TEMPLES, WELLS AND GARDENS THE CENTRAL ROLE OF WATER IN INDIA – TAASA Review December 2008
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This article was originally found in the December 2008 edition of TAASA Review (Volume 17, Issue 4, Page 4).
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Frederick Asher T ravelling by land into India across the Hindu Kush mountains from the region we think of today as the Middle East, one encounters a remarkable climate change.
A monsoon climate predominates, one that brings if the monsoon succeeds heavy rains for three months of the year and essentially dry weather the rest of the time.
That dependence on the regularity of rains for agriculture, as well as concerns that rains might be insufficient or excessive, stimulated a special relationship with water, one that is often manifest in the art of India. We see this as early as the time of the Harappan Civilization, that is, about the third millennium BCE, when a water ideology, as Gregory Possehl has described it, prevailed...