Indian Sculpture and Painting, Illustrated by Typical Masterpieces, with an Explanation of their Motives and Ideals c8.57

c8.57

Asoka's immediate successors did not continue his great propaganda of Buddhism, so Indian architects and sculptors naturally reverted to the use of the material with which they were most familiar. In the meantime, however, on the north-west frontier of India, the Indo-Roman school of Gandhara arose. Gandhara was a country in which suitable stone for building and sculpture was more plentiful than wood; so while all the wooden, or semi-wooden, buildings constructed in India in this period have totally disappeared, the stone monasteries and the *stupas* of Gandhara have left a great deal of their rich sculptures to posterity. This, and the fact that Gandhara was closer to the outskirts of the Roman Empire, and therefore more susceptible to Græco-Roman influences than India, have given the Gandhara school a rather fictitious importance in the history of Indian art. To understand this early period of Indian art rightly we must always bear in mind that for every monument in stone which now exists there were in India perhaps a thousand in less permanent materials, which have completely disappeared.