Indian Sculpture c5.s3.t2.35

c5.s3.t2.35

This treatment makes the flying figures, for instance, attuned to any degree of speed. They know not the bliss of effortless soaring. A violent abandonment to the intensity of the moment is nowhere so convincingly shown as in the Maithuna couple¹⁴⁰ from the Kailāsanātha temple of Ellora. What had been pent up within the body, and mastered, although threatening in its potency, in some of the reliefs in Bādāmī and Ellora, now bursts all restraint, with attitudes expressive of rapture and elation. Between the active state (i.e. that of mastered and therefore latent power) and the passive aspect (i.e. that of abandonment to the manifestation of that power) there lies the wide field of psychological possibilities.