Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c12.s14.2

c12.s14.2

It is indeed curious that the first organised art activity in India in large scale and durable material of which datable examples have come down to us in any recognisable number belongs to the period of the Mauryas. The Chalcolithic civilisation of the Indus valley has left behind relics, few in number but varied in subject and treatment, that may safely be said to belong to the domain of high art with a long artistic tradition and experience behind it. Indeed, the art represented by the reliefs on the seals and figure sculptures in the round found at Harappa, Mohen-jo-Daro and other sites in the Punjab, Sind, Baluchistan, and further north and east, is already highly developed, sophisticated and conscious, and expresses most fully and significantly the culture-ideology of a people urban in upbringing, highly sophisticated in the luxury of living, and probably industrial and feudal in socio-economic organisation. Like the civilisation itself its art also had already reached the creative climax of a tradition. Into the relation of this art with the art of the contemporary civilised world it is not the place to enter; but it must needs be told that this art in spite of its affinities with contemporary Mediterranean art has its own essential qualities and its own character cf form that link it with the art of India of the historical period¹. Yet the fact remains that the art of the Indus valley is still largely an unknown factor in so far as it remains chronologically unexplained, and we hardly know anything definite of what happened along the arrow of time between the final phase of the Indus valley civilisation and the civilisation that flourished in the Ganges valley more than two thousand years later.