Indian Art: A History of Indian Art from the Earliest Times up to the Third Century A.D. c4.25

c4.25

Appendix I, Symbols and Icons in Classical Art and Religion, has been added with the specific purpose of looking before and after. The numerous cults of tutelary gods and goddesses which had been in the field for thousands of years were now being transformed as the higher religion of classical Hinduism. The richness of their symbolical meaning was retained but subordinated and reorganised in the iconographic forms of such higher Gods as Viṣṇu, Śiva, Sūrya, Gaṇeśa, Skanda, etc. Many obscure religious cults took their final leave by getting merged in the great movements of the Bhāgavata, Saura, Śaiva and Tantra disciplines. For example, the Suparṇa and Śrī-Lakṣmī cults became part of Viṣṇu’s iconography. The cult of Gaṅgā and Yamunā was given a subordinate place on the door-jambs of the temples of Viṣṇu and Śiva. The Harivaṃśa gives a list of hundred and eight Auspicious Symbols (maṅgalāṣṭa-śatam), most of which were retained and given honorific places in the iconographic formulas (dhyāna and sādhana) of the Great Gods of the classical religion. The Yakṣas lost their independent character and became subservient to Buddha, Kubera, Śiva, Gaṇeśa or Kumāra. The process is clearly recorded in literature and preserved in iconography. The Revatī Kalpa of the Kāśyapa-Saṃhitā is a rare text which has preserved the names of several hundred minor goddesses, now all classified under the new title of Jātahāriṇī (equivalent of Buddhist Hārītī) and equated with Revatī or the ‘Seven Divine Mothers’. The Nāga deities were merged in the cult of Balarāma. These problems occupied the major attention of the religious teachers and sculptors for about five hundred years (c. 1st to 5th cent. A.D.). The Purāṇas, Āgamas and Saṃhitās provide the data of religious synthesis worked out in the Sanskrit epoch of the Kuṣāṇa and Gupta civilisation. Every student of Indian art standing on this threshold of the old and the new should note all the forms and symbols that had gone before and also those that were to emerge later with the full development of the Brāhmanical images and temples. The present study just takes us to the story of the preceding age to initiate its subsequent part from Gupta times onwards which would be the subject of volume II. I had intended to include a chapter on Palace Architecture, but since the subject developed into a book, I have chosen to publish it separately under the title Ancient Indian Palace Architecture. Additional information about some of the topics discussed here is contained in my papers being published simultaneously under the title ‘Studies in Indian Art’.