Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c13.36

c13.36

As regards art, we must obviously look to Gandhāra for the chief source of Greco-Roman influence upon India. These sculptures, as we have already seen, were probably the work of craftsmen imported from Syria. These craftsmen were not, of course, artists of a high order. None of their productions shews any inspiration or any outstanding merit, and Syrian art at the time was decadent. It appears likely that these artists settled in the Panjāb, as their productions, purely Greek at first, become, as time goes on, more and more deeply tinged with Indian influence. The latest work of the Gandhāra school is a compromise between Greek and early Buddhist art. It has been the fashion of late to abuse the Gandhāra sculptures roundly. This is not altogether fair. They possess, of course, nothing like the beauty or vigour of the graceful and powerful work of the Gupta period, but many of them are by no means devoid of charm and interest. They are a lively commentary on the life of Gautama and the Jātaka legends. The Gandhāra sculptors were the first to portray the Master as a human being. The earlier Buddhist sculptors, with puritanical abhorrence of idolatry, merely indicate his presence by symbols such as footmarks (pāduka), the wheel, or the umbrella. The conventional figure of the Master in modern Hīnayāna Buddhism of to-day, shews in the halo, the arrangement of the drapery, and the treatment of the hair, traces of borrowing from Gandhāra. The Corinthian pillars which appear on some of the friezes, with the figures placed among the foliage of the capital, and finished with stucco, resemble Roman work of the third century¹. These pillars are ornamental, of course, not structural. Kanishka’s buildings were, no doubt, purely Indian in type, but being made principally of wood and brick, in Indian fashion, they have almost entirely vanished. There is no reason to suppose that India was in any way influenced by Greek architecture. By 400 A.D., if not earlier, the Gandhāra school appears to have been completely extinct.