Indian Art: A History of Indian Art from the Earliest Times up to the Third Century A.D. c16.91

c16.91

At Paharpur (Rajshahi district), stucco decoration on the wells was being used along with terracotta plaques.³ This seems to have been the convention of the building art in the early medieval period as illustrated also at Nalanda. By far the vast majority of finds in the Paharpur excavations were the terracotta plaques that came from the debris of the verandahs of the first and second terraces. No less than 579 complete and fragmentary plaques were discovered during the clearance of the mound. Besides a considerable number were found in *situ*. If arranged in a single row they would cover a distance of over two-thirds of a mile, taking 14" as the average length of a plaque. The terracotta art of Paharpur shows that Bengal was also sharing in that common mass movement for the spread of aesthetic culture through the modeller's art. The Stūpa of Mirpur Khas in Sind, the Suratgarh Fort in Bikaner, the Bhitargaon temple and the Śrāvastī Stūpa of which most of the examples are now deposited in the Lucknow Museum, the Nalanda Stūpa and the Lakshamaṇa temple of Sirpur in C. P., constitute the best monumental remains of this art. As observed by Sri K. N. Dikshit, the use of terracotta plaques as a material for the embellishment of the interior of temples had established itself in Bengal by the late Gupta period. This art had taken root in the soil and was in the hands of more humble artisans than was the art of sculpture. The loss in respect of skill and finish was more than compensated by the delineation of homely subjects of everyday rural and outdoor life, of men and animals, and of stories current in folk-lore. It was truly a folk art vibrating with life and expression. Popular folk tales are represented with the utmost brevity. In single plaques at Paharpur, for expmple, we find the well-known story of the meddlesome monkey coming to grief in pulling out a wedge from a split beam of wood; the story of the haughty lion being conducted by a hare to a well and perishing there; the "Elephant and Mice" story in which the grateful mice releases from captivity a huge elephant by nibbling at the cords of the neck and the legs. The treatment is cryptic, but must have been intelligible even to ordinary people, since the fables behind them were of wide publicity and known even to children. The representation of the typical fauna and flora of Bengal, including the tiger and the leopard, the wild boar and the deer, the elephant and the horse, the jackals and the dogs, the cows and the buffaloes, the ducks and the geese, the peacocks and the parrots, as well as of plants like the palm and the plantain, the *Champaka* and the *Kadamba* are favourite themes of illustration. Specially interesting as depicting the earth-bound sense of the people is the representation of the aboriginal people like the Śabaras in their quaint apparel of leaf aprons and picturesque hunting suite consisting of quivers and bows. Religious subjects also occur prominently amongst the Paharpur finds, e.g. the plaques representing the Buddha in different attitudes, Bodhisattva Padmapāṇi, Mañjūśrī holding a book, and also Brahmanical deities like Śiva, Brahmā, Viṣṇu and Gaṇeśa are repeated several times. Composite beings, with bird's wings and legs and human bodies, lion faces and crossed human legs, cobra hoods and human trunks—all these go to make up a picture of a fabulous world which must have appealed strongly to the imagination of Bengal in the sixth-seventh century A. D. By far the most numerous class among plaques represented human beings engaged in various activities of everyday life. Warriors holding sword and shield, musicians playing cymbals, gongs, trumpets or battle-drums, acrobats performing difficult feats of balancing, ascetics seated in meditation or reduced to skeleton, are some of the more noteworthy subjects which make the terracotta art of Paharpur one of the most fascinating and picturesque ever found in this country,