The Development of Hindu Iconography c8.11

Language: English

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The importance of this branch of study having been emphasised in the previous paragraphs, it is necessary to take stock of the different materials which are required for its prosecution. The first and foremost data to be utilised in this connection are evidently of monumental or archaeological character. The extant images or sculptures themselves are to be closely studied by every student of this subject in order to acquire proficiency in it. By a proper and scientific study of them, it will be possible for us not only to trace the gradual evolution of the art of image-making and the practice of worshipping these images, but also to classify them satisfactorily in ordered groups and understand the underlying peculiarities of the constituents of each of these groups. Besides the images proper, reliefs carved on sections of religious architecture or figures appearing on extant painted frescoes and such other objects, are important data in this connection. Two other archaeological data which have been practically ignored by most of the previous writers on Brahmanical Hindu iconography, but which are extremely important for its study, are of epigraphic and numismatic character. Foucher and Coomaraswamy have no doubt utilised these sources in their scholarly works on Indian art and iconography; but few writers on Brahmanical iconography have cared to avail themselves of these materials.

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Figures of divinities on the coins of particular localities belonging to different periods will indicate the manner of their representation that was in vogue in different times and places. It is very often the case that we do not light upon comparatively early specimens of images in various localities of northern India; in such cases, the coins discovered in those places are sure to help us in a very remarkable manner to determine the early iconographic types of various gods and goddesses worshipped there. It is needless to remark further that these numismatic depictions of deities are in many cases really based on the actual sculptural representations of them. Where both the early sculptural type and its numismatic counterpart are extant, we do not fail to find very close parallelism. Thus, the figure of Buddha belonging to the second century A.D. is well represented in plastic form among the Gandhāra sculptures; when we compare it with the numismatic type appearing on the coins of Kanishka and clearly described by the Kushan die-cutter as CAKAYMO BOΔΔO (Śākyamuni Buddha), we are struck by the great similarity between these two. The figure of a Śiva or a Mahāsena has not so far been discovered among the extant Gandhāra sculptures of the second or the third century A.D.;

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but when we find the devices on certain coins of Kanishka and Huvishka delineating the features of either of these divinities definitely described by the die-cutters as such, it will not at all be presumptuous to conclude that these forms are some of those in which the two abovenamed gods used to be plastically represented during the period. It will then be interesting to compare their early features with the peculiar traits of the extant icons of a later period. We find the figure of an enthroned deity, with the figure of an elephant or the forepart of an elephant with its trunk upraised in front of it, on some coins of Eukratides, Antialkidas and certain other Indo-Greek rulers; on a particular coin-type of Antialkidas, we find the same deity walking by the side of the elephant striding to right with its trunk upraised. On some coins of Maues the same god seated on throne is shown to place his hand on the head of the personified vajra (thunderbolt). It has been proved by me that these coin-devices are nothing but the various ways of representing Indra (very easily identified by the Greeks with their Zeus) who was the tutelary deity of Śvetavatālaya or Indrapura, a locality in the neighbourhood of ancient Kapiśā, on the basis of certain observations of Hiuen Tsang and an explicit statement in the Mahāmāyūrī.¹ This point can be substantiated further by a reference to the coin-types of the Greek city-states;

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these, when they represented different Hellenic divinities like Zeus, Heracles, Pallas Athene, Artemis, Nike and others, were actually based on their sculptural representations current in those localities. In many cases they were tutelary deities and cult divinities of such city-states, and they made their appearance as such on the coins.² In an opposite manner, the devices appearing on the earliest indigenous coins of India shed a flood of light on the problem of symbolic representations of gods and goddesses. Coomaraswamy, while referring to the number of symbols (rūpa) appearing on the punch-marked coins "in general use from about 600 B.C. up to the beginning of the Kushan period or somewhat later," makes the following interesting observation, ". . . the importance of these symbols, many of which have remained in use to the present day, lies in the fact that they represent a definite early Indian style, amounting to an explicit iconography.”¹