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Indian Sculpture c5.s2: 2. Early Maturity

Indian Sculpture c5.s2

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2. Early Maturity

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WHILE the artistic activities of the former period had been diffused through the country, they are now concentrated in Mathurā and Veṅgī. During the first and second centuries A.D., Mathurā is of primary importance, whereas just previously (Fig. 40) the idiom of its sculptures, although broader and more relaxed as far as modelling goes and livelier in the rendering of physiognomy and movement, conformed with reliefs (p. 39) as those from Bodhgayā. Although it gives to Indian imagery its pantheon of Buddhist and Jaina as well as of Brāhmanic denominations, it fails—or, rather, never makes the attempt—to experience and create the spirituality of any. Firmly footed on earth-bound Mauryan survivals, it imbues the massiveness of its large-sized figures with the self-sufficing serenity of physical superiority.58 Reliefs are of minor importance, but, even so, they have undergone relevant changes. The main interest, however, is devoted to the large-sized cult image. Mauryan colossal statues are its ancestors, as far as appearance is concerned. But what with them had been dignity and civilised bearing is a more relaxed, while cruder, sturdiness in Mathurā.

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Where did this demand for images come from, and where did the Buddha image originate?59

Origin of Buddha Image

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Representations of some of the gods in human shape are as frequent as they are standardised in Bhārhut and other monuments. Early classical sculpture, however, does not show these gods as being worshipped. Allusions to the anthropomorphic appearance of divinities occur in the Rgveda.⁶⁰ Anthropomorphic, too, are some figurines and representations on seals of the Indus art. That these had been worshipped is shown on one fayence sealing from Mohenjo-Daro.⁶¹ But anthropomorphic images, it appears, as an essential part of the ceremony of worship in any of the forms of cult that are recorded in scripture, were not in vogue in India prior to its contact with Hellenism. This did not exclude a tendency towards image worship amongst the masses which had maintained this attitude from early days, such as those of the Indus civilisation. Yakṣa statues, for instance, although distinctly not images (p. 9), may nevertheless have been worshipped by the people. The Yakṣa Maṇibhadra, from Pawāyā (Gwālior, about the beginning of the Christian era, i.e. of later date),⁶² is inscribed as ‘Bhagavān,’ i.e. ‘Worshipful.’ That an anthropomorphic tendency existed amongst the craftsmen, and allowed itself to be repressed with difficulty only, is shown within the non-iconic reliefs themselves from Bhārhut and Sāñcī (p. 26).

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This innate tendency of the Indian craftsman towards giving shape in the likeness of living things, asserted itself in Mathurā unreservedly.

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The Buddha there is given the appearance of a Yakṣa, who excels others of his kind by being a Cakravartin (a world-ruler), endowed with marks of a ‘great being.’ In this powerful and worldly manner the craftsmen from Mathurā fashion their images of the Buddha, whom they prefer to think of and to call a Bodhisattva. Popular belief and imagination interpret according to their own resources what the Buddha means to them. The ‘Bodhisattva’ image from Mathurā is a robust figure (Fig. 41). In conception and treatment it has ancient Indian sculpture for its background. That the earliest preserved image dates from as late as the end of the first century A.D., whereas in Gandhāra the Buddha was shown in human shape at an earlier date (p. 45), may be due to the accident of preservation. But in no case does priority establish a claim of the Gandhāran type as origin of the Buddha image. The type as formed in Mathurā is totally different and in keeping with the quality and meaning of contemporary Indian sculpture. It is, moreover, the outcome of an aboriginal attitude of the masses towards image worship.

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The image from Gandhāra, on the other hand, is a resourceful adaptation of Indian notions by syncretistic craftsmen. A weary eclecticism distinguishes it. The two types of the Buddha image, from Mathurā and Gandhāra, have different origins, psychologically as well as culturally. The character and the later date of the image set up by Friar Bala,58 A.D. 81, and of other figures from Mathurā, prove the independence of this thoroughbred Indian type.

Mathurā

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With the notion of the cult-image foremost in the mind of the artist, his conception of the importance of the human figure and of its relation to its surroundings changed. Compared with those in the early reliefs, the figures now have actually grown up, so much so that the height of the main figure in a number of scenes now preferably is equal to the entire height of the panel63 (cf. Āmohinī relief, Mathurā, A.D. 14), and the subsidiary figures are graded accordingly. This novel proportion, when strictly followed, excludes the use of ‘spatial’ formulæ as well as of continuous or uni-local narration. Large figures are boldly carved, isolated objects are more definitely foreshortened than hitherto; they are set against the plain surface of the ground.

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During the first century A.D. the quality of Mathurā figures, be it in relief or in the round, is heavy with the burden of Mauryan tradition; but this volume has been modified in unavoidable heritage to the Śuṅga idiom. Whatever there was left of innervation in the bodily bulk of the third century B.C. has melted into relaxed flesh, encumbered by scarfs, thrown across shoulders and drawn across legs and hips. The scarfs preferably are not allowed to lie flat, but are twisted into bulging ropes, and into loops dangling sideways on one side only. To treat the garment as separate volume, where it does not cling to the body, had been a Mauryan feature. In the subsequent period, however, the garment was made as invisible as possible, and indicated by a few scratches only in the modelled surface of the body, or else it hung like an apron in front of it, where it was meant to suggest the loose ends of drapery. Now, however, as in the case of the body, so in that of the garment, Mauryan and early classical traditions attempt a cumbersome fusion.

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The faces of these figures are full of *bonhomie*; their open eyes and smiling mouths ill-fit the head of a Buddha. When, by the end of the first century A.D., the Buddha-Bodhisattva was given an image, it is that of a ruling and self-pleased figure⁶⁴ (Fig. 41). The garment covers the left shoulder only. The body clearly shines through its transparency, and is modelled with soft and summary treatment up to the waist, while the legs, stiff and hardly modelled, are decisive in their outline.

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In the beginning of the second century A.D. the reins are loosened, the possibilities of movement have increased and for the first time the figures exhibit their gestures. All ‘early’ spontaneity has vanished. In Mathurā, in the second century A.D., a complaisant lewdness (Bhūteśvar pillars, about A.D. 130) is carried by exuberant limbs (Fig. 28). Rustic stolidity, with its attempt at largeness, has become a thing of the past. It helped to prepare a more excitable, though not a nobler, appearance. The naturalism of Mathurā, in the first and second centuries A.D., has physical mass for its substance and sensual appeal for its aim. The former is gradually absorbed by the latter. Flesh—tight, resilient or relaxed—is suggested by the modelling. At no other stage of Indian sculpture has the plastic sense been so entirely steeped in the physical.

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At the same time, too, the Gandhāra Buddha type⁶⁵ is being purposely copied, and from now onward the folds of the garment covering both the shoulders becomes a favourite, though more and more linearised and conventionalised, attribute of Buddha images made in Mathurā.

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Hellenism at this phase plays by no means a negligible part in the sculpture of Mathurā. It is assimilated with understanding and a certain amount of freshness, for it meets an indigenous tendency of this school towards a somewhat detailed modelling for the sake of sensual associations.

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Colossal statues of the Kuṣāṇa kings, that had been set up in the Devakula at Māt, Mathurā, occupy a position of their own. Unfortunately, none of the heads of the figures of Kaniṣka, Vima Kadphises and of the satrap of western India, Caṣṭana, from the end of the first century A.D. have been preserved, but the bodies in themselves are sufficiently characterised to show what type of portrait was aimed at by the artists. The custom of setting up portrait statues, or carving them out of the rock, is substantiated by literature of about the same time as well as by actual remnants.⁶⁶ There was no novelty in the task, but only in the idiom of execution. The novelty is not of the Mathurā school that has produced innumerable images. Stern economy confines the main effect of the first and last named statues to the surface, to harsh angles and to lines incised as if with the stroke of the sword. The balance peculiar to all Indian sculpture is absent. Without the cohesion of ancient Mauryan ponderosity and without the rhythmic consistency of the early classical type, an upright posture weighs on the ground with the firmness of will. The angles of Kaniṣka’s coat, the enormous horizontal bar of his boots, the inscription of his name across the surface of his vestments, indicate that the artist was of the same race as his patron. A Scythian inspiration, that had learned in Mathurā how to model—as can be seen from the treatment of the chest—has commemorated the dignity of the Kuṣāṇa kings and of one of their contemporary rulers. The statue of Vima Kadphises,⁶⁷ however, is the work of a local and inferior craftsman, who endeavoured in vain to reach the arid altitude of the Scythian incident.

Reliefs of the Western Ghāṭs

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The school of Mathurā left its impress with the craftsmen of the Western Ghāṭs. But in this case what has been influenced is far more rich and vital than the influence that was brought to act on it (Figs. 43, 44). It has already been pointed out how aboriginally plastic the reliefs of Bhājā are (p. 36). This primevally surging plastic mass now becomes impressed with a knowledge of the stateliness and self-sufficiency of the human physique. It is soothed and further aggrandised by the breadth and fluidity of this thoroughly plastic idiom. Large and fully-developed human bodies carry animated heads. Their eyes, and smilingly expectant mouths, face the world with the dream they carry of themselves, warm and proud with the breathing of their body. Physical life seems to halt on the threshold of its being. There it listens to deep sources that well up to an unruffled surface. The nearness of man and woman is visualised in its simplest, confident of existence as completeness in itself (Kārlī, about A.D. 100). Later on Maithuna couples, in their accuracy of the erotic situation, pay the penalty of the conscious mind and its reassurances.

Central India and Orissā

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The school of Mathurā formulated prototypes of the Indian pantheon, and raised the figure of man to sculptural supremacy. In other parts of the country, which but remotely fell under its sway, parallel processes are to be seen at work. In Sāñcī (ground balustrade reliefs of stūpa II, of the second century A.D.)⁶⁸ the stretched proportions of the human figure—no longer top-heavy and stunted in growth, as in the underlying Austro-Asiatic type (p. 33), are clad with soft flesh and versatile movement and outline. The tendencies of Bodhgayā (p. 29) have now made sure of their faculties. In Orissā, too (Rānī Gumphā, and Gaṇeśa Gumphā, first and second centuries A.D.⁶⁹), such achievements as those on the gateways of Sāñcī, are made to serve as a field of action for bodies with free and impetuous gestures, and for physiognomies aflame with the zest of being alive, while older conventions linger on in a provincial manner. Provincialisms and atavisms are further conspicuous in reliefs of this period from the Central Provinces.⁷⁰

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Scantily preserved sculptures of the third century show, in Gwālior, for instance (Fig. 45), the idiom of the school of Mathurā still active. A summarising consistency belongs to this age. A flattening and hardening of the plastic context makes the character of form in this age of transition appear parallel to that of Indian sculpture of the eighth century (pp. 72, 78 and Figs. 69, 81, 83).

Gandhāra

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Gandhāra, with the sculptures produced there in the early centuries A.D. to the fifth century A.D., occupies a position apart. For if it is Indian and colonial from a Hellenistic point of view, it is Hellenistic and colonial when viewed from India. Of the earliest phase the little that is known is definitely provincial Hellenism, with but slight concessions to Indian predilections (see the jewel borders on the Bimaran reliquary; uṣṇīṣa, mudrā, etc., of the Buddha). Later on, however, Indian standards of modelling, proportion and poise are also accepted inconsistently, and therefore lifelessly. Yet a certain amplitude of facial features, of drapery and demeanour of Gandhāran figures throughout is a local symptom of Indian heritage. It is the redeeming factor of these otherwise hybrid and sapless products.

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The weary vacancy over which these large and slow curves are laid, may, in later sculptures (Fig. 46), be adapted to an expression of scepticism, all the more hopeless because it is part of an obstinately placid and thoroughly poised structure of form. The largeness and regularity of such a face contains a mouth of which the descriptively naturalistic treatment is set against an incompatible, while unavoidable, situation with tired disgust.

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The crudity of some works (Kaniṣka casket, A.D. 78) is due to Scythian hands.⁷¹ Their firm and sharp linear strokes, however, have nothing to rest upon in the ambiguity of the Gandhāran output. Their impress does not outlive the second century A.D. The picturesquely melting folds and features after the third and up to the fifth century in Gandhāra are not arranged by Indian currents.⁷²

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The syncretistic craftsmen of Gandhāra attempted, without scruples, to make images with the help of such conventions, the effect of which on the mind of the Buddhist worshipper they could calculate. These they either applied, or else interpreted in terms more familiar to them (see ‘uṣṇīṣa’). All that this school, apart from the iconographic fact of making Buddha images to be worshipped, did contribute to the fabric of Indian art, amounts to very few motifs speedily transformed, such as the rendering of drapery of the Buddha’s robe⁷³ (p. 42).

Veṅgī

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The south expressed itself in ardent form. Amarāvatī was the centre of the school of Veṅgī (second century B.C. to third century A.D.). With the work of Jaggayapeṭa as precursor, with the work on, and connected with, the stūpas of Nāgārjunikoṇḍa, Alluru and Gumadidurru⁷⁴ as contemporaries, albeit of chiefly the later phase and with the reliefs of the stūpa at Goli among the last contributions, the school of Veṅgī, condensed within a circumscribed locality, has contributed a vast amount of sculptures. In the last two centuries B.C. (p. 34) the delicacy of the modelling, the slimness of the over-elongated limbs, the powerful character of the bodies, and with it all a sensibility and keenness of movement, were distinctly of local origin. Later, by about the first century A.D., a heavy and spreading plastic form in some reliefs⁷⁵ precludes linear fineness. This trend is fully unfolded in Nāgārjunikoṇḍa, in the second century A.D. and later, whereas in Amarāvatī it is disciplined in future and swayed by linear rhythms. From about A.D. 100 onward, influences from Mathurā had their chance. This can be seen in some of the Veṅgī reliefs, with stately figures of relatively round and heavy form and dispassionately postured (Fig. 42). But a tremor now seems to pass all through the most luxuriant bhaṅgas, when the artists of Veṅgī, their age of receptiveness being over, re-ascertain their own genius. By the middle of the second century A.D. another external factor was to leave its impress. Hellenism⁷⁶ reached southern India by way of trade. As also in the school of Mathurā, it was neither dully accepted nor was it misunderstood by the south Indian artists. It is significant that their interest was captivated, as a few reliefs show, not by Hellenistic anatomy and modelling but by the contrapost, the Hellenic tradition of carrying the weight of one's body. A novel sense of equilibrium was appreciated as affording further possibilities of movement, with their not wholly unrelated contrast to the tribhaṅga posture.

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With that autochthonous heritage and those northern Indian and other reverberations, in the second century A.D., the art of Veṅgī refined what it had come to inherit, and transformed it into the deadly beauty of life at its fullest.

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Buddhist subject-matter at this phase has changed its importance. Not that symbols as well as actual representations of the Buddha do not occur in plenty. But they do no more than this, for the breathless sway of the compositions does not halt before them. They are just part of it (Figs 47, 50). The scene of Māyā Devī’s dream, for instance, which in Bhārhut had been told so simply but exhaustively with the sleeping queen and the flying elephant, both of about the same size, in a bare room, indicated only by the presence of a narrow bed, a light and drowsy maid attendants, serves now an opportunity of exhibiting an opulent scene where the Buddha-elephant has no room; in one panel the Buddha-elephant in miniature edition is relegated to the border, while in another it is omitted altogether.⁷⁷ Miracles now are true because they are intensified instances of life. Accuracy of narration is not required. Assemblies and festival scenes (Figs. 49–51) are favourites with the school of Veṅgī. But equally significant with any of them is the frieze of the coping stone from Amarāvatī, an issue of the rambling lotus landscape of the Bhārhut type (Figs. 47, 48). There peace had been given the form of vegetative thriving, of an existence where there is room for all and none may feel his importance. Here the ‘lotus stalk’ has swollen to serpentine bulk, its threatening onrush, however, is merely the heavy weight of a twisted garland of many flowers and beads. It almost bursts the thick rings and elaborate plaques that help to clasp it, it almost crushes those who carry it, rush along with it in mad exhilaration and stop still defiantly and exhausted.

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The Bhārhut lotus creeper, with its bounteous stalk, had equally carried all. Now that this conveyance of the life-sap has expanded its movement means doom. There is no escape.

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The reliefs are deprived of nature, understood hitherto as co-ordinate existence of human figure, plant and animal, each of equal significance. Now the human figure itself is nature. Where perchance rocks, trees and water are shown, they indicate locality or their own symbolical meaning and help to fill the relief; artistically the trees, be they Bodhi trees or other, have mostly dwindled into inert signs of lost interest (Figs. 47, 50, 51, 53). But wherever the scene takes place it teams with human figures (Figs. 49–52). They sit, stand, dance and fly with the same abandonment.⁷⁸ They join their hands and it is a hymn and incantation to life that fleets they bend their bodies with heavy, heaving shoulders and willowy spine, with a tension that is beyond endurance but that will not break. They fly out of sheer elation, while stepping through the air and hovering in it horizontally. One of the favourite attitudes—and which would be outside the range of the Veṅgī artists—is a three-quarter view with the curve of the bent arm over-secting it, so as to preserve in most of the cases the integrity of the outline, while giving largest scope to a modelling that in its vibrations yields the most intimate pleasures of touch (Figs. 50, 51). As counterpart to the high tension of active movements (Fig. 52) there is the elegant langour of physical relaxation, from where this exalted sensuousness inexhaustively replenishes its strength (Fig. 49).

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Devices of inter-relation (p. 18) are taken for granted and are extensively used (Fig. 49). At the same time, however, experiments in over-secting and foreshortening (pp. 22, 40) have matured. They are made use of in parts only, like ornaments to enrich the composition (Fig. 47, extreme right with altar and wheel and a figure circumambulating the latter), with the whole gamut of the technique at the disposal of the craftsman. This is also the case in the representations of interiors, where the actually suggested limits of the room coincide with the depth of the relief.

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Here, too, for the first time,79 buildings visible almost totally, from two of their sides, according to the old formula, are treated as open pavilions, their roof or storeys supported by slender corner-pilasters only. They are filled with human figures, and thus set up a cube, a body-space so frequently employed in the later paintings of Ajaṇṭā.80

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The approach towards the dimension of depth, however, —it scarcely need be said—is not that of the eye and its illusion, but it is derived from a dynamic relatedness of volumes. This can be clearly seen in the reliefs where no indications of an actual room are given, but where a plain background delimits a group of figures (Fig. 47, extreme right and group round Bodhi tree). These, however, attitudinise in such a way that a shallow area results from being occupied by bodies turned at various angles towards each other and towards the ground.81 It is mostly built from the ground of the relief towards the front (p. 17 and also Figs. 49, 50; see, however, Fig. 51, lower part).

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The preferred appearance of the figures in their vigour and elegance is that of youth where it is nearest maturity. To complete by contrast and to paraphrase its accomplishment, in some compositions pot-bellied dwarfs, vainly endeavouring to outgrow their deformities, make a counterpoint of body-physiognomies (Fig. 48). This tension between the perfect and its opposite is not, however, only projected into separate figures, it is immanent in every single figure, with its sturdy body carried by limbs of an unearthly tread (Figs. 48, 50, 51). But the face as a spiritual physiognomy is yet unknown. There is no enlightenment, no liberation, in any of them. It is still, as it had been during the whole of early classical sculpture, but a part of the body, now so expressive of its passion, fatigue and elation.

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So far did early classical sculpture go, so utterly steeped in the body, that the mastery of its modelling seems to come from within (Fig. 52). The tangible vibrations of living flesh are the surface movements of deeper stirrings. Such is the naturalism of Amarāvatī. Nothing, in spite of the surrender of either to the beauty of the body, could be less Grecian. This is one of the supreme and complete artistic forms of the soil and the mind of India; for ever, that is, as long as it is active and creative, outside salvation the body cannot escape from itself, yet it can help in the attainment of salvation and eventually it is plastically transmuted into its receptacle. (See next chapter.)

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In the second half of the second century A.D. the school of Veṅgī is at its height. Linear composition now has not only become more flexible, but has grown in the same direction and to the same degree as the movement of the single figures. From the days of Bhārhut onwards an ever-increasing use was made of the joints of the body in their pliability: as in the fettered shyness of Bhārhut postures (Fig. 27), in the slow sway of the Bodhgayā figurines (Fig. 19), in the vivacious experimenting with new movements and angles of posture in Sāñcī (Figs. 33, 34). These, by the end of the first century A.D.⁸² (‘Loṇaśobhikā’ relief, Mathurā), are rounded off into one sweeping boldness, that bends head against shoulders, shoulders against waist, supported by legs reciprocal in their crossed attitude to the body and surmounted by arms that continue the pattern of the body-rhythm (see also Fig. 42).

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In unison with the bodily movement, the outline in Bhārhut had been reticent in its flow (Figs. 26, 27), but it gathered momentum as well as sinuous continuity in the subsequent century (Fig. 32), and in the first century A.D. it reached an amplitude that seemed to distend the movement now to the right, now to the left, except for a diagonal composition, which held together the exuberant outline. In the second century A.D. the turn and bend of the neck matter much and the threefold flexion (tribhaṅga) of the figures becomes the favourite pose (Fig. 42). This may be seen in the Mathurā and in the Veṅgī school. But the latter, being more subtle and expressive, gives it a different scope.

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Hitherto the movements of the single figures were contained within the appearance and extent of the figure. Now, however, and nowhere in such degree as in the reliefs from Amarāvatī, the rhythmical, i.e. compositional or dynamic, movement of each figure seems to transcend its bodily movement. The compositional movement of an upraised arm, for instance, does not end at the tips of the fingers. On the contrary, surging along the legs and passing across a powerful body, with mighty chest and vigorous shoulders, the movement is thrown forth from there across the arms and beyond the physical reach of the figure (Figs. 52, 51, etc.).

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The dynamic movements of these figures transcend them; their sway, their curves and even the tremulous and disintegrating outline (Fig. 53), specially of the later reliefs from Veṅgī, are attempts at escape with the help of the body, and from its limitations.

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The linear composition of the relief panels, too, as a whole, in its preference for parabolic curves (Figs. 49–52), is dynamically open. However filled with figure the relief may appear, it does not solely rely (see Sāñcī) on crowded shapes that have accumulated within a given frame; their multitude is bound together by linear rhythm. This, however, has none of the satisfied recurrence, none of the composed conclusiveness, peculiar to Bhārhut. On the contrary its movement is left open; it just begins only within the given relief field, but transcends it dynamically.

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In the first century B.C. (Sāñcī, South gate) groups of figures had begun to be formed, but they were sprinkled into the density of otherwise inarticulate crowds (Fig. 33). Now, however, the entire linear composition comprises but one group, i.e. that of all the figures taking part in the scene of the relief (see also Sāñcī, West gate, War of the Relics). With as many subordinate groups as there are interests and actions binding the single figures together, the whole is swept by a major movement, which, with its parabolæ,⁸³ leaves open the entire constellation of any scene, futile in its ardour. The perfection of the Veṅgī school, incomplete, however, in its attempt to transcend the limits of the single compositions and of the body, with an intensified awareness of its vitality, has an eternal poignancy.⁸⁴

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In the third century the discipline of the late second century no longer checks a truly excentrical sense of movement. With a tremulous mannerism of modelling (casing slabs of stūpa of Amarāvatī, reliefs from a stūpa near Goli, etc.),⁸⁵ the highly-sophisticated school of Veṅgī dissolves (Fig. 53).

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Classical Indian sculpture experiences its early maturity in Mathurā in the fullness of sense-perception and enjoyment. In Veṅgī the intensity of this experience transcends the experience itself. While early classical sculpture had been based on, and rendered in, plastic terms, the infinite connectedness of all life and form, the later phase, on the self-same basis and with related means, seeks an escape from its very foundation, which cannot be avoided. The direction only alters.⁸⁶

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The pendulum of the attitude of the artist towards life has swung back. The oneness with nature in its extended aspects is now condensed and transferred into the human frame. This integration aggrandises the latter to superhuman dimensions and constitutes the notion, if not as yet the form, of the image (Mathurā). The other alternative is that it burdens or elates in order to transcend the human figure (Amarāvatī). In the sculptures of Veṅgī transcendentalism is rendered in terms of locality; the movement of figures and compositions exceeds their actual extension. Transcendentalism, in the sense of a transubstantiation of the body itself and within its frame, was expressed by subsequent generations of craftsmen.

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1. Character of form: Fullest plastic and naturalistic modelling.
2. Geography: Two centres: Mathurā and Veṅgī, while the contributions of the other provinces are brought up to date. Expansion of Mathurā idiom.
3. Chronology: Unfoldment of all the artistic faculties as part of a process of inflexion.
4. Inner meaning: (a) Hedonism of Mathurā and (b) transcendentalism of Veṅgī as alternatives of an experience of life which turns back upon itself.

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