapta matrika.
· Some unfinished mandapas in the southern wall.
A trishula-stambha and an elephant, stand on either side of the Nandi-mandapa. The front wall is extensively covered with sculptures, both inside and outside, and has a mahadvaara in the middle.
The temple is unfinished, as mysteriously as Mamallapuram and Vettuvankoil. If it had been completed, internal staircases would have led to half-finished mandapas.
And yet,
Grammar stutters, adjectives wilt, metaphors go into hiding. How does one control one’s senses, when they are overloaded? Perhaps, that is why there are no inscriptions.
Autographs of sculptors? They chose to depict Bhrigu and Shukra, authors of two ancient shilpa shaastras, instead of themselves.
Sculptures
Sculptures in a temple are usually decorative. Two sculptures of Ravana lifting Kailasa in Ellora, though, are suggestive, and placed strategically.
One is chitraardham, a low-relief sculpture in the upapithaa of northern wall of the sabha-mandapa.
It strongly reminds us of a similar sculpture in Pattadakkal, which is located decoratively in a pillar.
The other is chitram, fully in the round, in the upapitha of the southern wall of the sabha mandapa. His heads in a circle, the enormous burden of lifting the mountain so telling that every face is crying out, his every muscle taut in strain, his hands stretching in every direction, Ravana presents the very picture of limitless hubris and impending humility.
Siva, smiling amusedly, seated nonchalantly, while a troubled Parvati leans on him in confusion.
The two Ravanas are lifting not only the mountain in their sculptures, but also the entire mountain that is the vimanam of the Ellora Kailasanatha temple.
On the first floor of the sabha mandapa are two contrasting sculptures side by side — one of Siva emerging out of the linga built by Markandeya and kicking Yama in his chest; the other of Gangadhara.
But we have hurried inside in eagerness. Let us restart at the entrance.
The front wall of the temple forms a courtyard with the jutting tail-ends of the hill. All three are profusely decorated with various samhara-murtis in the north — Gajasamhara, Narasimha, Trivikrama, BhuVaraha and AshtaDikpalas in the south — all on their vahanas. These sculptures have suffered great damage.
Gajalakshmi.
As we enter, we are greeted by the essence of auspiciousness — Gajalakshmi — seated on a lotus, bathed by two elephants upturning pots of water over her, while two more fetch water from the pond filled with lotuses in front.
The whole panel is about 20 feet tall; traces of mortar and paint at the very top indicate that the entire panel was painted — as was perhaps every wall of the top.
There is grandeur in the remaining grayness; there must have been splendour in original colours.
The lotus spread a few feet forward in full three dimensionality, accented by the towering mace-bearing dvarapalakas on either side.
In sharp contrast on the other side, is a ferocious Gajasamhara Murthy, tearing apart the elephant skin which he holds overhead, while one hand holds a bowl for the blood, one hand reassures Devi, one foot rests on several ganas, and Kalabhairava, skeletal and terrifying, dances between his feet.
The inside of the front wall is also as resplendent with giant sculptures as the outside, but far less worn out.
Among these are Mahishasura Mardhini, Govardhana Giridhaari and Gauriprasaada.
The most arresting sight here is Tripurantaka — Siva astride a chariot, Brahma steering the horses, arching the majestic bow that in a later yuga, the Ikshvaaku prince Rama would string in the court of Janaka.
This is not on one wall, within one kostha, but traverses two walls, as the horses turn a corner, giving us a sense of their speed.
The three floating cities of the eponymous Tripura are shown above to the right.
Equally dynamic is a sculpture of Siva as UrdhvaTandava. Traces of painted designs are visible about this. The joy and exuberance of Siva as he dances with abandon, can be seen in his smile.
Head to toe, his body curves in flowing tribhanga, his left leg almost perfectly balanced in the middle, his right leg bent in balanced grace; his arms flow in every direction in symmetry; a seated gana accompanies him perhaps, attempting to synchronise with Siva’s own damaru.
Narasimha battling Hiranya is another extremely dynamic sculpture, complimenting UrdhvaTandava on the other side of the Nandi mandapa.
Narasimha has locked one hand of the asura, and has gripped his girdle with another hand, ready to lift the asura and slam him on the other side.
Notice Hiranya is entirely behind Narasimha. This contrasts strongly with the Pattadakkal depiction, where Narasimha is behind Hiranya, and the Kanchipuram depiction, where they are face-to-face.
Each sculptor, a century apart, has chosen a different pose at a different time in the combat.
Now compare the three depictions of Durga battling Mahishasura — they are almost perfect copies of each other, except in size.
The Pattadakkal sculpture is a miniature on a pillar; the asura is defeated and running. The other two are large panels several feet tall and high.
Very subtle differences mark them: in the Ellora version, arrows fly, showing the heat of the battle. In the Mamallapuram version, the asura is about to retreat.
Mithunas, dvarapalakas, ghata-pallavas, the entire Ramayana and Mahabharata in miniature — the cornucopia that is Ellora is endless.
No essay can capture them. One of India’s greatest artists, Sri Chandru, ex-Principal of Government Fine Arts college, Chennai, was so taken by the rajaleelaasana of Siva in a negligible corner under a mandapa, and its resemblance to this posture in Vettuvankoil, that he immediately tried to mimic it.
Bhrighu and Shukra would have smiled knowingly.
Paintings
We can see patches of mortar and some painting over them in several sculptures and walls of the temple. They are most visible in the sabha mandapa, especially on the ceiling.
It is quite dark here, so difficult to see and photograph. One wonders how the artists painted such beautiful pictures in such dim light.
Of note is a painting of Siva in what seems to be Bhujanga Trassa, one leg lifted as though frightened (trassa) by seeing a snake (bhujanga); a popular theme among Chola bronzes, where the left leg is raised; here, though, it is the right leg raised, a variation only found in Madurai.
The paintings of Ajanta are more famous. But there are also paintings in the Jain caves of Ellora not to be missed.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.
