The people of the Indus Valley showed a knack at construction that was ahead of their time. Their cities had many public buildings large enough to house quite a few people, one such building being the Great Bath at Mohenjodaro, built around 2500 BCE. It had a capacity of around 250 cubic metres and was lined with two layers of brick with a layer of bitumen in between.

Buildings had a stone base of two to three metres and mud and wood were used above it. Some sites had fortifications of stone. Bricks were made of alluvial clay. They were moulded in various shapes for different purposes. Mud or lime mortar was the cementing material. Bricks were arranged in the English Bond

Houses of the Rigvedic period were made of wood with bamboo rigging. Roofs were thatched and walls were made of reed bundles in wooden framework.

As kingdoms rose, palace and temple construction brought new challenges for the ancient Indian builders. Palaces sported monolithic columns of granite, and wood was used where stone was scarce. By the time of the Mauryas, Persian and Greek influences became more evident.

An important piece of architecture during the Buddhist kings’ reign was the stupa - a hemispherical mound as large as 120 feet in diameter with a central chamber containing relics. The inner part of the structure made of unbaked bricks while the outer was made of baked bricks. The outer layer was plaster. The largest such stupa was reputed to be 327 feet in diameter¹ in present-day Sri Lanka, built during the 2nd century CE.

Cave temples:

Until the Gupta kingdom was established (ca. 320 CE) the primary feature of construction that we know of today is the cave-temple. Cave-temples are artificial cavities carved out of solid rock for religious purposes. Specimens have been found in various parts of the Deccan plateau, some sites having several temples in the same area. In fact, the term “cave-temple” is a misnomer as these were completely man-made and more of tunnels than caves.² Many were huge and comparable to the great Greek and Roman temples of the time. However in terms of workmanship, they were probably easier to build because of the absence of transportation of material and of scaffolding.³

Gupta temples were also made of blocks of stone, but were smaller than previous temples. No mortar was used in their design; in some places, iron pegs fixed in sockets in the adjacent faces of stone blocks held them together.

Towards the middle and end of the first millennium CE, the kingdoms of the south built a series of temples in a characteristic style. The striking feature of these temples is the huge tower at the gate, which is shaped like a rectangular block tapering at the top. These structures could reach heights of 200 feet, and often sported a heavy monolithic sculpture at their peak. To hoist such a sculpture, the builders would have used elephants to haul it up a ramp with a very gentle slope, using cylindrical tree trunks as “wheels” to ease the effort.