Eastern Indian School of Mediaeval Sculpture c4.5

c4.5

The Varendra Research Society of Rajshahi, founded in April 1910, has collected an immense number of specimens from different parts of Bengal proper and arranged them in the Museum built by Kumar Sarat Kumar Roy of Dighapatiya at Rajshahi, the principal town of Northern Bengal. The majority of specimens in this Museum come from Northern Bengal, i.e., the Districts, of Rajshahi, Malda, Pabna, Bogra, Dinajpur and Rangpur; but many of them have been collected from other parts of Bengal also; viz., from Rampal in the Dacca District and different parts of the Hughly District. The collection contains a few inscribed specimens, none of which are earlier than the 11th or the 12th century in date. The examination of the Rajshahi collection proved definitely that a certain class of writers were wrong in ascribing the conventionalised style and stylised forms of these specimens to the 8th and 9th centuries, instead of to the 11th and the 12th centuries.¹ Subsequent discoveries made by the members of the Varendra Research Society prove that though artistic development in Northern Bengal was parallel with that of Magadha or Southern Bihar, yet during the first empire of the Pālas, the artists of Northern Bengal were decidedly in a minority compared with those of Eastern Bengal and Southern Bihar. An image of Viṣṇu discovered by Mr. Nani Gopal Mazumdar in the Malda District and the Buddha discovered at Biharoil in the Rajshahi District prove that, as late as the end of the 7th century, the artists of Eastern Bengal were followers of the decadent Gupta style of the School of Pāṭaliputra. The impulse which enabled the artists of Northern India to shake off the servile obedience to the tenets of the older school had not come as yet. When it came it was felt in Magadha, the metropolitan district of Northern India for at least one millennium. The artists of Northern Bengal may have felt the tremor but it had weakened considerably before reaching the new metropolitan district. Stray specimens discovered in Northern Bengal show the beginning of the change in artistic motives, in the broadness of vision and forceful delineation of the human figure which we find in the image of Tārā (I. M. No. 5862). Such is the torso of the Boar incarnation of Viṣṇu from Kashipur in the Dinajpur District in the Rajshahi Museum.¹ The founders of the Varendra Research Society, specially the Director of that institution, were inclined to think that conventionalised images of the 12th century like the image of Tārā in the Indian Museum (I. M. No. 5618) were really the products of Dhīmān and Biṭpālo, who were mentioned by Tārānātha as the founders of the Eastern School of Mediæval Sculpture in the 8th century A.D. A comparison of the inscribed specimen of Tārā (I. M. No. 5862) with the majority of specimens in the Rajshahi Museum proves definitely that such specimens cannot be earlier than the 12th century and that they belong to the decadent conventional style which came into being during the rules of Rāmapāla and Lakṣmaṇasena.