Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c12.s17.20

c12.s17.20

These remarks are however hardly applicable to the Dhauli elephant or the Rampurva bull which both seem to belong to a somewhat different aesthetic vision and outlook, perhaps to a different art-tradition. True, indeed, so far as feeling for volume and its reproduction are concerned they belong to the same fully developed stage of art as the crowning lions discussed above and that there is nothing archaic and primitive about them; but it is equally true there is nothing conventional about them as well, and the plastic sense and method of treatment is altogether different. The modelling betrays a full knowledge of the softness of the flesh and of the flowing current of life that is within; it is also restrained and is not contaminated by any conventional exaggeration or localised emphasis. Nor is there any evidence of schematisation of form. Indeed these two examples (with the Sankissa elephant as a close third) represent a different aesthetic outlook, a different art-tradition than those of the crowning lions and the lion, horse and bull reliefs on the Sārnāth abacus. This difference in outlook and tradition is clearly brought to the fore when the Rampurva bull is compared with the relief of the same animal from the Sārnāth column; the two bulls belong to two different worlds as it were. It is, I think, permissible to assume that it is Indian aesthetic vision and imagination and Indian art-tradition that are here largely at work, so far as art-style at least is concerned. The same plastic conception and quality of modelling constitute the pivot round which early Indian art moves, and the same restraint and quiet dignity are the qualities that Indian art ideal has sought to achieve in higher art from the very beginning. Moreover, if the Dhauli and Sankissa elephants, particularly the former be compared with the figures of elephants in bold and high relief in the frieze of the facade of the Lomaśa Ṛishi cave, it will at once be seen that they belong to the same style and tradition of art. This cave may not be of Mauryan date, but it cannot be very much later also; all scholars recognise that the entire facade of this cave is the exact and literal translation in stone of a wooden prototype. It may be assumed therefore that figures of elephants in the same style and tradition as we see them on the stone-facade were already being rendered in wood for generations before they came to be transferred on stone. It is not unlikely that in the Dhauli elephant, the Rampurva bull and partly in the Sankissa elephant, all of which are decidedly Indian in feeling, appearance and spirit, we but witness the traditional Indian conception of these objects and the older or contemporary Indian art-style and tradition transferred into stone in terms of the requirements of that particular material and according to the dictates of bolder designs and bigger dimensions. The mastery of the third dimension, in other words the solution of the difficult problem of free figure as revealed in them, is the only lesson the artists seem to have learnt from Graeco-Bactrian art-tradition. But here too it is possible to present the counter-hypothesis that there must have existed in pre-Mauryan India an art of wood-carving and clay-modelling that carved and modelled free and round figures of men and animals out of wood and clay, and perhaps also of big dimensions.