Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c12.s18.9

c12.s18.9

Artistically the Didarganj Yakshiṇī is the best of the series and can in no way be considered as archaic or primitive. In the easy and light stoop and forward movement of the upper part of the body helped by a slight bend of the right knee-joint, the narrow waist and full round breasts with the necklace hanging rhythmically along and between the breast-lines, the broad hips, the shapely legs gradually tapering down to the thin ankles decorated by heavy and fully jewelled ornaments, the style of doing and decorating the hair, and not the least in the sensitiveness of flesh as revealed in what remains of the modelling of the abdomen, the chin and the region round the eyes, but more fully and clearly of the back—one witnesses here perhaps an earliest urban, conscious and sophisticated female type and form immortalised in later Indian art and literature. The fact that the treatment of its ornaments and drapery, especially of the latter, is the same as that of the Patna Yakshas is no reason why it should be labelled as primitive or considered as belonging to the same period or phase of early Indian art. The statue, plastically fully round, is bound by no ‘law of frontality’ and is meant to be seen from all sides—it has no primitivity whatsoever about it. Its heavy but loose mass of hair, its full soft bosoms and the firmness of the flesh at the back, and its attenuated waist with soft abdominal muscles and the broad hips at once recall the still daintier and more lively Yakshiṇīs of the Mathurā reliefs of the second century A.D. which are characterised by fully round and lively modelling of their limbs, scarfs and anklets. Indeed the Didarganj Yakshiṇī cannot be very much earlier than the latter, in spite of so-called Mauryan polish or its material which is Chunar sandstone.