The Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India: A Study of Indo-Aryan Civilisation c13.21

c13.21

Fergusson’s critical judgment upon the sculpture of the Gautamî-putra Monastery is very wide of the mark. He compares it with that of the adjoining Nahapâna monastery, which may be somewhat earlier in date, and praises the “graceful bell-shaped Persian capitals” of the latter to the disparagement of the “pudding-forms” of the other. Here he was betrayed into the misconception which with other modern writers has become an obsession, that all that was finest in Indian art always came straight from western Asia, and that the history of Hindu sculpture is "written in decay." None of the sculpture at Kârlê and very little that belongs to the Mauryan epoch in India had any connection with Persia in the sense intended by Fergusson and other archæologists. These capitals are Vedic-Indian, or Indo-Aryan, and only Persian so far as Persian art was in early Vedic times itself inspired by Aryan culture. The superficial similarity between these and Persepolitan capitals was the result of the common origin of their symbolism, not to the presence of foreign craftsmen in the India of Asoka's time. The splendour of the Mauryan court may have attracted