South Indian Bronzes: A Historical Survey of South Indian Sculpture with Iconographical Notes Based on Original Sources c2.1

c2.1

It was during a hasty pilgrimage in October 1909 to the great Hindu shrines of the various Cathedral cities of the South that the project of the present publication was first formulated. The discovery of an old Sanskrit text of the *silpasastras* specially dealing with South Indian images in the possession of a hereditary craftsman in Swami Melai (Tanjore District) afforded excellent materials for the study of this school of bronzes which has contributed such interesting figures to the sculpture galleries in every corridor of all the important temples in the South. The discovery of the text, however, entailing, as it did, a hard and strenuous task of interpreting difficult and mutilated technical terms necessarily delayed the preparation of this work. The delay had its advantage in the time that it afforded in collecting photographs of an adequate number of examples so as to interpret and illustrate the leading characteristics of this interesting branch of Indian sculpture.