Indian Sculpture c7.s4.8

c7.s4.8

Time thus applies in a dual sense to Indian plastic art. Subsisting on the inward dimension, it is an immediate experience of being as becoming, that is, of an inner life movement which goes on permanently. But as far as art is learnt and taught, its tradition subsumes unfoldment or increasing differentiation, together with local conditions that, in the main, are the result of the ethnical past of the particular province. The passing and the subsisting or enduring modes of experiencing time make the dual chronology of Indian art. They, too, are inseparable, and are interknit in a texture of their own. For the experience of duration as an awareness of becoming is the reassurance that each work of art gives in its Indian form. It is the indivisible measure along which Indian art creatively persists throughout the phases which the urge towards form passes on the way from the un-formed to the formless. It is the balance between the permanent state of being (realised as an ever becoming), on the one hand, and the permanent urge of the un-formed towards the formless, on the other. The state of becoming, an oscillation between existence and non-existence, belongs to the movement of the inner life. Whatever its degree of consciousness, it is subsumed by the urge towards form. In this way it becomes art.