Maurya and Shunga Art c7.17
Maurya and Śuṅga Art c7.17
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c7.17.1
The Dhauli elephant and perhaps the Rampurva bull seem to belong to a somewhat different aesthetic vision and outlook, perhaps to a different art tradition other than that of the lions. True, indeed, so far as feeling for volume and its reproduction are concerned they belong to the same fully developed stage of art as that of the crowning lions discussed above, and that there is nothing archaic and primitive about them; but it is equally true there is nothing conventional about them as well, and the plastic sense and method of treatment are altogether different. The fluidity of the modelling betrays a full knowledge of the softness of the flesh and of the flowing current of life that is within; it is also restrained and is not contaminated by any conventional exaggeration or localised emphasis. Nor is there any evidence of schematisation of form. Indeed, these two examples (with perhaps the Sānkāsya elephant as a close third) represent a different aesthetic outlook and a different art tradition than those of the crowning lions and the lion, horse and bull reliefs on the Sarnath abacus. This difference in outlook and tradition is clearly brought to the fore when the Rampurva bull is compared with the relief of the same animal in the Sarnath column; the two bulls belong to two different worlds as it were.
c7.17.2
It is, I think, permissible to assume that it is Indian aesthetic vision and imagination and Indian art tradition that are here largely at work, so far as art style at least is concerned. The same plastic conception and quality of modelling constitute the pivot round which early Indian art moves, and the same restraint and quiet dignity are the qualities that Indian art ever sought to achieve in higher art from the very beginning. Moreover, if the Dhauli and Sāṅkāśya elephants, particularly the former, are compared with the figures of elepants in bold and high relief in the frieze of the facade of the Lomaśa Ṛiṣi cave, it will at once be seen that they belong to the same style and tradition of art. This cave, even if not of Mauryan date, can not be very much later; all scholars recognise that the entire facade of this cave is the exact and literal translation in stone of a wooden prototype. It may be assumed therefore that figures of elephants in the same style and tradition as we see them on the stone facade were already being rendered in wood for generations when they came to be transferred on stone.
c7.17.3
It is not unlikely that in the Dhauli elephant, the Rampurva bull and partly in the Sāṅkāśya elephant, all of which are decidedly Indian in appearance and spirit, we but witness the traditional Indian conception of these objects and the older or contemporary Indian art style and tradition transferred into stone in terms of the requirements of that particular material and according to the dictates of bolder designs and bigger dimensions. Indeed, the Dhauli elephant and the Rampurva bull are both characterised by a lively naturalism and a plastic treatment of volume that are unlike those of the Mauryan lions or of the animals on the abacus of the Sarnath capital. But they cannot, I am afraid, be said to represent the stage of exhaustion of the art of the Indus Valley; rather their fresh energy and dignified bearing bespeak a new and fresh consciousness of life. I am, therefore, disposed to hold that the conventional art-form as represented by the lions is of foreign extraction, and from what we know of the phil-Hellinism of the Maurya court on the one hand and the art-form of the Hellenistic Orient on the other, there cannot be any reasonable doubt that it was imported from West-Asia which happened to be the play ground of Medo-Achaemenian and Hellenistic culture-complex. The art-form represented by the Dhauli elephant and the Rampurva bull stand on a different footing altogether;
c7.17.4
it is perhaps the indigenous art tradition practised in wood, presumably through centuries, an art tradition to which the art of the Indus Valley may have bequeathed but distant memories. To such plastic practices in wood and other materials we have references in the ‘Arthaśāstra’, the ‘Manusamhitā’, the ‘Ashtādhyāyī’ of Pāṇini, and in certain early Buddhist texts (Barua, JISOA, XI, pp. 65-68). Thus, there must have existed in pre-Mauryan India an art of wood-carving and clay-modelling that carved and modelled free and round figures of men and animals out of wood and clay, and perhaps also of big dimensions.