History of Orissa from the Earliest Times to the British Period v2.c47.19.3

v2.c47.19.3

Over the halo of the figure are represented the branches of a *Aśvattha* tree indicating that the figure is meant to be a *Vajrāsāna-Buddha-Bhaṭṭāraka*. On the halo itself we find the Buddhist creed, the characters of which enable us to determine the age of the sculpture. It is the alphabet of North-eastern India, of which the palatal *Śa*, in which the upper part of the letter has ceased to be one curve and is separated into two separate strokes : a vertical straight line on the left and a curve which touches the straight line on the right. In the inscriptions of the adjoining province of Bengal this form of *Śa* is used exclusively in the 10th century. The next from of *Śa* is to be met with for the first time in the records of Mahīpāla I of Bengal. So far as is known, the earliest occurrence of this transitional form is in the Bodh-Gaya inscription of the 26th year of Dharmapāla. From the fact that this transitional form is very largely used in the votive inscriptions of Bengal and Bihar in the earlier part of the 10th Century A. D., it would be reasonable to infer that the second renaissance movement in the plastic art of Orissa also belongs to the same period. Images of this class can be called renaissance products in a limited sense, because compared with specimens of period “A” they are still crude in conception, because proportion is not regularly observed and there is a general degeneration of ideal in the execution of faces.