The Development of Hindu Iconography c8.49.4

c8.49.4

Of the various texts collected by Gopinath Rao to describe the icons of Sūrya, the *Amśumadbhedāgama*, the *Suprabhedāgama* and the *Śilparatna* do not at all record the features to be found in the Sūrya images of northern India, while the others, viz., the *Bṛhatsaṃhitā*, *Viśvakarmāvatāra-śāstra*, *Viṣṇudharmottara*, *Matsyapurāṇa*, *Agnipurāṇa*, etc., do so. We can with a great deal of plausibility assign on this basis the former groups of texts to the southern region and the latter group to the northern. The *Pūrvakāraṇāgama*, which is also presumably a southern text, contains passages such as *kañcukāñcitavigraham* and *pādau sakaṭakau tasya* reminiscent of the northern feature and thus seems to be influenced by the latter group of texts. Thus, as a broad division can be made between the Brahmanical images of India into north Indian and south Indian on the basis of important iconographic features, so the texts also can be generally classified into two groups, the one followed in the north and the other in the south. But there can be no denying the fact that sometimes texts belonging to one group showed traces of their contact with those belonging to the other, as undoubtedly varieties of images usually current in one region are occasionally to be found in the other. The *Pūrvakāraṇāgama* has just been shown to have been influenced by the iconographic texts of the north;