The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c15.19

c15.19

We now come to some miscellaneous pieces which are referable to this period but cannot easily be linked with any particular group. Among them I give an early and prominent place to fig. 95, which was formerly in the possession of Maj.-Gen. H. L. Haughton, but is now, I believe, in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Mr Hargreaves, who published it in the *Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society* (1951, pp. 131-3 and pl. IV), is clearly right in interpreting it as the child Bodhisattva going to school in a ram-cart, accompanied by his school-fellows carrying their writing-boards and ink-pots. At first sight, the relief might appear to belong rather to the close of the Adolescent Period than to the beginning of this one, but the sketchy treatment of the boys’ tunics, coupled with the highly refined modelling of their young faces and of the rams’ heads, and the slight stylization of the indispensable *śāla* tree in the corner—all point to the later date. A prominent feature of this panel is the exaggerated size of the four figures in the background in relation to those in front. This disregard of the laws of perspective has already been noticed in connexion with figs. 87 and 90, but it is rare in Gandhāra reliefs, and does not appear to be a trait of any particular group. In this case, the author’s main concern has been with the minutiae of the individual figures rather than with the composition as a whole, and it was probably for this reason that he went out of his way to show the four figures in the background on an exaggerated scale. Had they been in correct perspective, they would have been too small for him to display his skill in varying the details of their features and hair-dressing. The relief is said to have been found in the Chārsada Tehsil of the Peshāwar District.