India Discovered

by John Keay

  As he wandered round, penning his thoughts as he went, his style grew increasingly jaunty; he was on the verge of attempting a description of the mithunas. But in the end he shied away, contenting himself, before climbing back into his palanquin, with a lively account of another ‘ecclesiastical erection’.

  Let us now look at the little Mahadeo, or lingam [the phallus symbol of the god Siva] which is to be seen in another temple. In order to arrive at it, it is necessary to ascend a considerable number of steps, at the top of which is situated the representation of the vital principle. Let us now measure the height of the gentleman. The natives objected to my going inside without taking off my boots, which would have been inconvenient; so standing at the doorway, I saw a bearer measure the height with my walking stick; it amounted to 2⅓ of its height or eight feet and its diameter to 1⅓ or four feet. Its weight will be about 7½ tons & and it is considered by far the biggest lingam in India.

  The next account of Khajuraho seems to be Cunningham’s. The General finally arrived there in 1865 and, if rather less naive than Burt, he was certainly not going to be any more explicit; ‘all of these [the sculptures] are highly indecent and most of them disgustingly obscene’. He must, though, have paid them a bit more attention. On the Khandariya Mahadeo he counted and measured 872 sculptures, mostly two and a half to three feet high. ‘The general effect of this great luxury of embellishment is extremely pleasing although the eye is often distracted by the multiplicity of detail.’ He also agreed with Burt about the date. Studying the script of every visible inscription, he came to the conclusion that all the temples dated from the tenth and eleventh centuries, ‘a date which I should otherwise be inclined to adopt on account of the gross indelicacy of the principal sculptures’. He also ascribed them to the patronage of the Chandel Rajputs of Chatterpore, who were one of the many rajput clans who so valiantly resisted the Mohammedan invaders.

  To Cunningham’s mind it was the fact that Khajuraho had been miraculously preserved from the iconoclastic Mohammedans that constituted its real importance. ‘The remains are more numerous and in better preservation than those of any other ancient city I have seen.’ Hidden away in an extremely remote tract of country, the site had been deserted by the Chandel rajahs before the Mohammedans advanced; then the jungle quickly smothered it as effectively as did the volcanic lava Pompeii. Though never an especially ancient or sacred site, the magnificence and profusion of its temples, their scarcely credible riot of sculpture and relief, and above all the pristine perfection of every detail, gave some idea of the splendour of older and holier cities before the Mohammedan conquest.

  In the whole of north India there is scarcely a statue that was not defaced by the Islamic invaders, scarcely a temple that was not ravaged. In Delhi the desecration and destruction were total. And the same was true of Mathura, the other site on Cunningham’s list which is of particular relevance to Indian sculpture. Since the discovery of Stacy’s ‘Silenus’, more carvings had come to light there. ‘In one of the ancient mounds outside the city the remains of a large monastery have lately been discovered. Numerous statues, sculptured pillars and inscribed bases of columns have been brought to light.’ According to Fa Hsien, Mathura had been a thriving Buddhist and Jain centre, and, as the scene of Krishna’s youthful exploits, an important place of Hindu pilgrimage. Indeed, the latter it still is. But today not a single building in the Mathura area dates back beyond the seventeenth century. The stupas, the monasteries, the temples were all razed to the ground by the invaders.

  Fa Hsien reported twenty Buddhist monasteries and 3000 monks, considerably more than Sarnath. In his day the domes of the stupas were clad in gold leaf, and the railings and their reliefs brightly painted. The monasteries and temples were covered with frescoes and the stone sculptures could barely compete with the multitude of gold and silver images. (One such, of solid gold, carried away by Mahmud of Ghazni in 1017, weighed half a ton and bore a single sapphire of three and a half pounds; Mahmud’s loot also included five more solid gold figures with rubies for eyes and a hundred silver images each of which was heavy enough to constitute a single load for a camel.) To get any idea of what the place must have been like one must also people it with priests and pilgrims, princes and ascetics, moving in procession from shrine to shrine; the maroons and ochres of the monks’ robes, a scarlet shawl, a dazzling dhoti, mingling amongst the sea of white cottons and glistening brown torsoes. Even the women of ancient India went naked above the waist – naked, that is, except for jewellery. And all the while the air would have been throbbing with the sounds and smells of worship – bells ringing, incense burning, chanting and shouting, the scent of a million marigolds and the murmur of a million prayers.

  Turning from that image to the silent halls of today’s Mathura Museum, the double tragedy of Indian art strikes one with force. For here, bar a few pieces sent to other museums, is all that is left of Mathura’s ancient glory: perhaps a dozen Buddha or Boddhisattva images, all to some extent mutilated, a few bits of railing, an architrave or two, a ‘Silenus’ like Stacy’s, more miscellaneous statuary, and a battery of Hindu deities. And, as if destruction by one set of foreigners were not in itself enough, the reconstruction of this past by another set of foreigners at first totally ignored all aesthetic values. The sculptures in the Mathura Museum are mostly carved out of the none-too-exciting sandstone of Sikri, a lifeless reddish stone marred with white spots. Sun-starved and paraded for inspection rather than effect, they invite the purely antiquarian and archaeological approach to Indian art. This was how Cunningham and his contemporaries saw them, and this is the stigma Indian art still to some extent bears. Sir William Jones would have been horrified. He had always insisted that Indian civilization deserved to be studied for its own sake and that Sanskrit literature, his particular field, could stand comparison with anything that Europe had to offer. But the rhetoric of Macaulay had put paid to all that. The only justification now for studying Indian culture was for the light it might shed on the past. An aesthetic, emotional or spiritual appreciation would have to wait another half century.

  Cunningham had first visited Mathura in 1853. He returned with the Archaeological Survey in 1862, 1871 (twice), 1876 and 1882; no other site in the country received so much attention. His own finds and acquisitions were numerous, including the giant yaksha (tree spirit) from Parkham, dating from the Mauryan age – the earliest figure sculpture then found in India. He also excavated the first of the famous Mathura railing pillars, each of which is graced with one of those voluptuous, hip-swinging yakshis (female tree-spirits), the forerunners of the Khajuraho apsaras. But these were almost incidental discoveries. Excavations at the various sites around Mathura went on continuously throughout his long years as the Archaeological Surveyor. The combination of an enlightened District Collector and an ambitious local clearance and rebuilding programme resulted in a steady flow of discoveries. Cunningham’s role was essentially interpretative, deciphering the coins and inscriptions and assessing the importance of the finds.

  It soon became clear to him that this city had played a crucial role in the development of sculpture. ‘Everywhere in the north-west I find that the old Buddhist statues are made of Sikri sandstone, from which it would appear that Mathura must have been the great manufactory for the supply of Buddhist sculptures in northern India.’ But it was not only Buddhist sculptures. Hindu, Jain and purely secular pieces were soon coming to light. There were more finds of Gandhara art – another ‘Silenus’ and a well-draped female figure sometimes identified as Queen Kambojika. There were some classic pieces of Gupta and medieval art including two near-perfect standing Buddhas. And there was a giant warrior, legs apart and feet booted just like the figure first noted on some of the Indo-Greek coins and now identified by an inscription as the great Kushan king, Kanishka. One of the advantages of Mathura art, as opposed to Gandhara, was that most of the pieces bore inscriptions, even dates. Starting with the Parkham colossus of the third century BC, the Mat
hura finds spanned a period of iooo years and thus gave a unique panorama of Indian art from its earliest stages to the eve of the Mohammedan invasions.

  Moreover, its geographical position between the classically-influenced north-west and the Indian heartland made it an ideal site for studying the inter-action of foreign and indigenous styles. Here the curly haired, clear featured, well draped figures of Gandhara met the soft, bejewelled yakshas and the sinuous, flamboyant yakshis of the subcontinent. The Gandhara female figure (Queen Kambojika) and a more or less contemporary figure on the recently discovered gateway bracket from Sonkh provide two totally different ideals of femininity. To be fair to Cunningham, there were just no known aesthetic criteria that could be applied to the Indian figure. It was too gross, too primitive. Woman never yet aspired to a shape and a pose quite so blatantly provocative. Indian sculptors seemed to have denied their own experience of human anatomy in order to produce something that was simply and solely erotic. Where was the artistic subtlety in this; where the grace and dignity of womanhood? As much attention had been paid to the lower abdomen as to the face; one could only describe the figure, like the inspiration behind it, as crude. Professor Westmacott’s verdict of 1864 may stand for the whole of the nineteenth century.

  There is no temptation to dwell at length on the sculpture of Hindustan [India]. It affords no assistance in tracing the history of art, and its debased quality deprives it of all interest as a phase of fine art.

  But happily, if belatedly, a few brave spirits did question it. The aesthetic appreciation of Indian art owes much to Indians themselves and a great deal to. Hindu revivalism and the stirrings of Indian nationalism. But it also owes something to Lord Curzon, the first British ruler of India since Warren Hastings to admire Indian civilization, and to his contemporary, the first man to attempt an exposition of Indian art, Dr Ernest Binfield Havell.

  Havell’s is not a name writ large in the annals of the British raj. He came to India as principal of the Madras College of Art in the 1890s and left as principal of the Calcutta College of Art some twenty years later. But during this period his work and writings exercised considerable influence both in India and in the West. ‘Whenever I speak of Indian art,’ Sir William Rothenstein of the Royal College of Art told him, ‘I say that you were before us all in understanding its qualities.’

  Understanding its qualities meant understanding its inspiration, its ideals, its symbolism and its techniques. Havell’s then distinctly novel premise was that ‘no European can understand or appreciate Indian art who does not divest himself of his western preconceptions, endeavour to understand Indian thought, and place himself at the Indian point of view’. It meant rejecting all comparisons with European art, and all theories of classical or foreign influence, and tackling the whole concept of art from a different direction. A good starting point was the Indian approach to the carving of sacred images. Take, for instance, the two most famous Buddha images from Mathura. The first, a seated figure in red sandstone, dates from the Kushan period and is therefore contemporary with the best Gandhara sculpture. But there is no sign of Gandhara influence. The body is not composed of muscle and bone but simply of flesh, softly swelling. The sculptor has made no attempt to capture reality: the hair and top-knot look more like some kind of hat than real hair; even the smile is not exactly convincing. Much the same goes for the standing Buddha of the Gupta period. In the centuries between, the Mathura artists had adopted a few Gandhara conventions – the curly hair for instance, and the flowing drapery. But there is still no flirting with visual reality; their ideal remains the same. The curls have been reduced to shell-like lumps and the drapery into an abstract pattern of flowing lines which does less to hide the body than to accentuate it. Technique has advanced; there is more refinement in the features, more finished modelling. But still this is not a very convincing figure of a man, or even of a superman.

  And there, of course, lay the secret; it was not meant to be a man. European art was still mainly representational: its ideal, according to Havell, was simply the imitation of nature. But Indian art was conceptual, aiming at the realization of’something finer and more subtle than ordinary physical beauty’. The image that the Indian sculptor created came from inside his head; he had no need of a goose-pimpled model posing uncomfortably in his studio. His achievement was not that of capturing real life in art, but of giving birth to an abstract ideal. It was a bit like the difference between non-fiction and fiction. But life is not like that, protested the traditionalists. Beauty is, must be, truth; distorting the facts, giving a female figure mountainous breasts or a male sixteen arms, showed that the artist was either primitive or perversely depraved. On the contrary, said Havell on the Indian sculptor’s behalf; truth is much more subtle and elusive, and beauty will never be found in the mere perfecting of reality.

  The sculptor of Gandhara, following the classical approach, took an ideal human figure, added on the necessary top-knot, earlobes etc, and called him a Buddha. But the Mathura artist started with the Buddha. First, by study and meditation, he conceived the divine image in his mind. This needed religious and spiritual development of a high order. Then, by strictly observing numerous conventions and by constantly consulting his original inspiration, he strove to embody this image in a shape that fellow believers would recognize. So comprehensive were the various canons about proportions, gestures, features, etc., that there was certainly very limited scope for individuality and innovation. But then the Indian sculptor was not in the business of displaying his own virtuosity or laying claims to immortality. He usually remained anonymous and, to the extent that his creation matched up to his original inspiration, it was as much a comment on his spirituality as his skill.

  Havell rightly pounced on this approach to divine beauty as ‘the key to all Indian aesthetic thought’. This did not lead him to a defence of idolatry, although he did clearly show that the creative process amounted to one of consecration. Instead, he concentrated on the purely aesthetic objections to Indian religious art.

  A figure with three heads, and four, six, or eight arms, seems to a European a barbaric conception, though it is not less physiologically impossible than the wings growing from the human scapula in the European representation of angels&. But it is altogether foolish to condemn such artistic allegories a priori because they do not conform to the canons of the classic art of Europe. All art is suggestion and convention, and if Indian artists can suggest divine attributes to Indian people with Indian culture, they have fulfilled the purpose of their art.

  Just as angels were given wings, or saints halos, or just as the Holy Spirit was portrayed as a dove, so Siva and Vishnu were given extra arms to hold the symbols of their various attributes, or extra heads for their different roles. The fact that invariably the body of a Buddha image was highly generalized and somewhat full was not because the Indian artist could not understand anatomy. It was full because the divine ideal owed much to yoga, the traditional discipline through which man might realize the infinite; a wrapt inward-looking expression conveying transcendental calm and contentment was obviously a manifestation of yogic communion. So too was the holding of the breath, the prana or spiritual inflation.

  By way of contrast, Havell then showed how consummately the Indian artist could handle movement. Taking as his example one of the famous Nataraj (dancing Siva) bronzes of south India, he first explored its symbolism. No work of Indian art is without a wealth of allegory and symbol, ignorance of which was, and still is, a major stumbling block for most non-Indians. But Havell showed how a formidable collection of mystical and mythical associations need not detract from – and to the Indian, very much enhanced – the beauty of the composition. The Nataraj dealt with the divine ecstasy of creation expressed in dance.

  There is nothing of the mere animal gaiety of the Dancing Faun, nor any suggestion of the dancing frenzy of the Bacchanal. In its technical treatment the figure presents the same broad anatomical generalization and the peculiar type of
torso as we have seen in Buddhist sculpture. No one who observes the mastery of the structure of the human figure and the immense technical skill which the Hindu sculptor here shows can believe that it was from want of ability or knowledge that he has left out all indication of the smaller details of the muscular system. The Indian artist as a rule delighted in elaborating detail; but here, as in all his ideals of Deity incarnate, he has deliberately suppressed it.

  The same could be said of another favourite subject with Indian artists – animals. Havell chose as his example one of the great war-horses outside the Black Temple of Konarak; but he might just as well have selected an elephant from the Sanchi gateways or from the great mural relief at Mahabalipuram, or a Nandi bull from Khajuraho. None of them was anatomically realistic, yet somehow the Indian artist had gone beyond appearance and captured the peculiar character of each animal. The playfulness of the monkey, the elegance of the peacock, the timidity of the deer – all are eloquently represented in Indian art. Whereas Leonardo might have dissected a dog before drawing it, the Indian artist was not especially interested in how a dog worked; he wanted to get at the essence of dog.

  The Konarak war-horse, prancing into battle with a massively strong warrior striding beside it, appealed to Havell because it also showed that the Indian sculptor was quite capable of handling martial themes. ‘Not even the Homeric grandeur of the Elgin marbles surpasses the magnificent movement and modelling of this Indian Achilles, and the superbly monumental war-horse with its massive strength and vigour is not unworthy of comparison with Verocchio’s famous masterpiece at Venice.’ None of the then fashionable equestrian statues in Calcutta and elsewhere could begin to compare with it. Here was an area in which the Indian artist should be encouraged and patronized.