Indian Art: A History of Indian Art from the Earliest Times up to the Third Century A.D. c4.2

c4.2

Several histories of art and architecture of India have been written before. The works of Fergusson, Smith, Coomaraswamy and Percy Brown are full of merit and hold the field even today. But they are mostly of a descriptive character with little reference to meaning and generally deal with sculpture and architecture separately. During the last fifteen years of my work as teacher of Indian art to post-graduate classes, I realised that there was the need for a new ‘History of Indian Art’ in which architecture and sculpture should be dealt with as part of a single scheme, as the builders of the monuments actually conceived them; secondly that objective description should be accompanied with an exposition of meaning of religious and philosophical inspiration which brought the art into existence. I have tried to present this two-fold point of view in this new history of Indian art. In addition to these two features I have gone to the original Sanskrit and Pali sources to trace the literary background of the works of art and this has led to the understanding of the art monuments more clearly as embedded in the cultural conciousness of the Indian people through the ages. A net advantage of this method has been the recovery of a large number of ancient terms, hundreds of which have been freely introduced here taking care to explain them by equivalent modern terms where possible. This method had long been accepted as valid and essential in the study of Greek and Roman arts where the surviving literature has been patiently tapped for recovery of original art terms. Dr. Coomaraswamy was the pioneer of this method in Indian context and the same has been carried much further in the present study. Besides Sanskrit and Pali texts early inscriptions of the Śuṅga, Kuṣāṇa, Āndhra periods (2nd cent. B.C.—3rd cent. A. D.) have proved very faithful in supplying a number of appropriate art terms for sculpture and various elements of architecture. For example, Ghara-mukha (porch) Pānīya-poḍhi (cistern of water), Dvigarbha (two-celled cave), Chatushpada-paṅkti (a row of animals as seen on the drum of the Sarnath Capital which had begun to be regarded as auspicious from pre-Mauryan times), darpaṇā (woman holding mirror), Padmavara-vedikā (lotus-railing), Putra-vallabhā (mother and child), etc. There are hundreds of such terms known from inscriptions and literary texts which will be found scattered throughout the book. They have been brought together in the word index.