The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c33.48

v1.c33.48

To complete our survey of the arts of early India, we must retrace our steps, finally, to the North-West and pick up once more the threads of Hellenistic and Western Asiatic culture which became established there in the second century B.C., and subsequently led to the development of an influential school of Buddhist art. The all-important part played by Bactria and Persia in connexion with the monuments of Açoka has already occupied our attention. Forty years after the death of that Emperor the Bactrian armies of Demetrius overran the north of the Punjab and paved the way for the foundation of an independent Greek rule, which remained paramount in the North-West for nearly a hundred years and lingered on still longer in the hills of Afghānistān. The antiquities which these Eurasian Greeks and their immediate successors, the Scytho-Parthians, have bequeathed to us, are not numerous, but one and all consistently bear witness to the strong hold which Hellenistic art must have taken upon this part of India. Most instructive, perhaps, among them are the coins, the stylistic history of which is singularly lucid and coherent (Pl. XXX, 83, *a–l*). In the earliest examples every feature is Hellenistic. Their standard is the Attic standard; their legends are in Greek; their types are taken from Greek mythology, and designed with a grace and beauty reminiscent of the schools of Praxiteles or Lysippus; and their portraiture is characterised by a refined realism, which, while it is unmistakably Greek, demonstrates a remarkable originality on the part of the engravers. With the consolidation, however, of the Greek supremacy south of the Hindu Kush, the Attic standard quickly gave place to one—possibly based on Persian coinage—more suited to the needs of local commerce; bilingual legends were substituted for the Greek, and little by little the other Hellenistic qualities gradually faded, Indian elements being introduced among the types and the portraits losing their freshness and animation. And so the process of degeneration continued, relatively slowly among the Eurasian Greeks, more rapidly when added barbarian elements came to be introduced from Parthia. The testimony of these coins is specially valuable in this respect: it proves that the engravers who produced them were no mere slavish copyists of Western models, but were giving free and spontaneous expression to their own ideas; and it proves further that, though the art which they exhibit underwent an inevitable transformation in its new environment and as a result of political changes, its influence, nevertheless, was long and well-sustained on Indian soil.