South Indian Bronzes: A Historical Survey of South Indian Sculpture with Iconographical Notes Based on Original Sources c8.119

c8.119

The poses of the arms and fingers constitute another artistic peculiarity of this class of figures which further distinguish them from the images of Northern India. In the movements of the arms and fingers the Indian artist has devised a “highly formalized and cultivated gesture language” which has been the medium of expressing the attitude of the mind. They have been used by the South Indian artist as effectively as the gestures of the body, in conveying by values of movements, ecstatic raptures and spiritual moods. Some of these gestures, attitudes and movements must seem to the Western mind as ‘artificial’ or unnatural. But devised, as they were, as suggestive of a super-human, divine personality, they have been very properly conceived in a manner antagonistic to the poses and gestures natural to man under the sway of human feelings and actions. They have been devised as exquisite artifices for suggesting, as it were, *a refinement of external action corresponding to a refinement of feeling*. When an Indian divine image holds in its hand a trident or a *discus* it does not gripe the weapon clumsily as the Greek Zeus from Hungary (in the British Museum), it playfully poises the *ayudha* between its two fingers, the other fingers hanging out in graceful angles (*see* diagrams C. S. & V.). Some of these gestures apart from their significance and symbolism are wonderfully articulate with a grace and a tenderness which is truly spiritual and non-human. These movements have been characteristically called by Sukrācharya, as ‘*dihya-kriya*’ or ‘divine actions’ and they must be distinguished in their conventions from the movement and gestures of the ordinary human being. For it is by means of these departures and variations from ‘natural poses’ that the non-human form could possibly be rendered in terms of the human shape. As Dr. Coomaraswamy has pointed out, “the more human in expression, the less does Hindu sculpture approach its own perfection.” At any rate these gestures and *mudras* (finger-poses) have afforded to the Indian sculptor rich motifs of vital aesthetic quality. “If any power in Indian art is really unique, it is its marvellous representation of movement—for here in the movement of limb is given the swiftness and necessity of the impelling thought itself much more than a history of action subsequent to thought.”