Maurya and Shunga Art c13.6

c13.6

Śuṅga art is thus the first organised and integrated art activity of the Indian people as a whole and stands directly counterposed to the court-art of the Mauryas. It reflects for the first time the results of the ethnic, social and religious fusion and integration that had been evolved through centuries on the Indian soil, more particularly in the Madhyadeśa. It is true, artists from the North-west, from those regions where the Kharoṣṭhī script was in vogue, worked side by side with the artists nearer home; the meaning of mason-marks in that script is unmistakable. Equally unmistakable is the meaning of the use of certain West-Asiatic motifs and Persepolitan column and capital forms, bearing clear testimony to the work done by artists from the North-west. But all such forms and motifs have been so completely fused and integrated into local forms and idioms that they have become just vague memories. Considered from this point of view Śuṅga art happens to be the first chapter of national and indigenous Indian art and expresses the contemporary Indian mind in all its grades and shades. Iconographically too this fusion and integration make themselves evident. Here in the reliefs of Barhut and Bodhgaya one can witness such gods of civilised conception as Sūrya, Lakshmī and Indra mingling freely with such tribal deities as the ‘yakṣas’ and ‘yakṣiṇīs’, the ‘vṛkṣadevatās’ and the ‘nāga’ spirits, ‘apsaras’ and ‘kinnaras’ of popular faith and imagination. There can be no doubt that types and iconographic forms of such divinities as Lakshmī and Sūrya and of such conceptions as the woman touching the tree with her foot and grasping its twigs with her hand and thereby bringing it into efflorescence had received their shape and sanction in ancient practice long before Barhut and Bodhgaya. It is interesting to observe that these forms and motifs can be followed from age to age through the entire realm of early Indian art.