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Indian Sculpture c6.s5: The Specifically ‘Mediæval’ Factor

Indian Sculpture c6.s5

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The Specifically ‘Mediæval’ Factor

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The complexity of the ethnical texture of the Indian people, which had called forth classical sculpture, was reinforced just when it had given form to all that was alive in it. This took place during more than the first half of the first millenium A.D.¹⁴⁶ Northern immigrations from the Kuṣāṇas to the Gurjāras had been ever-recurrent features. It took centuries for the immigrants to settle down and mingle with the people. Even after they had become a novel alloy, some more time had to pass before this new context showed itself in the plastic form of classical sculpture.

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Reactions to the influence of new blood are registered slowly but precisely by artistic form. In the case of the northern factor, it may seem difficult to demonstrate its share in Indian figured art, because on the whole the northern nomads, prior to their coming to India, ignored the human figure in the abstract and decorative way of their various crafts. (Exception: Luristān bronzes.) The whole problem of this abstract art has been treated by Strzygowski; it affects Indian form in the middle ages and not for the first time. The western school mainly will show this factor at work.

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Ancient, classical and mediæval, when taken in the direction of the arrow of time, denote the reactions of India, the motherland, with its creative soil, to the people it nourishes. While the foreigners of various origins in the course of time were adopted by the country, they grew into her ways and certified their Indian birthright by the indelible impress the country gave to their art. They were not iconoclasts, like most of the Muslim invaders. But what they found in India was alien to them; yet not wholly so, for already classical sculpture had integrated much that had not been aboriginal (p. 16). A prolonged stay, from generation to generation, in the country, and mingling with it, compelled them to yield to its influences.

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This provokes a partly new measure in some of the provinces of mediæval Indian sculpture as well as painting. To overlook it and to estimate this mediæval phenomenon as a downward movement of the prior, i.e. the classical Indian complex of form, would be like interpreting the early Christian art of Europe merely as a decay of classical Græco-Roman traditions. The northern factor, that had its share in the building of classical Indian art, now, although carried by a variety of different immigrants, who had come to India from the north, whether their original homes lay in the north-east or in the north-west, leads to a reinforcement of tendencies already present. In it precious blossoms bestir themselves to outlast the overwhelming vegetation that was classically Indian.

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Significantly enough, the northern impress in a radical version is given to the wall paintings at Ellora of the ninth century and of later date.¹⁴⁷ There the iconography is classically Indian. While acknowledging its rules, the novel form asserts itself ruthlessly. It does not change, but altogether replaces the round modelling by linear angles and three-dimensioned body-space by a flat-coloured surface. In sculpture, on the other hand, a similar, yet never quite so one-sided, form is reached, though not before the tenth century. Classical Indian art, whether painting or sculpture, had been essentially plastic. The northern element, however, is linear. Painting is more congenial to the mediæval artist. Technically it affords no obstacles to his vision, once it has ousted the classical idiom. Sculpture, however, intrinsically three-dimensional, resists with greater tenacity the onrush of the mediæval, and when this can be averted no longer it enters into one more amalgamation.

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But it is characteristic that within approximately one century, and on the same monument, i.e. the Kailāsanātha temple of Ellora, there should be the relief of Rāvaṇa shaking Kailāsa (p. 88), and the fresco of Viṣṇu with his consorts, etc., referred to here. Though composed with the last possibilities of classical form, the relief is given a psychological turn altogether unsupported by contemporary sculpture in Ellora. But it is not before the tenth and eleventh centuries that reflective fineness distinguishes the plastic art of central India, though not of the Dekkhan.

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The most active mediæval trend has an originally northern stock for its carrier. Its extension depends upon the spread of the latter, i.e. mainly in western India, and coincides with the spheres of its influence and contact.¹⁴⁸ Outside these, although the line is nowhere quite strictly drawn, classical heritage is preserved.

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¹⁴⁸ Outside these, although the line is nowhere quite strictly drawn, classical heritage is preserved.

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