Indian Sculpture and Painting, Illustrated by Typical Masterpieces, with an Explanation of their Motives and Ideals c8.29

c8.29

The chief direction of all these works would have remained in Indian hands, and the great majority of the craftsmen must have been Indian also, and therefore more accustomed to work in wood and metal than in stone. The wood-carvers found in the red sandstone which abounds in Northern India an excellent material, which could be worked with practically the same tools as they had always used: there was no necessity for them to alter their usual technique. Fergusson thought that the surprising degree of technical skill shown in the Bharhut sculptures proved that stone must have been a material perfectly familiar to the craftsmen who executed them, and that their skill must have been acquired by centuries of practice in the same material; but, on technical grounds, I see no reason to suppose that this was the case. Even now there is very little difference in the tools used in India for decorative purposes by wood, stone, and metal workers, and technical skill acquired in the material could easily be transferred to another. The technique of the Bharhut relief suggests that they were the work of skilled wood-carvers attempting for the first time to use stone instead of wood. This would explain why the sculpture of the early stone monuments of India shows a much higher degree of technical perfection than is found in the first attempts at stone-carving of a primitive state of art-culture. The sculptors were not tyros in craftsmanship, but skilled wood-carvers, or sometimes metal-workers.