[Pramāṇa](https://indike.org/pramana/) › [Studies](https://indike.org/pramana/ins) › [Architecture and art](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.art) › [Maurya and Shunga Art](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.art.ray-1945) › c4 # Maurya and Shunga Art c4: I. Introductory Maurya and Śuṅga Art c4 - **Language:** English ### I. Introductory ### [c4.2](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.art.ray-1945.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. ### [c4.3](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.art.ray-1945.c4.3) The earliest that the Ganges Valley is alleged to have offered to us in the shape and form of what may be called an art object is a small gold tablet representing a naked woman standing on her legs in symmetrical rigidity, with exaggerated hips and sexual organs, heavy and clumsy ornaments and in a rigidly angular composition.² Dug out of a tomb near Lauriya, it was identified by Bloch, the explorer, as the iconic representation of the Earth goddess, and was ascribed by him to about the 8th or 7th century B.C. There can hardly be any doubt that such images in metal, and perhaps also in clay, served as fetishistic symbols. There are passages in the Ṛig Veda and later also in the Gṛihya Sūtras which can be interpreted to suggest that figures of gods and animals were fashioned in metal and clay for such purposes. A small gold tablet similar to that found at Lauriya and a small gold figure, forming part of the relics from the ruins of the Piprahwa Stūpa evidently Buddhistic, and belonging to a period not earlier that of the Mauryas,³ reveal the same motive and treatment as those of the Lauriya tablet, so that the latter can hardly be ascribed to so early a period as has been done. Some of the oldest terracotta pieces recovered by Marshall from the ruins of Bhita also seem to belong more or less to this category⁴; their motive, if not their treatment, is the same, so that all these objects my be taken to be typical representations of a primitive phase of imagination and expression centring round fetishistic beliefs. They are not definitely the products of any organised and conscious art movement in any considerable scale, though it must be admitted that primitive faiths and beliefs may have helped and favoured the development of sculptural and architectural art in India at a later stage of history. In any case, the Piprahwa and Lauriya gold pieces seem to be artistic representations of fetishistic symbols outside the Maurya court and represent the popular tradition of art that was later on to find its fullest expression in the reliefs of Barhut. ### [c4.4](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.art.ray-1945.c4.4) That this was indeed the case is fully borne out by early Buddhist and Jaina texts and supported by early Buddhist sculptural reliefs that reveal the flourishing existence, particularly in Middle and Eastern India, of a primitive religion that indulged in the worship of such symbols as the ‘chaitya’ which was either a holy tree or groves of trees ( rukkhachetiya, vanachetiya, ārāma-chetiya etc. ), and not unfrequently these trees were the abode of gods or spirits known as vṛikshadevatās, yakshas, etc. Another important symbol that received worship was the ‘stūpa’, a hemispherical tumulus, either votive or commemorative. All such objects and places of primitive worship were enclosed for protection with a railing which must have given the people some scope for the play of their artistic and decorative instincts.⁵ A third object that also seems to have been an important element in the primitive religion of Middle and Eastern India was the animal standard, the ‘dhvaja-stambha’ of later Indian literature, i.e. posts or pillars crowned by animals considered sacred and therefore worshipped by primitive peoples. This trait of primitive religion was not particularly characteristic of India alone, but was equally potent in Babylonia and Assyria as well as in ancient Greece. Later Brahmanical mythology knows of such standards or ‘stambhas’ of at least three different animal-gods, namely the Garuḍa, the Vṛisha and the Makara, the ‘vāhanas’ of Viṣṇu, Śiva, Gaṅgā and Kandarpa respectively. Sometimes the animal was substituted by certain trees considered sacred, the Kalpadruma or the ‘wishing tree’, for example, and the palm tree represented by its crowning cluster of leaves.⁶ It was evidently from such early specimens of primitive animal standards made of impermanent materials like wood and bamboo etc. that Aśoka seems to have derived the inspiration of erecting monumental pillars crowned by sacred animals. ### [c4.5](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.art.ray-1945.c4.5) But of such objects of worship before the days of Aśoka Maurya we have hardly any remains extant, nor of the ‘yakṣa-devatās’ or spirits referred to in a general way or specifically by name in early Buddhist and Jaina texts. Attempts have been made on epigraphic reasons to identify the two statues in the round from Patna in reddish-grey sand stone of the Chunar region and bearing ‘chauris’ as those of yakṣas; indeed behind the shoulder of one of these statues, on the scarf is a short inscription, paleographically assignable to abour the first century A.D., that may be read as yakh (o) sa (?) Vatanaṃdī. That they are monumental sculptural representations of yakṣas there can hardly be any doubt, though persistent attempts were once made to identify them as statues of two kings of the Śaiśunāga dynasty of Magadha.⁷ This later theory is no longer seriously pressed; but it is still generally held that they belong stylistically to the later phase of Mauryan art. I shall try to show later on that the so-called Mauryan polish which is the rock-argument on which the assumption is based can hardly be considered sufficient for their being labelled as Mauryan, and that not only paleographically but stylistically as well they cannot belong to a period of art earlier than that represented at Sanchi and in the early primitives of Mathura. ### [c4.6](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.art.ray-1945.c4.6) The fact remains therefore that we have no examples extant of either sculpture or architecture that can definitely be labelled chronologically as pre-Mauryan. Indeed, all evidences suggest that whatever specimens of these two branches of visual art we know are directly the products of the Mauryya court. Except two pillars that stylistically may be ascribed to a date anterior to that of Aśoka, all the rest belong definitely to the latter's reign along with the animal figures that crown them or exist independently. The description of the city of Pāṭaliputra and of the royal palace we read of in the accounts of classical writers like Megasthenes, Arrian and Strabo and the excavations at the site of the old city by Waddel and Spooner⁸ to which we shall turn at a later stage may be taken to suggest that Chandragupta, the first Maurya, may have been responsible for the original initiative in the general planning and execution of the building of the city as well as of the royal palace. But there can be little doubt that Bindusāra and Aśoka, particularly the latter, added considerably to the original lay out and the buildings. The Maurya Pillared Hall and the stupendous buildings remains of which were laid bare by Spooner may have presumably been built by Aśoka himself, since their essential ideology and conception agree so remarkably well with all that we already know of the aims, ideals, motives and general ideological design of that great benevolent autocrat. Such large designs executed with almost imperial thoroughness can for all that we know be associated with his name alone. Of other architectural remains that can definitely be associated with the Maurya dynasty are a few cave-dwellings dedicated by Aśoka and his grandson Daśaratha for the use of the monks of the Ājīvika sect. The more important remains of Mauryan art may on proven grounds be said to include the remains of the royal palace and city of Pāṭaliputra, a monolithic rail at Sarnath, the excavated chaitya-halls or cave-dwellings in the Barabar-Nagarjuni group of hills in Gaya, the non-edict-bearing and edict-bearing pillars with their capitals, and the front half of an elephant carved out in the round from a live rock at Dhauli in Orissa⁹. ### [c4.7](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.art.ray-1945.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. ## Linked texts (11) - [Gobhilagṛhyasūtra](https://indike.org/pramana/in.vedanga.kalpa.grhya.gobhila) — Gobhila, Sanskrit - [Ṛgvedasaṃhitā](https://indike.org/pramana/in.veda.samhita.rg) — Sanskrit - [Sārnāth](https://indike.org/pramana/inp.site.sarnath) - [Pāṭaliputra](https://indike.org/pramana/inp.site.pataliputra) - [Sāñcī](https://indike.org/pramana/inp.site.sanchi) - [Bharhut](https://indike.org/pramana/inp.site.bharhut) - [Dhauli](https://indike.org/pramana/inp.site.dhauli) - [Chunar](https://indike.org/pramana/inp.site.chunar) - [Basarh](https://indike.org/pramana/inp.site.basarh) - [Bhita](https://indike.org/pramana/inp.site.bhita) - [Piprahwa\_Stupa](https://indike.org/pramana/inp.monument.piprahwa-stupa) --- Source: [https://indike.org/pramana/ins.art.ray-1945.c4](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.art.ray-1945.c4) · Pramāṇa