Maurya and Shunga Art c13.2

c13.2

It is curious that Maurya art knows nothing of the creative fusion of the two trends referred to above; it is ignorant of the flowing linear movement, and of inexhaustible onrush of form it is unconscious. In its conventionalised naturalism and stagnant compactness it belongs to the final phase of a different art-tradition altogether. Touched by Indo-Aryan religious ideology it seems to have repudiated the human figure, but since it belonged to the last sequel of the art of the Asiatic West it was untouched either by the flowing linear movement and swaying balance of the North or by the wild growth of imaginative form of the un-Aryan South. Maurya art reflects the last stages of a tradition, Śunga art the initial stages of quite a different one. Yet Śunga art can not be labelled wholly as ‘primitive’. It is true, certain primitive traits as I have already pointed out, persist, but these traits are ethnically conditioned and are not attributable to technical limitation, not even the translation of depth in terms of surface. (Indeed few of the difficulties and limitations of ‘primitive’ art are to be seen in Śunga art, or otherwise it would not have been possible for the artists of Barhut and Bodhgaya to show figures in a large variety of