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Indian Sculpture c6.s10: Dekkhan

Indian Sculpture c6.s10

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Dekkhan

(A) Northern Part

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In the Dekkhan the repercussions of the specifically mediæval trend are sporadic only. Local tradition survived in the monuments of Dhārwār and Hyderābād,¹⁶² whereas the carvings of Mysore exhibit, though on a similar basis, the froth of the trends of this phase of Indian sculpture. The northern Dekkhanī monuments frequently contain compositions which once had been of transcendental conception. Creative power of an unsurpassable degree is clipped to fit a given size and decorative purpose (Fig. 108), it is surrounded by, or drowned in, an ornamentation of high quality. But the modelling has hardened. Its generalisations are stiff and lack firmness. The breadth of Dekkhanī sculpture survives in them in postures which are distended, but do not suggest superhuman power (Fig. 110). The art of the Dekkhan had spent itself by the eighth century.

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(B) Southern Part

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The same motifs abound in the sculptures of Mysore. Their range is further enlarged by friezes filled with manifold scenes. Although carved in very high relief, and frequently altogether in the round, they appear pressed between the two surfaces of the relief, and are tied down by ponderously exuberant ornamentation (Fig. 109). Even in large panels and in the case of images and bracket figures, where one human-divine figure predominates, it is rigid with, and suffocated by, a meticulous burden of carvings, as artistically meaningless as they are technically elaborate (Fig. 111). In this exhibition of the skill of the stone-carver mediæval sculpture has reached its lowest level. There, in the carvings of the twelfth century—time has hardened them to metallic appearance—the relics of Indian plasticity are seized by torpor and by the exasperation of intricate artifices.