Dimensions of Sound at Kanheri Caves, Mumbai

Architecture of Sound- 2

 About 2000 years old rock-cut Buddhist Caves at Kanheri are now within the Metropolis of Mumbai. The Buddhist campus is located in the hills. This area is notified as National Park, a place of heritage of Forest and the caves too. I am ignorant of what it looked like then, two thousand years ago. But our experience there has been unique.

Chaitya at Kanheri Caves, SNGP, Mumbai

 

There are many visitors, particularly at weekends and holidays: Tourists, families, students, singles and couples. Sometimes some of the visitors have their fun of hearing the noise they make by shouting all together in the Chaitya. They perhaps learn something here? They experience reverberations. But the learning, unfortunately, does not go further than the noise of which they are used to in their urban life. Mass-mania! They perhaps also do not take notice of the notice put up there by the Archaeological Survey of India, not to make noise.

    In the empty (of other visitors) hall we, my student Nadakumar Jethe and me, spoke to each other. We stood some 15 meters apart. We began our conversation by a whisper, in low decibel. We raised our voice slowly until it was heard clearly by both of us.
    There were no reverberations.
    The sound level was lower than two persons talking to each other, sitting at one-meter distance in a crowded restaurant at a busy street-side in the city of Mumbai. How many monks did gather here for discourses, debates, and prayers etc? There are about hundred caves on the Campus.
  
      Imagine for a while, the Members of the Parliament of India, representatives of the people in the contemporary times, holding a session here in the Heritage building of Chaitya, on the hot issues of the country! They too, perhaps, may discover the Dimension of Sound (or SILENCE!), and its significance, not only in the Third Ecology – human ecology – but also in the entire ecology of Land (and Waters)! They too, perhaps, may acquire an ability to listen to the other beings, besides human beings, and the other happenings in the world of animals, insects, trees, reptiles, the night, clouds – lightning and thunder and droplets , breeze – storms and gales, water –  waves and floods and rain, the ground – the sprouting of a grain, and earthquake.
  
And also imagine about the teachers in modern education (and architecture) holding their classes here!
  
    We are generally deprived of leisure, an important dimension of life, as much important as Work, Education and Health, in these times of stress and strain, speed and efficiency. In the wave of visual aesthetics of hedonism we are missing, now and then, the other senses of existence. In here, going into the Earth, was like returning to womb ― a tranquil environment ambivalent for meditation – recollection  leisure; the mind and SELF face to face ―  listening to the soundless sound.

"The old pond
A frog jumps in.
Plop!'

         [Basho, Japan, 17th Century.]


Mumbai
17-9-1995

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© Remigius de Souza, all rights reserved.

Architecture of sound

It is the kind of speech 
no eye can see.
Kabir says, listen 
to the word spoken 
in every body. 
— Kabir
 (Translation by Linda Hess and Sukhdeo Singh)

"In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God." 
 — New Testament [John 1.1]  

IT WAS the middle of monsoon in the world famous monsoon forest of Konkan, West Coast region of India. The hills of Karnala Bird Sanctuary, about 70 km from Bombay (now Mumbai), were lush green with grasses and bushes. Otherwise they radiate heat waves rest of the year.

Four students of architecture and one of their professors from Bombay City were wandering near their project site. They were in the hills about quarter of a kilometer from the Bombay-Goa Highway.

"Do you hear anything?" asked the teacher.
"We hear the sounds of trucks and cars passing on the highway."
"Do you hear anything more than that?"
"No, Sir, nothing else."
"There is too much noise in our heads. Let us stop that noise and then listen."
"Oh! The murmur of a stream! Sir, where is it?" They exclaimed in unison.

With the progress and development of the civilized world, a few, very few, dance and sing and play; and the millions watch them dancing, singing and playing, on the cinema and television screens, and listen them on gramophone, radio, audio-video-players, and on the public address system during public festivals. [Incidentally there are "Adivasi" ― aborigine ― tribes named Katakari and Thakar in and around the hills of Karnala.]

In the increasing noise of market economy and information technology, transport and communications, media and propaganda… the Self is lost.


Four years after the incidence in the hills of Karnala, which was of course forgotten, the students of architecture had the 1994 Western Zonal Convention of NASA [National Association of Students of Architecture] held at Mumbai (then Bombay). Its theme was "AWAKENING OF SENSES". It is the beginning of a very hard journey in the present urban environment to experience "ANHAD NAAD"? Silence, which is the heart of music, and the primordial sound, intelligible sound ? "Nada", “Nada Brahma".

In the architecture of sound, the archetypal "Lomas Rishi Cave" [mid third century BC] at Barabar Hill, one could hear the sound within oneself and move towards the quietude.

Note: Illustrations: Top- Facade of Lomas Rishi Cave, Barabar Hills, Bihar. India. Bottom: View of inner chamber, plan and section of the cave. See, also, "Masters of Timeless Architecture".

(19-11-1994 | published in "Soundsnipe" - magazine of acoustics, issue 2, New Delhi, January 1995)
Remigius de Souza
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© Remigius de Souza, all rights reserved.