ABSTRACT
In 1915, the British government reversed a policy of non-sectarian secular education and gave official approval to a movement led by a nationalist Brahman pandit, Madan Mohan Malaviya, to create a Hindu university that Malaviya envisioned as a “Temple of Learning.” The adaptations of learning, architecture, and Hindu tradition that made this university both “modern” and “Hindu” can be understood as instances of a wider process of cultural interchange which emerged in the colonial context. Early Hindu temples were accepted as consisting of “pure” Hindu design. British architects and designers in India, however, tended to be reluctant to draw exclusively from Hindu architectural aesthetics, for, as Metcalf notes, not only did the British disdain “the ‘idolatrous” Hindu religion. The shikhara of the Sanskrit Mahavidyalaya, for instance, has a distinctive temple bell–shaped ornamentation, recalling the bell at the entrance at the entrance of Hindu temples that is rung to announce the presence of worshippers.
