Hindu Polity: A Constitutional History of India in Hindu Times c29.8

c29.8

§ 185. As to the sculptures, it has never been claimed on behalf of the *gaṇas* that the Sāñchī and *Bharhut* monuments are the products of republican art. The question therefore, strictly speaking is irrelevant. I may, however, express a fear that probably Mr. Smith's conclusion is based on photographs of the reliefs of Sāñchī and Bharhut. The noses have been the pointed target of decay and iconoclasm. Further, many of the figures are meant to represent foreigners and barbarians and evil spirits, and their features have been studiedly made un-Hindu. A good example of this is the representation of *Yakshas* and *Yakshiṇīs* which occur again and again. The Yaksha and Yakshiṇī have been the theme of Indian mythology and folk-lore, poetry and romance, throughout literature. They are always connected with the Himalayas, and treated not only as foreign but also mischievous. Now, if the Himalayan people are represented with snub-nose, credit is due to the artist, but no credit can be given to ethnology which makes the sculptor identical with the sculptured, the virtue with the dreaded evil. The point becomes clearer if we take the life-size female statue discovered at Patna. The Bharhut Yakshiṇī is ugly, heavy and repulsive, while the statue lately discovered is as perfectly Aryan as it could be, with the poetic *tribhanga*, a beautiful nose, small chin and the Aryan head.¹ This is the type which the Jātaka describes² as the statue of motherly woman which decorated royal courts and deceived people in darkness as a living figure. One is the representation of the home type and the other foreign. In Indian art there is a tendency to devote pointed attention to the foreign and queer, as the Hindus do to-day in their national pageants. The man which the Hindu saw every day, namely, one like himself, did not interest the artist and his public so much as the outlandish, the uncommon, the *dwarf*, the *lion-rider*, the *snake-man* and the *snake-woman* the *Yaksha*, the *Abyssinian*, the mischievous alien slave. Incidently when the Sāñchī or Bharhut artist has come to deal with his own kings and queens, women and boys, ascetics and trees, the virtuous elephant, and the surgeon monkey, he has anticipated this ethnological controversy. I venture to challenge any one to show the snubnose or the high cheek bone or any outlandish element in those representations.¹