202 Part III: South Asia
ily, engaging in appropriate work through all the middle years, seeking wealth
and esteem, and seeing to the marriages of one’s children. Daughters are mar-
ried out into other families and sons bring their wives in; as one’s sons begin
their own grihasthya stage, and grandchildren come along, it is time to begin the
withdrawal from life, turning worldly affairs over to one’s sons and embracing
more spiritual activities; this is known as vanaprastha, now imagined in terms of
retirement but which classically involved moving into a simple life in a forest
hut shorn of all the commotion and materiality of a large busy household.
Finally the last stage is full renunciation (sanyasa), when final ties to life are
severed, and the sanyasi begins a life of wandering. Along the Ganges River,
Varanasi (Banaras) is the most revered place, with its cremation ground at
Manikarnika Ghat, sacred to Shiva. This is the best of all places to die, whether
as a sanyasi or not; many elderly persons go there during their final months to
await death. It is said that the world will end only when the cremation fires at
Manikarnika Ghat finally go out. Further upriver closer to the sources of the
Ganges, there are many other sacred towns such as Haridwar and Rishikesh,
where dozens of ashrams are located. These are meditative retreats for renun-
ciants or semirenunciants, many of them quite comfortable and attractive in an
austere way. For there are certainly class dimensions to renunciation; the poor
sleep under the stars along the river and eat food distributed by temples; the
well-to-do take up cells in pleasant ashrams where they pay an entry fee and
monthly charges. These ashrams also have a strong appeal for foreigners from
Western societies who are often seen practicing meditation and yoga along
with Hindu renouncers along the banks of the Ganges.Temple Worship and Bhakti
Between 700 and 1200 C.E. Indian kings developed a new approach to pro-
claiming their authority to rule: they began building monumental temples to
particular gods in place of the lavish Vedic sacrifices overseen by Brahmans.
Rajadharma—the “dharma of kings”—had been defined by the models set in
the Mahabharata and especially in the Ramayana (see chapter 5), but those
were not temple-building ages. The movement began under the Guptas in
competition with stupa-building Buddhist monarchs but reached a peak in
South India around the time of the first Muslim invasions, the rapid expansion
of the Delhi Sultanate, and the building of mosques (see the section on Islam
later in this chapter). A temple was a palace for a god—Shiva or Hanuman or
Rama or Vishnu—who dwelt deep in the inner sanctum known as the garb-
hagriha—the “womb room,” a fitting term for the life-sustaining power of the
image itself, which was bathed, dressed, fed, and taken out for walks in daily
and annual homage.
Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim structures sponsored by pious kings, have
distinctly different architectural styles. The main material used was stone, far
more plentiful and long-lasting than wood. Over time, temples were increas-
ingly ornamented with stone sculptures. (See the photographs on pp. 203–204.)