Indian Sculpture c6.s9: Himālayan Sculpture

Indian Sculpture c6.s9

Language: English

c6.s9.t1 Fountain Stones of Cambā — 1 part

Himālayan Sculpture

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The mountain districts of the north were not plastically gifted. Yet they stored and were able to combine in compositions, balanced and disciplined, such impressions that history chanced to make on them. To a certain extent even Gandhāran Hellenism can be seen in the proportions and the treatment of some reliefs. Apart from this, sculptors trained in the Gupta tradition (cf. Brahmor wood-carvings, about A.D. 700, Cambā)160 found a way into these high and remote hill tracts, and later on, specially in Kaśmīr, Pāla sculpture was given a welcome. All these were remembered in the sedate as well as stately images of the ninth and tenth centuries (Fig. 105). Later on the western schools to some extent also had their say. But however tactful the appropriation of all the trends, the whole is not essentially Himalayan sculpture. This, in its purity and unfoldment, is left intact only in the fountain stones of Cambā.

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The large metal images of Cambā have been already referred to (p. 78). By their linear incisiveness they anticipate the mediæval trend. If, on the other hand, the popular art practice of Cambā, albeit mostly of later date, is taken into account, the linear abstractions of these images, otherwise inexplicable at such an early date, appear organic qualities of this hill art.

Fountain Stones of Cambā

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The earliest and simplest of these fountain stones could be ancestors of the roundels of Bhārhut, although what is preserved of them does not ante-date the eleventh century. Plain lotus discs are set into squares.¹⁶¹ (See also early ceiling paintings, cave ix, Ajaṇṭā.) This non-iconic art, however, harbours variegated devices, amongst which the intertwined band of serpent-origin is of considerable interest. The treatment given to figures, when interwoven with the abstract patterns, is on similar lines to the treatment of the figures in Sāñcī, ground balustrade of stūpa II (p. 27). The predilection for the pattern, with human and other figures—if at all—subservient to it, is preserved in the fountain stones of Cambā even at this late phase, with the conservatism of the hills (Fig. 106).