Place · Gandharan hilltop monastery · Pakistan
Jamāl Garhi
A Gandharan monastery on a hill in Mardan district, dug into from 1848 and again in the 1920s, and one of the richest sources of Gandharan narrative relief anywhere. A circular main stupa was ringed by chapels, and the schist panels that faced them carried the life of the Buddha in sequence — birth, the four sights, the enlightenment, the first sermon, the death — in the Hellenistic-derived idiom that makes Gandhara immediately recognisable. Most of the sculpture left the site in the nineteenth century.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 34.317, 72.067
Worth knowing
Panels from this one hillside are now in Kolkata, London and Peshawar, so a single monastery's story cycle has to be read across three museums on two continents.
Connections (3)
- In the same set asTakht-i-bahi
Takht-i-Bahi and Jamāl Garhi are the two great hilltop monasteries of the Mardan plain, about thirty kilometres apart, and they show the same plan: a main stupa in a court, ringed by votive stupas and image chapels, with the monastic cells and assembly hall on separate terraces below. Takht-i-Bahi survives as architecture and is a world heritage site; Jamāl Garhi survives as sculpture, its schist narrative panels dispersed to museums in the nineteenth century while the buildings were left as foundations.
- Craft tradition ofGandhāra
Jamāl Garhi is one of the richest single sources of Gandharan narrative relief. Its chapels were faced with grey schist panels carrying the life of the Buddha in sequence — the birth at Lumbinī, the four sights, the enlightenment, the first sermon at Sarnath, the parinirvāna — cut in the Hellenistic-derived idiom with drapery and volume that no other Indian school of the period attempted. Cleared from 1848, the panels went to Kolkata, London and Peshawar, so the cycle has to be reassembled across three museums.
- Image migrationPeshawar Museum
The museum holds what the monasteries lost. Jamāl Garhi was cleared for sculpture from 1848 — the schist panels of the Buddha's life prised off the chapels and shipped out, to Kolkata, to London, and to this building in Peshawar. Because the sites were mined for objects rather than excavated for evidence, nobody recorded which panel stood where, so the museum's fourteen thousand pieces constitute a complete corpus of a school's art with its architecture permanently detached from it.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Jamal Garhi”. Archaeological Survey of India reports on the 1848 and 1920s clearances; Kurt Behrendt, The Buddhist Architecture of Gandhāra (2004).
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