A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c10.s3: Section III. Criticism
A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c10.s3
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Section III. Criticism
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The productions of the Gandhāra school, good, bad, and indifferent, are so numerous that it would be easy to fill the whole of this volume with interesting illustrations of them, without exhausting the material available; but it is hoped that the reproductions in this chapter may be considered sufficient to give an adequate notion of the best work of the school, and to indicate the steps in the process of gradual Indianization of the style. Students who desire to follow out in detail the evolution of the Buddha type, or any of the many other fascinating problems suggested by these strangely composite works—so Greek or Graeco-Roman from one point of view, and so Indian from another—will find abundant material for reflection and discussion in the collections of numerous museums and the publications devoted to the exposition of different aspects of the many-sided subject.
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We now pass on from description to critical and historical comment, as brief as possible.
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[Figure: Fig. 78. Four-armed image, from Momand Frontier. (Arch. S. photo. No. 397.)]
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The general impression produced by study of the Gandhāra sculptures is that they form a class standing to a considerable extent apart from the main current of the evolution of art within the limits of India. M. Foucher has succeeded, I think, in demonstrating that the Gandhāra school has no direct filial relations with the earlier art of Maurya and Sunga times dealt with in Chapter III of this work, notwithstanding the appearance in both of certain elements common to the Hellenistic art of Western Asia. The artists of the north-west, who were masters of the technique of Asia Minor, had no need to copy tritons, centaurs, and so forth, from the works of their humbler predecessors in the interior. The true view seems to be that, whatever may be the sources and extent of foreign influence on the work of early Indian sculptors, the rapid development of the Gandhāra school during the first century of the Christian era was the direct result of a fresh importation into the frontier regions, by accomplished artists introduced from outside, of Hellenistic ideas expressed in the forms then current throughout the Roman Empire.
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Such importation of artists and ideas appears to have been closely associated with and dependent on the extension of the foreign Kushān or Indo-Scythian empire, as it gradually advanced its borders from the Oxus to the Ganges, and possibly as far as the Narbadā.¹ Unfortunately, as already observed, the chronology of those times is uncertain; and until the chronological question, summed up as the problem of the date of Kanishka, shall be definitely solved, the exact relations of the art of Gandhāra with that of the Graeco-Roman world and India proper cannot be elucidated with all the precision desirable.
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¹ This was the view taken by Sir A. Cunningham, which I hesitated to accept at one time, but now admit to be correct.
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It is, however, safe to affirm both that the Kushān kings had become lords of Kābul, with at all events part of the Panjāb, before A.D. 100, and that by that date the character of the Gandhāra style was already fixed. Much of the better sculpture of the Gandhāra school undoubtedly was produced during the reigns of Kanishka and his colleague and successor, Huvishka.
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No doubt, Hellenistic work adapted to Indian requirements had been done on the frontier in earlier times. The execution of such work during the reign of Azes I at some time in the first century B.C. is established by the Bīmarān casket (*post*, Chap. X, Sec. 4), the Ionic temples of Taxila (*ante*, p. 101), and the Pallas Athene statuette (*ante*, p. 116, Fig. 66). Although, so far as I know, it is not possible at present to refer any given work in the Gandhāra style to an earlier period, there is no apparent reason why Indo-Hellenistic sculpture should not have been produced from at least the age of Demetrius, 'King of the Indians', at the beginning of the second century B.C.,² and it is possible that certain extant examples may be as early. But the admission of the probable existence of Indo-Hellenistic sculpture from about 200 B.C. does not involve an admission that the origin of the Gandhāra school long preceded the Christian era. The earlier Hellenistic works differed from it in style. The Ionic temples of Taxila apparently had no successors, and the Bīmarān casket, while agreeing with the Gandhāra sculptures in the arrangement of the figures in compartments separated by pilasters with sunken panels, differs in the form of the arches and the absence of Corinthian capitals. The Pallas Athene, too, is more distinctly Greek than the true Gandhāra work. The characteristic of that work is the modified Corinthian capital, similar in style to the capitals fashionable throughout the Roman empire in the early centuries of the Christian era.
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² *Early Hist. of India*, 2nd ed., p. 210.
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The appearance in sculpture of that specially Graeco-Roman form coincides with the introduction of the Kushān gold coinage, agreeing in weight with the Roman *aureus*, though somewhat debased in standard.³ All the evidence, in my judgement, leads to the inference that the rapid development and extension of the distinct Gandhāra school, with its characteristic Indo-Corinthian capitals, were effected under the patronage of the great Kushān kings, who must have imported foreign artists, and through their agency have carried the application of Hellenistic technique to Indian subjects much farther than had ever been done before. Such foreign artists, accredited by royal authority and the fashion of the court, would have been readily accepted as teachers by the local Indian sculptors, who, after their accustomed manner, would have proceeded to adapt the new methods to their own purposes, sometimes, perhaps, bettering the instructions of their masters.
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³ For details see Cunningham, *Coins of Mediaeval India*, p. 16.
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The sudden introduction of the Persian style of painting into India by order of Akbar in the sixteenth century, and the immediate development of a prolific Indo-Persian school, surpassing its prototype in certain respects, while inferior in others, offer an almost exact parallel to the events which happened, as I believe, in the kingdom of Gandhāra during the first century of the Christian era. The parallel fails in so far that the Persian style of painting, being congenial to Indian taste, readily admitted of certain modifications which may be reasonably regarded as improvements, whereas the ultimate models of the Gandhāra sculptors having been the masterpieces of Attic and Ionic art, alien in spirit to the art of India, were usually susceptible of modification by Indian craftsmen only in the direction of degradation.
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It is obvious that the foreign elements in the art of Gandhāra tended to diminish as time went on, and that, generally speaking, the sculptures with most clearly marked Greek character should be considered early, and those most Indianized as comparatively late. But, as already pointed out (*ante*, p. 98), this criterion affords no infallible test of age. Some of the best finished works in Hellenistic style may have been executed by clever Indian imitators long after the introduction of the style, just as among the Mughal paintings we find close imitations of Persian models side by side and contemporary with paintings profoundly Indianized.
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Most European critics, rightly convinced of the unapproachable excellence of the highest type of Greek art, the model of the less excellent Hellenistic art, see in the process of gradual Indianization a decadence. But the critics of the new 'nationalist' school are persuaded that this view is erroneous, and that the process of Indianization is in itself an artistic improvement. Mr. Havell, in general agreement with Dr. Coomaraswamy, teaches that the earliest Gandhāra sculptors were no better than mechanical craftsmen, hirelings following more or less impure Hellenistic traditions, engaged by the frontier kings in the manufacture of inferior objects of handicraft, which are mere 'soulless puppets, debased types of the Greek and Roman pantheon posing uncomfortably in the attitudes of Indian asceticism', and tarred with the vices of commercialism, insincerity, and want of spirituality, most conspicuous in the earliest examples. The indictment continues:—
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'The insincerity and want of spirituality typical of nearly all the art of Gandhāra are, as I have said, most conspicuous in the earliest examples, or those which are attributed to the first century of our era, when the Roman influence was strongest. Two centuries later, in the sculptures of the Loriyān Tangai Monastery, which Professor Grünwedel
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describes as belonging to the best period of Gandhāra,¹ the art has become more Indian, more national, and more spiritual, but it has not yet achieved the true ideal of Indian art. Since, however, it is Indian influence, Indian thought, which has so far perfected the style, it is surely incorrect to say that the ideal of Indian Buddhist art has been created by foreigners. Foreign hands may have held the tools, but the influences which have dominated the art have been throughout Indian. . . . The perfected ideal of Indian art is as far in advance of the Gandhāran type as the art of the Parthenon surpasses the art of Gandhāra. Neither artistically nor technically is it possible to place the best Gandhāran sculpture in the same plane with that of Borobodūr, Elephanta, or Ellora, or even with the best modern Nepalese metal-work, such as the Buddha in Plate VI.’²
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¹ Now in the Indian Museum, Calcutta. See *ante*, p. 109, Fig. 60, the visit of Indra to Buddha. The date of the sculptures is not by any means certain.
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² *Indian Sculpture and Painting*, pp. 45–50.
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The critic then proceeds to liken Gandhāran art to ‘cheap, modern Italian plaster work’, and to extol the later mediaeval sculpture and bronzes as exhibiting ‘quiet restrained dignity, calm conviction, and effacement of physical detail . . . the embodiment of a great national tradition, a synthesis of Eastern philosophy and religious art’. We are further told that the Brahmanical art of the eighth and ninth centuries expresses ‘the true Indian conception of divinity in a superhuman, spiritualized body’, or, as elsewhere phrased, ‘the idea of a purified, transcendental body formed by the practice of Dhyāna [meditation] and Yoga [ascetic restraint]’. So Dr. Coomaraswamy declares that ‘just as through all Indian schools of thought there runs like a golden thread the fundamental idealism of the Upanishads—the Vedānta—so in all Indian art there is a unity that underlies all its bewildering variety. This unifying principle is here also Idealism, and this must of necessity have been so, for the synthesis of Indian thought is one, not many’.³
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³ *The Aims of Indian Art* (Essex House Press), 1908.
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The substance of these criticisms seems to mean that all high-class Indian sculpture must be an expression of Brahmanical metaphysics, nothing else being truly Indian or national. But the Gandhāra artists, who certainly did not worry about a ‘superhuman, transcendental body’, or take any interest in the Upanishads, agreed in those respects with the artists of all the early Buddhist schools, who were, nevertheless, just as Indian and national as any ninth-century Brahman could be. Although the technique of Gandhāra differed widely from that of Bharhut, Sānchī, and the rest, all the early Buddhist schools alike, that of Gandhāra included, were animated by the Buddhist kindly humanistic spirit, as different as possible from the Tantric notions dominating mediaeval art, both Brahmanical and Buddhist, but equally Indian. We are not entitled to denounce Gandhāran art as ‘lacking in spirituality’, and so forth, merely because it does not express the ideas of Elūra and Elephanta. As a matter of fact, many of the good Gandhāra sculptures may be fairly held to express with admirable feeling and sincerity the ideal of a saintly Indian man, and to be not lacking in ‘restrained dignity’. For instance, the beautiful Berlin Bodhisattva (*ante*, Fig. 63) is very far from being a ‘soulless puppet’; the Lahore Museum Kuvera (Plate XXVIII)
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has a good share of 'restrained dignity'; and many of the Buddhas are quite equal to any of the Javanese or Ceylonese images. Much credit is given by the new school of critics to the achievements of mediaeval sculptors in the representation of gesture and strenuous action; but, without depreciating their work, it is permissible to insist on the similar merits of the Gandhāran heads and Atlantes (*ante*, p. 100; *post*, Chap. XI).
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The best works of the Gandhāra school are deserving of high commendation for their aesthetic, technical, and phonetic qualities, to use Fergusson's terminology; or, in other words, because they are intrinsically beautiful, skilfully executed, and well adapted to express both the ideal of the artist and the religious sentiment of his patrons. The great defect of the later mediaeval sculpture is that it is so often ugly and repulsive, even when entitled to praise for power, technical skill, or vigorous expression—or even for all those three qualities. The Gandhāran work is rarely either ugly or repulsive, and that in India is no small merit.
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A Japanese author has come to the strange conclusions that 'a deeper and more informed study of the works of Gandhāra itself will reveal a greater prominence of Chinese than of so-called Greek influence', and that the sculptures 'follow in the main, so far as we know, the Hâng [*i. e.* Han dynasty of China] style in features, drapery, and decoration'. No evidence is adduced in support of these bold propositions, which are demonstrably opposed to the facts. The two Han dynasties were comprised between the years 206 B.C. and 220 A. D., during which period no considerable peaceful intercourse between India and China is recorded, nor is there reason to believe that any such unrecorded intercourse worth mentioning took place. It is impossible to imagine how Chinese art could have influenced India at that time. Sculptures of the Han period are very rare, being nearly confined to two localities in the province of Shantung, and ascribed, some to the first century before, and others to the first century after Christ. The ten specimens reproduced by Dr. Bushell have not the remotest resemblance to the work of the Gandhāran or any Indian school. How, then, can the sculptures of Gandhāra follow the 'Han style in features, drapery, and decoration'? No painting of the Han period is known to exist. The most ancient Chinese painting extant is the now well-known picture executed by Ku K'ai-chih in the fourth century and preserved in the British Museum. It does not show the slightest trace of any connexion with Indian art. What does Mr. Okakura mean by referring to the 'so-called Greek influence' on the art of Gandhāra? Innuendo is not argument, and the palpable fact of the Hellenistic origin of the Gandhāran sculptures, so far as their form and technique are concerned, is not affected by dubbing it 'so-called'. It would not be worth while to notice Mr. Okakura's rash assertions, but for the attention that his book has received in certain quarters for its attempted vindication of the claims of Asiatic as against European art ideals.¹
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¹ Kakasu Okakura, *The Ideals of the East, with special reference to the Art of Japan* (Murray, 1903), pp. 78, 92. The author, with equal disregard of easily ascertainable facts, declares (p. 76) that the Iron Pillar of Delhi is a work of Asoka's time, calling it 'the lofty iron pillar of Asoka at Delhi—strange marvel of casting!', and further (p. 5) that Asoka's edicts 'dictated terms to the sovereigns of Antioch and Alexandria'. This latter statement could hardly be made by anybody who had read the edicts. The Iron Pillar was erected early in the fifth century after Christ, about six centuries and a half after Asoka's death (*J. R. A. S.*, 1897, pp. 1–18). For the Han sculptures, see Bushell, *Chinese Art*, figures 8–17. For Ku-K'ai-chih's picture, see Fig. 125 in the same work, or Mr. Binyon's article in *Burlington Magazine*, Jan. 1904, or the same author's *Painting in the Far East*; or Giles's *An Introduction to the History of Chinese Pictorial Art* (Shanghai, 1905), p. 16 and Plate. I have seen the original painting in the Print Room of the British Museum.
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Within the limits of India the art of Gandhāra was not widely propagated.
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Perhaps the only places where its influence can be traced clearly are Mathurā, Amarāvatī, and Ajantā. The Buddhas on the pillars in Cave X of Ajantā (*post*, Chap. VIII, Sec. 3) are clearly related in type to Gandhāra work. Political conditions seem to have been responsible to a great extent for the failure of the art of the north-western frontier to penetrate deeply into the interior. The Kushān empire apparently broke up in the time of Vāsudeva I, the successor of Huvishka, and was followed probably by a time of unrecorded anarchy. The next empire, that of the Guptas, who completed the conquest of the Gangetic valley about the middle of the fourth century, did not include the Panjāb, and so was separated from Gandhāra by foreign territory.
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But outside India the Gandhāra school achieved a grand success by becoming the parent of the Buddhist art of Eastern or Chinese Turkistan, Mongolia, China, Korea, and Japan. The stages of the transmission of the style to the Far East have been clearly disclosed by the abundant discoveries of sculptures and paintings in the manner of Gandhāra throughout Chinese Turkistan, both to the north and south of the Taklamakān (Gobi) Desert. Through China the imported forms of Buddhist art passed to Korea, and thence to Japan. Pious pilgrims, like Fa-hien and Hiuen Tsang, played a large part in determining the course of Buddhist art in China by bringing back from the Indian Holy Land multitudes of images and pictures which became the authoritative models for Chinese monastic artists. The Indian influence, it must be clearly understood, affected the art of China and Japan only in its application to Buddhist uses. In other departments Chinese art, and its daughter in Japan, developed independently of Indian teaching.
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The pursuit of the eastern ramifications of Indian Buddhist art lies beyond the scope of this work, but a slight sketch in outline of the process by which the Gandhāra style became the basis of the art devoted to the service of Buddhism in the Far East is an almost indispensable supplement to an account of the Gandhāra school, and may be presented in few words.
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Communications between China and the western countries were first opened up during the time of the Early Han Dynasty (226 B.C. to A.D. 25)¹ by means of the mission of Chang-Kien, who was sent as envoy to the Oxus region, and died about 114 B.C. That mission resulted in the establishment of regular intercourse between China and the Scythian powers, but did not involve contact with India. In the year A.D. 8 the official relations of the Chinese government with the western states came to an end, and when the first Han dynasty ceased to exist in A.D. 25 Chinese influence in those countries had vanished. But in A.D. 73 a great general named Pan-chao 班超 reduced the King of Khotan to subjection, and from that date continued his victorious career until his death in A.D. 102, when the power of China attained its greatest western extension. In the last decade of the first century Pan-chao inflicted a severe defeat on the Kushān king of Kābul somewhere beyond the Pāmīrs in the Yārkand or Kāshgar country. Most probably that king was Kanishka. After Pan-chao's death the Kushān king retrieved his defeat and occupied Khotan, at some time between A.D. 102 and 123. To that Indo-Scythian conquest of Khotan I would attribute the rapid spread of Indian languages, scripts, religion, and art in Chinese Turkistan, as disclosed by the discoveries of recent years. I do not mean that Indian influence then first began to be felt, for there is reason to believe that it crossed the passes more than three hundred years earlier, in the age of Asoka, but its great extension appears not to go back further than the first quarter of the second century of the Christian era, the very time when the art of Gandhāra was at its best. Kanishka's defeat of the Chinese and conquest of Khotan afford an adequate explanation of the archaeological facts. Probably the Indo-Scythian occupation of Khotan did not last very long, but no documentary evidence on the subject has yet been discovered. During the third century Buddhism effected considerable progress in China, and from the beginning of the fifth century to the eighth a constant stream of learned pilgrims devoted themselves to the task of saturating Chinese Buddhism with Indian ideas and Indian art. Early in the seventh century Bajna and his son, Wei-tschü I-song, distinguished painters from Khotan, visited the Chinese court, and founded an Indo-Chinese school of painting. China transmitted the Indian forms of Buddhist art to Korea, whence they passed to Japan. That is the outline of the facts.¹ During all the centuries mentioned there is no indication of a reflex action of Chinese on Indian art, the supposed Chinese influence on the Ajanṭā paintings a little before or after A.D. 600 being very doubtful.
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¹ Chinese dynastic dates are given according to Tchang, le Père Mathias—*Synchronismes chinois* (Chang-hai, 1905).
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¹ Hirth, F.—*Ueber fremde Einflüsse in der chinesischen Kunst* (München und Leipzig, 1896), p. 83. For art of Gandhāra style in Turkistan, see Dr. Stein's works, and the German publications giving the results of the first German expedition to Turfan, as enumerated by Dr. v. Le Coq in *J. R. A. S.*, 1909, p. 301.
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The fact that the prevalent existing forms of Buddhist art in the Far East originated in Gandhāra has been fully proved in detail by Professor Grünwedel and other authors, whose finding on that point is generally accepted.
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The leading authority is FOUCHER, A.—*L'Art gréco-bouddhique du Gandhāra*, Paris, 1905, tome I (Tome II is in preparation). Other valuable works by the same author are:—'Notes sur la géographie ancienne du Gandhāra' (*Bull. de l'École française d'Extrême-Orient*, Hanoi, 1902); 'Les Bas-reliefs du Stūpa de Sikri (Gandhāra)' (*Journal Asiatique*, 1903); and *Étude sur l'Iconographie bouddhique de l'Inde*, Paris, 1900, 1905. The next in importance is GRÜNWEDEL, PROF. A.—*Buddhist Art in India*, translated by Agnes C. Gibson, revised and enlarged by BURGESS, J. (Quaritch, 1901). This indispensable work gives a full bibliography up to the date of publication. See also several articles in MARSHALL, J.—*Annual Reports of Arch. Survey, India*, from 1902-3 to date: and other references in footnotes. Plates Nos. 69-154 in BURGESS, J.—*The Ancient Monuments, Temples and Sculptures of India* (Griggs, 1897), are devoted to the Gandhāra school. Another good set of plates is in the same author's articles entitled 'The Gandhāra Sculptures' (*J. Ind. Art and Industry*, April, July, 1898; Jan. 1900), of which the two earlier were reprinted by Griggs in 1899.