The Age of the Imperial Guptas c9.14

c9.14

The introduction of this style in Benares itself is difficult to trace. Pandit (now Rai Bahadur) D. R. Sahni, the compiler of the catalogue of the Sarnath Museum of Archaeology, has not attempted it. A special study of the contents of the Sarnath Museum does not help in the least as all inscribed specimens show this particular feature, the first one mentioned above. In the Mathurā school the change is noticed in the first place by the final adoption of the curling hair and the uṣṇīṣa along with that of ornamental foliage and arabesques for the ornamentation of the halo. The most noticeable example is M.5 in the Indian Museum, Calcutta, in which the Mongoloid type of the eyes is to be noticed, perhaps, for the first time.¹ In the Mathurā school, the conventional lines indicating the folds of the drapery continued to be used for sometime and Buddha images of the Gupta period minus the lines of the drapery are rare. The best examples are A.5 in the Mathurā Museum. ² During the rule of the early Guptas over Northern India the output of the Mathurā school of sculpture diminished steadily. Very few Jaina images were dedicated and most of the products, especially images, are either Hindu or Buddhistic. It cannot be said that Buddhism was yet on the decline, we have the testimony of Fa-Hsien on that point. It was flourishing exceedingly at Benares, though languishing at the Buddhist Holy of Holies, Mahābodhi, as proved both by the statement of Fa-Hsien and the paucity of images at that place. The reason of the general decline of the Mathurā school of sculpture must be, therefore, a decline in the material prosperity of the people of that city. Jainism, too, must have declined, on the evidence of images, but it revived after Maḥmūd’s sack of that city in 1018 A.D. The extent of the influence exerted by the Benares school over the older school of Mathurā can be better gauged by a comparison of two Buddha images of these two schools now in the Indian Museum, Calcutta, S.14 ¹ and M.5. In these two the Mongoloid appearance of the upper part of the face and the tangential eyebrows are almost identical, the robes differ in the conventional lines indicating the drapery and there is more ornament on the halo of M.5 than in the case of S.14. This comparison will be sufficient to prove that the Mathurā school, at a later date in the Gupta period succumbed to the influences of the Benares School.