Maurya and Shunga Art c4.7

c4.7

A few characteristics are common to all these sculptural and architectural remains. They are all monumental in conception and design, and inordinately fine, orderly, thorough and precise in execution. Moreover, with the exception of the remains of the royal palace and city-buildings of Pāṭaliputra, all of them were executed in hard grey sand stone of more or less big dimensions, always very finely chiselled and highly polished to a glossiness that has hardly any parallel in India at any other period of history, and in the world except ancient Iran. And thirdly, all of them were reared up directly under the shadow of the royal throne of the Mauryas, Aśoka and his grandson associating themselves with most of them. We are thus confronted here with an historical phenomenon that calls for an explanation. Here we are face to face with a period in ancient Indian history when a royal dynasty with imperial ambition and outlook suddenly discards wood and bamboo, and perhaps also brick, ivory, metal, and clay, and takes to the employment of stone as the material *par excellence* for monumental sculpture and architecture, and that this new material is handled with such perfect ease and mastery as to suggest that the art of hard and large-size stone-cutting was as it were already long in practice. Except those carved out of live rock, all removable pieces were worked out of grey sand stone quarried at Chunar; the Mauryan columns are all carved out of this material, and it should be remembered that these huge columns are distributed over a very wide area, between Delhi in the west, Basarh in the east and Sanchi in the south. Most certainly the huge resources of the state made available to the artists, rendered possible the conception, planning and execution in such large and gigantic proportions. But royal will and state resources alone cannot explain the sudden transformation from wood, sun-dried brick, clay, ivory and metal to stone, or from fine workmanship and exquisite finish of ivory and metal work to bold and rounded work in stone of huge dimensions. It is possible to postulate that similar bold and large scale work was long in practice in wood in pre-Mauryan days, and what the Maurya emperors did was only to initiate the artists and art-guilds into the use of stone and translate their traditional skill in terms of a new material. Such an explanation is certainly admissible. One has only to read through the description of the city and royal palace of Pāṭaliputra left by classical scholars,¹⁰ and examine the design and execution of many an architectural element of the Maurya, Śuṅga and other early Indian monuments, e.g. the pillars, the railings, the gates, the chaitya-facades, etc. and be convinced of the force of the argument.¹¹ But the very fact that stone henceforward became the most important material for Indian plastic art is by itself significant; equally significant is that stone sculpture when it first comes to view in India during the Maurya period is already the expression of a civilised, sophisticated and fully developed art that had generations of artistic effort, experience and tradition behind it, that it is a work in the round, that it exists by itself and is borne by its own volume and strength, and that it has an inherent technical and psychological character that the carpenter's art fails to explain and account for. Indeed, past artistic tradition and the art of the wood, clay, ivory, mineral stone and metal worker in howsoever large a scale and with whatever technical skill and efficiency cannot fully explain the art-tradition Mauryan sculptures represent, or the technical skill and efficiency of the Mauryan sculptor who worked in stone of huge and heavy proportions, and the atmosphere the sculptures themselves breathe.