The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c33.53

v1.c33.53

The question of the rôle played by classical art in India has been a much disputed one in the past, some authorities maintaining that it was almost a negligible factor, others that it underlay the whole fabric of Indian art. The truth, as so often happens, lies between the two extremes. In Hindustān and in Central India it took, as we have seen, an important part in promoting the development of the Early National School both by clearing its path of technical difficulties and strengthening its growth with new and invigorating ideas. In the north-west region and immediately beyond its frontiers, on the other hand, it long maintained a complete supremacy, obscuring the indigenous traditions and itself producing works of no mean merit, which add appreciably to our understanding of the Hellenistic genius; here, too, as Indian influence waxed stronger, it eventually culminated in the School of Gandhāra, which left an indelible mark on Buddhist art throughout the Orient. Nevertheless, in spite of its wide diffusion, Hellenistic art never took a real and lasting hold upon India, for the reason that the temperaments of the two peoples were radically dissimilar. To the Greek, man, man's beauty, man's intellect were everything, and it was the apotheosis of this beauty and this intellect which still remained the key-note of Hellenistic art even in the Orient. But these ideals awakened no response in the Indian mind. The vision of the Indian was bounded by the immortal rather than the mortal, by the infinite rather than finite. Where Greek thought was ethical, his was spiritual; where Greek was rational, his was emotional. And to these higher aspirations, these more spiritual instincts, he sought, at a later date, to give articulate expression by translating them into terms of form and colour. But that was not until the more spacious times of the Guptas, when a closer contact had been established between thought and art, and new impulses imparted to each. At the age of which we are speaking, the Indian had not yet conceived the bold and, as some think, chimerical idea of thus incarnating spirit in matter. Art to him was a thing apart—a sensuous, concrete expression of the beautiful, which appealed intimately to his subconscious aesthetic sense, but in which neither intellectuality nor mysticism had any share. For the rest, he found in the formative arts a valuable medium in which to narrate, in simple and universal language, the legends and history of his faith; and this was mainly why, for the sake of its lucidity and dramatic power, he welcomed with avidity and absorbed the lessons of Hellenistic art, not because he sympathised with its ideals or saw in it the means of giving utterance to his own.