Alice Casalini (University of Chicago)
Lying less than half a mile north of the gates of the ancient city of Sirkap in the Punjab province
of Pakistan, the temple of Jandial overlooks one of the historic routes that connected the city to
Gandhāra in the Peshawar Valley. When the British archaeologist John H. Marshall excavated
the temple in 1912 its walls had partially collapsed and nothing of the roof survived. Two
capitals of Ionic type were retrieved from the floor of the temple, their shafts long gone. The
excavators were quick to dub the building “the Ionic temple,” and herald it as one of “the earliest
examples of Hellenistic art in India” (Rowland, 1935: 491 and Rosenfield, 1967: 129) for its
“striking Greek character” (Marshall, 1918: 225). Some have revisited Marshall’s thesis of the
temple as a site of Zoroastrian worship, on the basis of conjectural reconstructions that include a
fire tower at the back of the edifice (Boyce, 1975). Others, however, have argued that the
building is an early example of a Hindu temple, probably for the god Vishnu (Rapin, 1995).
In this paper I argue that scholarship has fashioned the Jandial temple into a virtual place of
syncretism in order to easily place it within the larger narrative of “Silk Road multiculturalism.”
The temple, however, resists its own reconstructions. The fragmented nature of the ruins
prevents a comprehensive vision, at the same time that it mirrors the complex intricacies of the
relationship between Asia and the West. The biographies of the Jandial temple are an integral
part of the monument and serve as heuristic tools in the analysis of colonial modernity. To this
effect, I consider the legacy of imperialist and colonialist mythologies on the numerous
reconstructions of the temple, and argue that this framework is so pervasive that it has now
completely effaced the archaeological and architectural reality of the building itself. By
examining the reconstructions of the temple within their historiographical background and
against the archaeological context of sacred architecture in early South Asia, the paper
challenges the assumption of multiculturalism that is inherent in Silk Road studies.