Indian Art: A History of Indian Art from the Earliest Times up to the Third Century A.D. c11.169

c11.169

The antiquity of evidence about this polish and its prevalence as a movement for about 400 years makes one thing that its commerce was just the other way, viz. it was taken from India to Iran, if at all it existed there, since we have the testimony of Darius himself in his foundation charters that for building his palaces at Susa and Persepolis, he had imported skilled Indian workmen who presumably must have been well versed in the best art traditions of this country. The strength of the team invited from India for the building operations by the Achaemenian kings is not known but it seems to have been considerable looking to the favourable reputation which India enjoyed amongst the nations of antiquity. India was radiating her philosophy, religious ideas, art and culture amongst her neighbours on the periphery and beyond it. The evidence of the earliest Greek writers who visited India is unmistakable that the results obtained by the Indian workmen of which they were eye-witness, were far superior to those monuments which were raised in Iran. This is perfectly corroborated by comparing the Iranian columns with the Aśokan pillars of which the aesthetic performance is exceedingly high, let alone their being vehicles of profound ideas of which the Iranians had little conception. Their pillars are bald and stolid whereas the Mauryan columns are full of animation being inspired by purposeful ideas and standing as monuments of long established divine cults. The miracle wrought in these Mauryan pillars is not surprising if we look upon them as descended from the ancestry of the Vedic monumental columns (varsiṣṭha stūṇa-rāja), or hundred Pillared Hall (śatalhuḭ śālā), or copper-sheated posts (ayaḥ-stūṇāḥ), or the magnificent Skambhas spoken of as the hundred-branched or the thousand-branched Vanaspatis. The handling of such colossal material, its fashioning into desired forms, its transport to distant centres and above all investing it with ideas that always go with greater art,—these were the problems which had been tackled successfully by generations of workmen and the accumulated skill of ages was at the disposal of Mauryan master-artists for whom there was hardly any new unsolved problem relating to their art. The honourable terms employed for these Rāja Takṣas or Rāja Śilpins show the esteem in which they were held for the people bestowed on them such honorific titles as Sthapati-samrāṭ, and Vāstu-vidyācārya, as given in the Jātakas. One point has to be specially noted, namely, that the transition from timber to stone in the construction of buildings was not done overnight under the behest of royal authority or an architect howsoever great, of foreign import. The facts of art-history in India demonstrate that it was a long drawn process in which the full transition from wood to stone was achieved in a very cautious and experimental manner, e.g. in the Chandragupta Sabhā itself the floor and roofing and other decorative accessories were in timber, whereas the pillars were of stone. The same is indicated by the façade of Lomas Ṛiṣhi cave where the material only is stone but the forms are of wooden precedents. In the western Indian caves we find still in existence timber and stone work being adopted together, e.g. the massive wooden ribs of the vaulted roof and the perforated screens of the chaitya windows. The gateways and railings of Bharhut and Sāñchī are essentially types of wooden architecture.