The Age of the Imperial Guptas c9.22

c9.22

We have now to discuss the effects of the new Buddha-type in the eastern provinces of Northern India. The influence of the Benares school was more widely felt towards the east than to the west. The only reason for this appears to be the activity of the artists in the metropolitan district of the Gupta empire. Quarter of a century ago Gupta sculptures were exceedingly rare in Bihar and Bengal; but the recent excavations of Nālandā have thrown such a brilliant flood of light on the plastic art of the eastern countries of Northern India that it is no longer possible to deny the existence of such a school in and around Pāṭaliputra. The differentiative features of this eastern school we shall discuss later on. In connection with the Benares school we shall have to discuss its influence on that of Pāṭaliputra. Images discovered at Nālandā, both in stone and in metal, definitely prove that the first distinctive feature of the Benares school had permeated as far as Nālandā. This is noticeable both in early Gupta and later Gupta sculptures. The great metal image of Buddha discovered at Nālandā³ shows the tangential eyebrows, the schematic arrangement of the curls of hair and the typical uṣṇīṣa of the Benares school. It differs from the regular Benares type of Buddha in its stylistic arrangement of both the upper and the lower garments and in the presence of the conventional lines indicating the folds of the drapery. Exactly similar characteristics are to be observed in the large copper image of Buddha discovered at Sultanganj, in the Bhagalpur district, and now preserved in the Birmingham Museum.¹ In Buddha images these two characteristics differentiate the Pāṭaliputra school from that of Benares, which were handed down by post-Gupta artists to the great Eastern Indian School of mediæval sculpture (800-1200 A.D.). The curly fringe of the upper and lower garments along with the conventional lines indicating the folds of the drapery show the indebtedness of the Pāṭaliputra school to the Indo-Greek school of Gandhāra. For some time, the Mathurā school of the early Gupta period retained the lines of the drapery but the curly fringe disappeared early in the Kuṣāṇa period. The influence of the Benares school was exerted more strongly outside the metropolitan province of the Gupta empire. An image of Buddha discovered at Biharoil, in the Rajshahi district of Bengal, is distinctly of the Benares type, so much so that it deluded Rai Bahadur Pandit Dayaram Sahni, M.A., into believing that it was actually made at Benares and transported to Northern Bengal for dedication. The technique is distinctly that of the Benares school in its entirety, but the material is not Chunar sandstone, thereby proving that mere identity of features and technique do not indicate locality so far as the Benares school is concerned. The Biharoil image shows the curly fringe of the drapery gathered together in the proper left hand. Moreover, the tangential eye-brows are less pronounced. The eastward extension of the influence of the Benares school was further demonstrated by the discoveries at Dah Parbatiya, near Tezpur in Assam, of a stone door, frame of the Gupta period in which the moulding of the forms of the river goddesses, Ganges and Yamunā, at the bottom of the jambs is distinctly reminiscent of the Benares school¹ and at the same time different from the mouldings of similar forms on the jamb from Besnagar now in the Boston Museum of Fine Art.²