Maurya and Shunga Art c7.17.3

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;