Maurya and Shunga Art c6.11

c6.11

The stone columns of the Maurya Pillared Hall were evidently without capitals whereas the columns of the pillared halls of Persepolis are provided with more or less elaborate capitals. Achaemenian columns stand either on bell-shaped bases or on plain rectangular blocks or on plain circular mouldings while independent Mauryan columns have no base at all. The bell-form that is used as supporting base in Persian columns serves as capital in Mauryan ones and makes altogether a different aesthetic effect; moreover, in form, shape and appearance the Mauryan bell, which along with the Achaemenian may have originally been derived from stylised lotus design and which may have been a common art-motif in both Indian and Iranian art-heritage, is a long way off from the Achaemenian bell in which a ring of leaves and petals plays an important part in the decoration of the upper end of the motif and which has no bulge whatsoever in the middle that makes the Mauryan bell so gainly and conspicuous. The Achaemenian shaft is fluted in all cases "save in the facades of the necropolis at Persepolis and the single column that still remains of the palace of Cyrus in the upland valley of Powar. In the latter case the anamoly is to be explained by the fact that the building to which the support belonged dates from a time when Persian art had not constituted itself and was as yet groping to strike out a path of its own. On the contrary, the rock-cut tombs are coeval with the palaces of Darius and Xerxes and if in them the shaft is plain, it was because the vaults stood at a considerable height above ground. To have made them fluted therefore, would have still further reduced the column and divested it of a frank clear aspect when viewed at that distance. To obviate so untoward a contingency the Persian sculptor modified the forms as the Greeks often did in similar cases."[41] Mauryan columns are all plain and circular, but evidently they did not adopt the type from Achaemenian unfluted ones which had for ordinary purposes been discarded by the Achaemenians themselves. A funeral mound at Lauriya-Nandangarh yielded to the excavator's spade a plain and circular piece of a column carved out of śāla wood; such columns are in our literature known as 'sthuna', and the 'primitive' animal standards were evidently comprised of such sthuna columns.[42] It is not unlikely that the Mauryan shaft was derived from such wooden originals. Indeed, early Buddhist literature speaks often of wooden pillars standing independently by themselves on public thoroughfares. Prof. Barua thinks that "the idea of setting up pillars on public roads (samsaraṇasi) might have been suggested by 'indrakīla' (Pāli, indakhīla) which, according to the Pāli scholiast, was a city-gate pillar made of durable wood (sāradāru mayatthambha)...The art of fashioning them with ornamentation, the capital and the abacus must have been the prevalent art of constructing the pillars of a pillared verandah or hall of a royal court" ('Aśoka and his Inscriptions', I, chap. IX). The above assumption derives further support from the fact that Achaemenian shafts are indeed built of separate pieces or segments of stone and evidently presents the essential character of the work of a mason, while the Mauryan shaft is one piece which partakes of the character of the work of a wood-carver or carpenter. The Achaemenian capitals crowned with a cluster of stylised palm-leaves after old Egyptian manner, and formed either of two semi-bulls or unicorns or lions seated back to back, or of an upright or inverted cup, and the whole crowned with projecting double volutes, have nothing whatsoever in common with the Mauryan capitals which consist as we have seen of simply a bell formed of stylised lotus-petals. The crowning abacus and the round and independent animal motif of Mauryan columns are also altogether absent in Achaemenian examples.