Eastern Indian School of Mediaeval Sculpture c5.32

c5.32

The existence of an earlier school of Indian sculpture at Mathurā has been definitely proved by the discovery of a large number of sculptures and basreliefs in which the majority of the human figures wear a peculiar head dress which has become so familiar to us from the basreliefs of Bharhut and Sanchi.³ In addition to the specimens of the Mathurā School published by Dr. V. A. Smith,⁴ a large number were found by the author in the Lucknow Provincial Museum in 1908. The exact period at which this older school of sculpture of Mathurā underwent a modification, on account of the influence of the Gandhāra School, can also be definitely determined with the aid of inscribed sculptures. The great red sandstone Bodhisattva of Sārnāth was dedicated in the third year of the reign of Kanishka⁵ and the Bodhisattva discovered by Cunningham at Sahet Mahet⁶ in the Gonda District, which was dedicated by the same persons and made from the same material and in which the first line of the inscription containing the date is broken, were carved by artists of the older and earlier school of Indian sculpture of Mathurā. The same donors, the monks Bala and Pushyavuddhi, dedicated another image at Mathurā in the year 33, during the reign of Huvishka, in which the influence of the Gāndhāra School on the Mathurā School of Sculpture can be clearly discerned. Besides this, the occurrence of the acanthus leaf ornament in the dated Jain images discovered at Mathurā, and belonging to the first half of the first century of the Kushān Era or the Era of Kanishka, proves definitely that the influence of the Northern School of Gāndhāra had permeated into the Mathurā School at that period, viz., during the last quarter of the first or the first decades of the second century A. D.