INDIAN ARCHITECTURE
RAM RAZ.
Essay on the Architecture of the Hindús … with forty-eight Plates.
London, John William Parker for the Royal Asiatic Society, 1834.
4to, pp. xiv, 64, [2 (errata)], with 48 lithographic plates by Day & Haghe (several folding); engraved vignette to title; title browned, some foxing, worming to inner margins of text and to several plates (especially at end), some of the plates cut close; text and plates mostly good; in somewhat later half sheep with marbled sides, gilt-lettered red morocco label to spine, marbled endpapers; some rubbing and wear to extremities; old circular ink stamp of ‘City Hall Library Hong-Kong’ to title-page and upper margin of p. iii, modern ownership inscription to front free endpaper.
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Essay on the Architecture of the Hindús … with forty-eight Plates.
First edition, scarce on the market, of this pioneering and handsomely illustrated essay on Indian architecture by the linguist and lawyer Ram Raz (c. 1790–c. 1833).
Born in southern India, Ram Raz worked as an interpreter, translator, teacher, judge, and magistrate for the East India Company, and in 1828 was elected a corresponding member of the Royal Asiatic Society. Inspired by ancient Sanskrit treatises on architecture in the Shilpa Shastras, particularly the Manasara and Mayamata, Ram Raz’s Essay ‘placed the temple architecture of southern India, the Sanskrit texts that he dated to a timeless “Hindu” antiquity, and interpretations of the ancient architecture of Greece and Rome within a shared arena of comparisons. His intention was to claim for Hindu architecture the merit of organization, as well as an ancient and, more significantly, superior lineage’ (Madhuri Desai).
The plates which follow the text depict various pedestals, columns, entablatures, multistorey vimanas and gopuras, and groundplans, ending with a particularly fine large folding plate showing ‘the pagoda of Tiruvalur’.
See Madhuri Desai, ‘Interpreting an architectural past: Ram Raz and the treatise in South Asia’ in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 71, no. 4 (December 2012), pp. 462-487.
