Maurya and Shunga Art c4.2

c4.2

Recent archæological discoveries and historical researches have pushed the history of India back to atleast three thousand years before the birth of Christ. But the first organised art activity in India in bigger scale and durable material that we have any definite knowledge of even to this day and of which dateable examples have come down to us in any recognisable number belong to the period of the Mauryas. The chalcolithic age to which belongs the civilisation of the Indus valley has bequeathed to us relics, few in number but varied in subject and treatment, that may safely be said to belong to the domain of high art with a long artistic tradition and experience behind it. Indeed, the art represented by the reliefs on the seals and figure sculptures in the round found at Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro and other sites in the Punjab, Sind, Baluchistan and further north and east is already highly developed, sophisticated and conscious, and expresses most frankly and significantly the culture-ideology of a people urban in upbringing, highly sophisticated in the luxury of living, and probably industrial and feudal in socio-economic organisation. Like the civilisation itself its art also had already reached the creative climax of a tradition. Into the relation of this art with the art of the contemporary civilised world it is not the place to enter; but it must needs be told that this art inspite of its affinities with contemporary Mediterranean art has its own essential qualities and its own character of form that link it with the art of India of the historical period.¹ Yet the fact remains that the art of the Indus valley is still largely an unknown factor in so far as it remains chronologically unrelated and unexplained and nothing definite is known of what happened along the arrow of time between the final phase of the Indus valley civilisation and the civilisation that flourished in the Ganges valley more than two thousand years later.