Maurya and Shunga Art c8.6

c8.6

Artistically the Didarganj Yakshini is the best of the series, and can in no way be considered as archaic or primitive. In the easy and slight stoop and forward movement of the upper part of the body helped by a slight bend of the right knee-joint, the narrow waist and full round breasts with the necklace hanging rhythmically along and between the breast-lines, the broad hips, the shapely legs gradually tapering down to the thin ankles decorated by heavy and fully jewelled ornaments, the style of doing and decorating the hair, and not the least, in the sensitiveness of flesh as revealed in what remains of the modelling of the abdomen, the chin and the region round the eyes, one witnesses perhaps an earliest urban, conscious and sophisticated female type and form immortalised in later Indian art and literature. The fact that the treatment of its ornaments and drapery, especially that the of latter, is the same as that of the Patna Yakshas is no reason why it should be labelled as 'primitive' or considered as belonging to the same period or phase of early Indian art. The statue, plastically fully round, is bound by no law of frontality and is meant to be seen from all sides; it has no primitivity whatsoever about it. Its heavy but loose mass of hair, its full soft bosoms and the firmness of the flesh at the back, its attenuated waist with soft abdominal muscles and the broad hips at once recall the still daintier and more lively Yakshinis of the Mathura reliefs of the second century A. D., which are characterised by fully round and lively modelling of their limbs, scarfs and anklets.