Indian Sculpture c9.173

c9.173

141. The division into three sections, i.e. ancient, classical and mediæval, is derived from the character of form of Indian sculpture. The dates assigned to these demarcations have been fixed on the basis of symptoms of the sculptures themselves. To correlate such symptoms, with data that affected the whole of India, had been a secondary consideration. Two migrations, the one about 2000 B.C., the other approximately in the first half of the first millenium A.D., and beyond these limits, either of them of people who came to India from countries to the north of it, infused new blood into the Indian organism. Its assimilative power had been adjusted to such infusions (Austro-Asiatic and Drāviḍian elements, etc.).