Indian Sculpture c5.s2.t3: Reliefs of the Western Ghāṭs

c5.s2.t3.1

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.