The Development of Hindu Iconography c4.1

c4.1

T. A. G. Rao's *Elements of Hindu Iconography* (Vols. I and II, published under the auspices of the Travancore State in 1914 and 1916 respectively) has so long been and still is the standard work on the subject. Some other works on it, such as H. Krishna Sastri's *South Indian Gods and Goddesses*, B. C. Bhattacharya's *Indian Images*, Part I, J. Dubreuil's *South Indian Iconography*, the Brahmanical section of N. K. Bhattasali's *Iconography of the Buddhist and Brahmanical Sculptures in the Dacca Museum*, etc., have been published since then. Krishna Sastri's and Dubreuil's works, as their names imply, deal with the South Indian images only, while Bhattacharya's book treats of several North Indian Hindu images of the Gupta and the post-Gupta periods. Bhattasali discusses the special features of the Brahmanical sculptures found mostly in Eastern Bengal. So none of these works can claim to be as full and comprehensive as the monumental work of T. A. G. Rao. But comprehensive as the latter is, it still lacks certain features which are essential for the study of Hindu Iconography. Rao, no doubt, collected a number of very useful iconographic texts (many of which were then unpublished, some are still so even now) in the appendices to his volumes, and reproduced numerous early and late mediaeval and some modern sculptures, mostly South Indian, to illustrate the same, but the development of the individual iconographic types has seldom been discussed by him. To show this development, it is not only necessary to study critically the extant reliefs and single sculptures of the Gupta, Kushan and pre-Kushan periods, but a careful and systematic handling of the numismatic and glyptic remains of India of the same periods is also indispensable. When earlier sculptural types of gods and goddesses are not available, ancient Indian coin and seal devices help us remarkably in determining the mode of their representation in the remote past. To refer to one or two instances: The Buddha type on Kanishka's coins, the Gaja-Lakṣmī device on the coins of Bahasatimita, Azilises and Rajuvula, and the ‘Varāha avatāra’ one on the ‘Ādivarāha drammas’ of the Gurjara Pratihāra king Bhoja I, fully show how they were based on the contemporary representations of the same divinities in Indian plastic art.