The Antiquities of Orissa v1.c10.92

Language: English

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The annals of the Śākya race as preserved in Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan and Chinese, represent them to have belonged to the foremost of the Aryan race, the Kṣatriyas, whose mode of life, if any faith is to be reposed on those records, was entirely different from that of the Paṭuas and of the Kukis. When Siddhārtha retired from home, he went forth, it is said, in the full court-dress of a prince, which he exchanged for the humble yellow vestment of a hermit, when he arrived at a neighbouring wood. If the sculptures are to be accepted without any qualification, the whole of these records must be entirely rejected, and we must believe that kings and princes, as shewn on Mr. Fergusson's plate, XXXI, went about with their bodies all uncovered, while the priests were clothed to the neck with scrupulous care; that Siddhārtha gave up a narrow *dhuti* for something that covered his person from neck to ankles; and that the attire of Māyādevī, the mother of Buddha, was somewhat less ample than the traditional "fig leaf" of Eve, consisting, as it does in sculptures, solely of a narrow bead cincture below the waist. The large Amarāvatī stone in the Museum of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, represents Māyādevī reclining on what appears like a stuffed cushion spread on a cot and provided with a large pillow or *tākiā*; she is attended by armed male guards, **[ 87 ]** and waiting maids holding *cauris*;

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but she has on her person nothing beyond a bead girdle to cover her modesty.⁵⁶ A prince on one of the Amarāvatī stones is seated on a high-backed, cushioned chair with what looks like a stuffed pillow behind him, but he has on his person little beside a cloth girdle two or three inches round the waist by way of dress. His ladies, seated on chairs without cushions or pillows, content themselves with only girdles of beads.⁵⁷ Occasionally the bead girdle is supplemented by a narrow slip of cloth attached to it and hanging behind, but not in front. In one instance in the same collection a Rājā and his little boy are dressed in *dhutis* reaching close to the ankles, but the attendant ladies are all in absolute *dishabille*.⁵⁸ In the garden scenes at Sāñci the lovers always appear dressed, but in two out of four instances, the belles are nude, the other two being decently draped.⁵⁹ Again, in a grand procession all the men are clothed and turbanned, and even the leading horse has a rich housing but, the ladies of the *rājā*, who look at the procession from the veranda and balcony of the palace, like the king's guards in a certain island in the South Pacific, whose full-dress consisted of a cocked hat and a pair of spurs, all confine their habiliments to a single article, a bead girdle amidst a gorgeous display of jewellery. One of them has a suspicious looking drinking cup in her hand, and a waiting maid is ready to replenish it from a covered flagon.

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It is worthy of note that in some instances, women wear a large thick band of cloth round the waist, but it never reaches so low as the hip joint. The so-called Dasyus too are everywhere represented as poor and degraded, but they are invariably dressed, decently enough for the position they occupy; but the women of the proud Aryans who despise them, and take the lead on every occasion, though richly jewelled, are generally devoid of all clothing. At Bhuvaneśvara the same scenes are by no means wanting; stuffed cushions shewing traces of buttons or tufting, which held the stuffing in its position, and large thick pillows (*tākiās*), such as are now held in requisition by men of rank and position, are repeatedly delineated, but the people who use them are mostly nudes. It must be observed also that in Sāñci and Amarāvati perfectly nude males have been carefully avoided, and at Bhuvaneśvara are comparatively few, whereas the female figure is very largely exhibited in all the three places in a state of nature, without any artificial covering. Had the nudity and spare clothing been due to race peculiarities, or tribal customs, they could not have been so markedly different among the two sexes. The habits and customs of the wild races now extant in different parts of the earth do not shew that where men and children have been clothed, the female sex has been left entirely without any garment.

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On the contrary, several primitive hill tribes in India and elsewhere, among whom the men and children go about without any covering for their persons, are particular in providing garbs of leaves or bark for their females; for there seems to exist even among them a sense of decency—a very imperfect and nebulous one no doubt, formed after their very primitive conditions—but still a sense of decency about covering the person, which prompt them to devise the means of doing so. A notable instance of this is offered by Col. Dalton in his interesting work on the *Ethnology of Bengal*. Noticing the Juāngs of Keunjhar, he says: "The females of the group had not amongst them a particle of clothing, their sole covering for purposes of decency consisted in a girdle composed of several strings of beads from which depended before and behind small curtains of leaves. Adam and Eve sewed fig-leaves together and made themselves aprons. The Juāngs are not so far advanced; they take young shoots of the Āsan (*Terminalia tomentosa*) or any tree with young soft leaves, and arranging them so as to form a flat and scale-like surface of the required size, the sprigs are simply stuck in the girdle fore and aft, and the toilet is complete. The girls were well developed and finely formed specimens of the race, and as the light leafy costume left the outlines of the figure entirely nude, they would have made good studies for sculpture.........

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Next day they came to tent at noon, and whilst I conversed with the males on their customs, language, and religion, the girls sat nestled together in a corner for a long time silent and motionless as statues, but after an hour or two elapsed, the crouching nymphs showed signs of life and symptoms of uneasiness, and, more attentively regarding them, I found that great tears were dropping from the downcast eyes like dew-drops on the green leaves. On my tenderly seeking the cause of their distress, I was told that the leaves were becoming dry, stiff, and uncomfortable, and if they were not allowed to go to the woods for a change, the consequences would be serious, and they certainly could not dance. It was a bright, dry day, and the crisp rustling, as they rose to depart, confirmed the statement".⁶⁰ The tears of the Juāng nymphs are remarkably expressive. A similar instance is narrated by Lieutenant, afterwards Commodore, Lambert in the voyage of one of Her Majesty's ships in the Pacific Ocean. The ship was at anchor close by an island inhabited by savages, who used the smallest possible amount of clothing "that could be made to serve the purposes of decency", and yet when they beheld the ship's crew jumping into the sea-water for a bath without any clothing on their person, they were sorely scandalised. Other instances it would be easy to adduce; but they are not wanted.

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Taking the facts here noticed into consideration I am led to the conclusion that as regards [ 88 ] dress, the prevailing character of the bas-reliefs is due, not so much to ethnic, or social causes as to the exigencies of art. No doubt, the scantily clad Tamulian aboriginal races formed the great bulk of Buddhist congregations, and were more freely and plentifully represented on the monuments of their co-religionists than the Aryans, but their presence alone does not suffice to account for all the peculiarities noticed above. It is probable, therefore, that a conventional rule of art, such as has made the sculptors of Europe prefer the nude to the draped figure; ⁶¹ or a prevailing desire to display the female contour in all its attractiveness; or the unskilfulness of early art; or the difficulty of chiselling drapery on such coarse hard materials as were ordinarily accessible in this country; or a combination of some or of all those causes, exercised a more potent influence on the action of the Indian artist than ethnic peculiarities, in developing the human form in stone. There were, likewise, it is to be presumed, a sense of humour which manifested itself in oddities, caricatures, and grotesque representations, a longing for a display of variety, and a pruriency of imagination which made the males appear in dresses of diverse kinds, and the females in a state of nature.

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At Bhuvaneśvara a religious sentiment, that of veneration for the creative energy of which some traits have been already noticed (p. [65]) and others will be referred to in a subsequent chapter, was evidently also brought to bear upon art, and to produce an effect highly offensive to good taste. But whether so or not, it would, I think, be as effectual to draw conclusions regarding the costumes of the ancient Indians solely and exclusively from the sculptures they have left behind them, as it would be for the New Zealander of Macaulay to do the same with reference to the Europeans of the 19th century from the collections of modern statuary in the Crystal Palace, the Kensington Museum and the Louvre.