Maurya and Shunga Art c16.32

c16.32

Fig. 30. Didarganj (Patna, Bihar). Standing Yakshiṇī bearing chaurī. Front view. One witnesses here perhaps an earliest urban, conscious and sophisticated female type and form immortailised in later Indian art and literature. Plastically fully round, it is bound by no law of frontality and has no primitivity whatsoever about it. Mark the sensitiveness of flesh as revealed in what remains of the modelling of the abdomen, the chin and the region round the eyes. Chronologically it seems to stand somewhere between the Bodhgaya woman climbing the tree and the daintier and more lively and sphisticated Yakshiṇīs of the Mathura reliefs of the second century A. D. Life-size. C. 50 A. D. Patna Museum. Photo : Bachhofer.