Indian Sculpture c5.s2.t5: Gandhāra
Indian Sculpture c5.s2.t5
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Gandhāra
c5.s2.t5.1
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.
c5.s2.t5.2
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.
c5.s2.t5.3
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
c5.s2.t5.4
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).