Indian Sculpture c5.s1.t7: Madhyadeśa

Indian Sculpture c5.s1.t7

Language: English

Madhyadeśa

The ground balustrade of stūpa II, Sāñcī (second century B.C.), almost exclusively decorated with low reliefs in ‘plant style’ (Coomaraswamy), is the most logical effort in this line during the early classical period (Figs. 29–31). The lotus-creeper is vegetative life visualised. Its rhythmical sway is also peculiar to stems of trees, as shown in Indus art. Stem of tree and stalk of lotus in Indian sculpture are channels which the recurring movement of vegetation bends according to its own rhythm. The stalk of the lotus issues and rambles through the reliefs, and from its own fertility, like a diver from the deep sea, brings forth unexpected treasures—flowers in abundance and spirits too, animals, human figures and symbols. The animal, too, even if shown by itself alone, takes part in this rhythm (Fig. 14). An angular reticence of the postures of some of the human figures ill-fits the heaving, sprouting luxuriance of the theme. The craftsmen seem to have subdued modelling by a linear scheme, that allowed a seeming quiet where wilder forces and more powerful handling appeared to be out of place. Primeval Indian folk art is overlayed by rhythmical discipline.

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These early reliefs of stūpa II, Sāñcī, are but patterns in disguise—rhythmical exercises in linear composition, and hesitating in the handling of the human figures which have been subjected to its yoke.

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(B) Bhārhut: Main Trend

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With a similarly careful awareness, the artists in Bhārhut (second half of second century B.C.), too, approach their themes. But there is relatively more ease in their attitude and a more leisurely expansiveness. The lotus scroll moves with homely assurance through its self-created jungle, which, in its turn, and with all the exuberance of vegetation, of which jewellery and apparel are also part, obeys a rhythm of slow but ceaseless measure⁴⁶ (Figs. 15, 24). Its movement is felt even where it is not itself shown and in some of the roundels the beginning and end are joined in an elastic balance (Fig. 16). By it are supported the actors of the story, loosely dispersed over the ground of the relief. Their distances, i.e. the tension between the single figures, their positions and gestures recline, and are carried by that swaying free rhythmical movement. No attempt is made to group the figures; each abides in the place assigned to it with a generous sense of well-being, in which quietly breathes the life of Bhārhut.

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Few of the difficulties of ‘primitive’ art, such as a limited range of attitudes, are to be found here. For although this is an early stage of classical art, yet it has the vast experience of ancient practice behind it. But the use it makes of it is circumscribed by an orientation that realises life as a ceaseless flow and has lost interest in the compactness of detached objects. (See Chapter I.) How the latter was gradually abandoned is tangibly shown by some of the large pillar figures; for instance, that of Sirimā Devatā and that of Sudarśanā Yakṣī (Figs. 26, 27). While the one consists of an inane superposition of massive forms, the other, mellifluous in gliding lines, balances her body like the languid stalk of a full-blown flower. Monumental stiffness, with knees stretched and arms pressed to the body, has melted into a lyricism of vegetative grace.

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The majority of compositions in Bhārhut are subject to this gentle rhythm; a group of reliefs, however, of which those of the Ajātaśatru pillar are most prominent, is not touched by its caress (Fig. 22). Harsher and less imaginative, the figures are densely packed, lacking melody though not discipline and are set in horizontal rows (cf. Fig. 8), which crowd the panels with their mechanical parallels. The relief in their case is so full of figures that the ground, with its calm and bare surface, no longer can be seen. This trend, which was destined to rule almost exclusively in the work on the Sāñcī gateways, is unaware of the silent and secure wisdom of swaying balance and self-supporting rhythms. Whereas the freely rhythmic manner is a favourite solution in Indian art, the seemingly inexhaustible onrush of form after form is one of its main problems.

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Irrespective, however, of the contexts into which they are implicated, the single figures are hesitating in their movements (Figs. 16, 17, 22, 24); these almost seem to come about without their knowledge. So unaccentuated are their actions that the manner in which hungry jackals prick up their ears does not differ in intensity from the way that branches curve (Fig. 15). A state of being, irrespective of all actions, has found variegated form in all those modest figurines. They exist in a permanent mood of shy approval, which at times amounts to veneration of that unending life that carries and supports them for the moment they are there.

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The physiognomy, common to all the faces in Bhārhut, sets each feature clearly marked into a but little differentiated round or oval, flatly modelled. These masks, with wide open eyes, which bulge but have no pupils, and are not seeing at all, are intent with the keenness of the life they are made to fit, eager but undirected (Figs. 21, 22, 24, 26, 27); whereas that of Sirimā (Fig. 26) is attracted by the without, the within is kept in abeyance by that of Sudarśanā (Fig. 27).

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(D) Bodhgayā

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The part of the square railing of Bodhgayā of the first half of the first century B.C. is an elegant, if superficial, sequel to Bhārhut. The scrupulously exhaustive manner of telling stories has dwindled into abbreviations, comprehensible to those only who are well-acquainted with the subject pictured. The same subjects in their versions in Bhārhut and in Bodhgayā (Figs. 16, 17, 19, 20) show this clearly. The figures now move with greater self-assurance and their rhythmical ease is not confined to the surface only, but extends into depth.

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They are placed at a slight angle with the ground of the relief, so that the whole body offers a broader surface to be modelled. The flying Kinnara of Fig. 20 may be contrasted with the woman in the tree from Bhārhut (Fig. 15), whose chest, although placed in a similar position, appears pinned to the surface by the four corners marked by her hands and feet.

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In equal measure, with an increasing freedom of physical movement, the surface of the body awakens also. The Sārnāth fragment (Fig. 11) had already anticipated this, but there was little scope for this quality in the second century B.C. Now, however, with bolder movements and prouder carriage, the surface of the stone is modelled in detail and with subtle gradations, so as to give a suggestion of soft, warm flesh. (Fig. 19, the man with the basket, for instance.) Sensuousness is tempered and supported by the lyrical measure of linear movements. To this stage approximately belong also, besides part of the Bodhgayā railing, the carved railings from Patna, Sārnāth, and fragments from Mathurā⁴⁷ (Fig. 40).

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(E) Sāñcī, Gateways of Stūpa I

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The Southern, the earliest (middle of first century B.C.) amongst the gateways of the Sāñcī stūpas, marks a decisive turn from the trend prevalent in Bhārhut and on ground balustrade of stūpa II, Sāñcī. What had struggled for expression in the work on the Ajātaśatru pillar has now broken into boisterous freedom. There still are some reliefs (Lakṣmī panel and lotus landscape panel)⁴⁸ permeated by the endless melody of Bhārhut. Yet it is silenced where the clash and din of tumultuous groups clamour for self-assertion and expansion (Fig. 33). No longer are the single figures loosely scattered in the composition. With a larger freedom of bodily movement and increased depth of the relief, they are turned at various angles and enter into group connections. The group now is the acting unit, and within its compass what variety of poses, what outbursts of blossoming, frolicsome and frenzied existence! As if from a cornucopia the wealth of figures throngs forth from the stone, increasing in vigour and reverberating with its onrush like the sound of a trumpet. The relief on the whole offers its field full to the point of bursting, with figures and nameless darkness between them. Instead of placidly swaying and clearly pronounced linear rhythms, what bewildering mass of compositional factors! With diagonal movements, and with planes intersecting, the figures appear as if breaking out of the solid mass of stone; loaded with energies that could carry them farther afield, they are kept with difficulty only within the confines of the relief. The boundless un-formed demands an almost boundless supply of form. Unmitigated creativeness fiercely and inexorably throws forth form next to form.

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To measure the degree of maturity of Indian art by Western standards—not to speak of influences—is nowhere as futile as it would be in case of the Sāñcī reliefs. Daring in diagonal arrangements, furtively broken by light and darkness, modelled with a delicacy and experience that would do credit to the Western Baroque, the genius which produces this seeming similarity assigns it to quite a different level. No consciously exalted striving and no exaggerated and calculated effects, but an inexhaustive young resourcefulness to cope with its onrush, seizes all possibilities that promise adequate form. Side by side, intersecting movements in depth and yet a reference to the surface, fullness of modelling and a clear cut outline—all these, achievements already of the South gate, shortly afterwards are also to be seen on the North gate; but about a generation later in the East and West gates ultimate outbursts of tumultuousness are not far from aridity (Fig. 34). It finally seizes the Sāñcī tradition in the work on the ‘Fifth gate’ (about the Christian era), the only gate of stūpa III.49

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On the whole, however, chronological sequence does not imply one line of stylistic development. Some of the panels of the South gate, which is the earliest, represent the climax of the specifical trend of Sāñcī, and are the work of craftsmen most alive to its urge (Fig. 33). Those craftsmen, however, of lesser sensibility and more addicted to the older version of this idiom (as practised in Bhārhut on the Ajātaśatru pillar), keep it valid throughout the sculptures of Sāñcī, but without the spellbound cogency of repetition that had kept the figures there so tightly gripped. This leads to stiffness without rhythm, to a discipline that only succeeds in mechanising the composition (Fig. 35).

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In its most vital compositions, the work of Sāñcī is tumultuously naturalistic. There a profusely surging plastic mass demands a high relief, with a rich interplay of light and darkness, that, combined with the three dimensional tangibility of objects, their variegated grouping and the freedom of the movement of the full-limbed figures, produces massive and vigorous compositions. Their coherence results from the impetuousness of this special creative impulse. The living stone, it seems, eagerly clamours to burst out into scenes full of its own life, which it imparts to the touch of the craftsman. Reluctant to recognise limits, the force which inheres bursts the volume in which it inheres. The frames, so neatly outlined, are at times transgressed upon by the figures. On the West gate,⁵⁰ in the scene of the War of the Relics, the composition brims over them. In this accomplished rendering (an earlier version of the same scene is on the South gate), the incompatibility of any frame with a composition that follows its own dynamic expansiveness is actually realised. This trend demands an extensiveness of which the limits are settled by its own propelling force, just as seeds will burst out from the seedpot and fall down according to the energy that has thrust them forth.

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Supplementary to this, and almost in opposition to its lack of rational design, the other tendency stresses the vertical and the horizontal in keeping with the order prescribed by the frame (Fig. 34). In some compositions it goes further than that, and endeavours to tie the entire throng of figures to the ground of the relief, parallel with it and preventive of any outburst from the un-formed depth of the stone diagonally into the light of day (Fig. 35). But the achievements of this restraint are not primary. Its qualities in respect of modelling, sense of volume and light and darkness, belong to the former group. The trees, for instance, even where they have not thrown off altogether the continuous outline filled by modelling (see Figs. 15, 17, 18, 20, etc.), with their branches jutting out freely,51 but observe the outline that neatly binds the foliage into a round or otherwise regularly shaped bouquet, are dishevelled within and eaten up by darkness (Figs. 34, 35).

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Buoyancy, with its rich resources, is not in keeping with the meagre orderliness that attempts to tame them and arrives at compromises at times, but fails on the whole. Of this, the Fifth gate, with its inconsistency of mollified volumes in rigid orderliness, gives evidence.

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Some of the scenes, such as the War of the Relics, the Chaddanta Jātaka52 and in other monuments other scenes—the dream of Māyā, for instance, in Amarāvati—are repeated. This recurrence of the one and the same scene on one monument establishes the ever-present actuality of the scene. What matters is not that it once happened, but that in all its importance it did happen and this cannot be repeated too frequently. In its significance the scene is ever present. The repetition of the same scene in several compositions on one monument is a feature cognate with the timelessness in the rendering of each composition (p. 18).

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All the while the human figures have remained squat in proportion, with short necks and heavy heads, non-Āryan as well as non-Drāviḍian in type, even more noticeable than in Bhārhut, where the relatively flat treatment and strongly linear compositional rhythm have made use of them more as signs or names than in their actual pertinence. In Sāñcī, however, a sturdy type is chosen without the mundane ease and self-assurance of the Bodhgayā figures, but unthinkable without its Śuṅga and Mauryan ancestors (Fig. 32). Yet however wide apart the main Bhārhut tradition of the flowing linear rhythm may be from that of Sāñcī, the later craftsman could not but unwittingly imbibe and carry on its achievements. The result is that a mollified volume is bounded by an outline ever more fluid in its gliding sinuousness. While lyricism and generalisations formulated during the second century B.C. were during the first century B.C. drowned in the onrush of more vigorous expressions, these ultimately, if outwardly only, were smoothed and disciplined by the former achievements.

Indian Sculpture c5.s1.t7: Madhyadeśa

Madhyadeśa

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