Indian Art: A History of Indian Art from the Earliest Times up to the Third Century A.D. c14.53

c14.53

With the life-story of Buddha and also the legendary Jātakas taken from the art of eastern India, the Gandhara sculptors show a wide acquaintance with Iranian and Graeco-Roman motifs. The Gandhara art was naturally a blend of Indian, Iranian and Graeco-Roman art elements. Among the Iranian motifs found may be mentioned the Fire Temple at Jandiyal, Goddess Nānī or Anāhitā with star-fangled crown, stepped merlon (i.e. battlement), winged lion, capitals with addorsed bull and lions with or without wings and fantastic animals with human heads. The Graeco-Roman motifs are more common, such as Corinthian, Ionic and Doric pillars, cupids, garland-festoons, atlantes, tritons, marine deities, Demeter-Hārītī holding cornucopia (Riddhi-śṛṅga), Amohini-Yakshas (corresponding to Indian Mālādhārī Devas), Athena-Roma, Harpocrates, the Centaur, Silenus, Satyr, Garuḍa and Ganymede. [Fig. 195]. The Gandhara artists have scored their best success in depicting the statues of Pañchika and Hārītī either single or in pairs. [Figs. 196-7]. Pañchika was the Gandharan counterpart of Kubera and was lord of the Yakshas, a benignant deity ensuring divine power and riches. He is richly ornamented and seated in European fashion like a emperor holding a long spear. Hārītī, in this school, is the presiding Goddess of Fertility and children, depicted with the more tender feelings on her face with children on her breast and shoulder. She became the type of the veritable mother goddess in Gandhara. Sometimes she is depicted as four-armed holding a long trident and water-pot in her left hand a true counterpart of the Indian Goddess Pārvatī. Hārītī was the Buddhist form of the Brāhmanical Goddess Jātahāriṇī as elaborated in the Revatikalpa. Her cult was also quite popular in Mathura art. Pañchika was the same as the Yaksha king Pañchālika, an incarnation of Vaiśravaṇa, whose worship was common between the Himalayas and Vindhyāchala. In Gandhara Buddhism the Pañchika-Hārītī pair fulfilled all the aspirations of the house-holders for prosperity and fertility. Their worship became a wide-spread cult not only throughout Gandhara but up to Central Asia. As a tutelary couple Pañchika was sometimes shown with a purse and Hārītī with the horn of plenty held in left hand.