South Indian Bronzes: A Historical Survey of South Indian Sculpture with Iconographical Notes Based on Original Sources c10.11

c10.11

As we have seen the contemplative verses, the *dhyanas*, are the roots and the starting-points of the Indian sculptor. In the Agipurana (ch. 43) the image-maker is enjoined on the night before beginning with his work and after ceremonial purification, to pray; "O thou Lord of all gods, teach me in dreams how to carry out all the work I have in my mind."' It is only when the mental image has sufficiently defined itself that the painter or sculptor begins to paint or mould.² The resultant of such mental or spiritual image could be ill represented in terms of a physically perfect healthy human body. It could be only symbolised in an ideal type and by *forms not strictly in accordance with known physiological laws but rather* by forms which transcend the limits of ordinary human body. The Indian Sculptor had therefore to devise certain artistic conventions and a special system of anatomy for the purpose of suggesting and intimating “something beyond the forms of things.” He had set himself “to create beyond himself,” as Nietzche puts it : to suggest and evolve the type of the super-man. The Indian image-maker in depicting the images of gods was not therefore circumscribed, like his Greek brethren, by the limitations of human bodily form but was free to deduce his forms from non-human existences as well. Hence we meet in Indian sculpture with forms which are many-handed, some times polycephalous, sometimes zoomorphic and some times the grotesque and the terrible, for the so-called distinction between physical beauty and ugliness has no place in these divine conceptions.