by John Keay
Working his way along ‘Ninth Lane’ in the southern sector of Mohenjo-daro, one of Marshall’s colleagues reached House LV. Compared to the ‘comfortable little House LIV’ next door, LV was in ruins. But one room had a particularly well-paved floor.
At one end of this paving is a little fireplace, by the side of which was lying one of the most interesting antiquities unearthed during the season. It is a bronze statuette of a naked, slender-limbed dancing girl cast in the round. It is four and a quarter inches high and in good preservation save for the feet, which are broken off. The figure is characterized by negroid facial features and executed with some primitive vigour.
Whether this lissom little figure in fact represents a dancing girl, and whether her features mean that she belonged to some subordinate negroid or aboriginal race, is pure conjecture. But there is no gainsaying the far from primitive modelling and the highly effective exaggeration of her long gangling limbs. Head held high, hand on hip and left leg forward, she could pass for a spindly mannequin or a nubile disco-dancer. The small pointed breasts and slender hips suggest a very modern ideal of feminine beauty — the antithesis of the full-blown figure usually associated with Indian art. Yet her nakedness but for bangles and necklace, and the careful modelling of the lower abdomen, anticipate similar conventions in later Indian sculpture. Perhaps, too, there is a hint of the south Indian bronzes in the exaggerated pose and the attenuated limbs.
Marshall was particularly impressed by her back view, with smoothly rounded buttocks and hips. But this was not to be compared with two even more surprising statuettes, this time from Harappa.
When I first saw them I found it difficult to believe that they were prehistoric; they seemed so completely to upset all established ideas about early art. Modelling such as this was unknown in the ancient world up to the Hellenistic age of Greece, and I thought, therefore, that some mistake must surely have been made; that these figures had found their way into levels some 3000 years older than those to which they properly belonged.
Had there been just one of these small stone torsos, or had both been found in the same place, this explanation might have stood, but in fact they were found some distance apart. It was inconceivable that each could independently have worked its way six to ten feet deep into the dense rubble. Moreover, there were peculiarities about the two figures themselves which meant that they could not readily be assigned to any known school of sculpture. One torso was of grey stone and the other of a more reddish stone, neither of which was used in any other school of sculpture. Nor was the technique of attaching head and limbs separately in socket holes used by either Indian or classical sculptors.
Indeed, what we have to realize & is that it is almost as difficult to try and account for them on the assumption that they belong to the historic, as it is on the assumption that they belong to the prehistoric age&. [Gandhara sculptures] give us the form, not the substance, of Greek art. Superficially they call to mind the Hellenic prototypes of which they are to some extent transcripts. But they miss altogether that characteristic genius of the Greek which delighted in anatomical truth and took infinite pains to express it convincingly. Now, in these statuettes, it is just this anatomical truth which is so startling; that makes us wonder whether, in this all-important matter, Greek artistry could possibly have been anticipated by the sculptors of a far-off age on the banks of the Indus.
Havell would have been delighted by this suggestion. He had always maintained that the Indian artist could handle anatomy as well as anyone, but had progressed beyond simple naturalism. Marshall, too, was no mean judge of Indian art; Vincent Smith had placed him alongside Havell and Coomaraswamy as a pioneer in its appreciation. Though the red figure was ‘work of which a Greek of the fourth century BC might well have been proud’, the execution was typically Indian as was ‘the set of the figure with its rather pronounced abdomen’. The grey figure, evidently of a male dancer, was more liberally endowed with socket holes. One was clearly designed to sport an erect phallus, and those on the neck must have been for three heads. Here then was what might well have been an early representation of the famous Siva Nataraja, the dancing Siva of so many later sculptures and bronzes.
No doubt Marshall was emboldened to make this suggestion by the earlier discovery of a very curious seal. This shows a figure sitting in the posture of a yogi. The figure has enormous horns and a long, lugubrious face which, on close inspection, appears to be three faces. He also appears to be exposing an erect phallus, although this could be a pendant from his belt buckle. Around him are shown various animals, and beneath his low stool, two deer. To Marshall he was ‘at once recognizable as a prototype of the historic Siva’. The cross-legged posture, like the inflated abdomen of one of the Harappa torsos, showed that the Indus Valley people were already familiar with yoga; and Siva was, par excellence, the Mahayogi. He was also traditionally three-faced and still very much associated with the lingam, of which, incidentally, the Indus Valley sites had yielded several unmistakable examples. Finally, he was also Lord of the Beasts; hence the animals. The image of deer under the throne would be precisely the convention adopted by early Buddhist sculptors to evoke the Buddha preaching his first sermon in the deer-park at Sarnath.
In all, some 12,000 steatite seals have been discovered. Although their script still defies solution, they constitute much the most comprehensive source material for the religion of the Indus Valley people. Horned female figures, big of bust and broad of hip, cavorting amongst the trees, almost certainly represent the earliest forms of the yakshi; evidently the fertility cult associated with trees was already prevalent. But the commonest subject of all is animals — elephants, tigers, rhinoceroses, buffaloes and, above all, bulls. There are also numerous mythical beasts, some part man, part beast — like the later Varaha versions of Vishnu boar-headed – others made up of various animal parts. It seems clear that some at least must have been cult objects and that the Indian habit of deifying animals was already well established. In the frequent use of the bull, further evidence is seen of Siva worship, the Nandi bull being Siva’s ‘vehicle’.
Even more remarkable is the execution of these animal seals. Most are about an inch square. Allowing space for the script, this means that many of the designs are no more than half an inch by three-quarters. They are cut intaglio, using the simplest bit and chisel. And, as yet one more constraint, the artist has had to bear in mind that for the seal to stamp clearly he must further reduce his conception to the very barest essentials. Yet the results are often startlingly effective. The famous humped bull with its enormous ruff-like dewlap is a masterpiece by any standards. It occupies the narrow zone of genius where the purely representational and the conceptual overlap; it has the universal appeal of, say, the Sanchi torso. Anatomically, it appears perfect; but the artist has also managed to suggest the bull’s great bulk and strength and, by stylizing the dewlap and twisting the horns through ninety degrees, to produce a composition which is also a delight to the eye. The same skills may be seen in the prancing tiger, the armour-plated rhino and the backward-glancing deer. Marshall, for one, was convinced that the artists who could produce these little gems of design could also have created the more contentious Harappa torsos.
But who were these Indus Valley people, and what became of them? On this highly debatable question Marshall was extremely cautious. He argued, convincingly, that they could not possibly be Aryans and that Mohenjo-daro and Harappa predated the first Aryan invasions (1500 BC) by at least IOOO years. But he would not commit himself on whether they might have been Dravidians. From pockets of the Dravidian language that still survived in Baluchistan, it was assumed that the Dravidian peoples of south India (today the Tamil, Malayali, Telugu and Kannada speakers) had once extended over most of the subcontinent. The most obvious theory, therefore, was that the Indus Valley civilization was a Dravidian achievement and that it was overthrown, when already in decline, by the invading Aryans. This is the line taken by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, t
hough it is by no means generally accepted. A change of climate, a cataclysmic flood, a weakening of the central authority, any of these things could have caused, or contributed to its collapse. But whoever the Indus Valley people were, the discoveries of Marshall and his colleagues served to focus attention on the non-Aryan element in Indian culture.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
New Observations and Discoveries
When Sir William Jones founded the Asiatic Society back in 1784, he envisaged a far wider field of enquiry than is nowadays associated with indology. ‘You will investigate whatever is rare in the stupendous fabric of nature; will correct the geography of Asia by new observations and discoveries; will trace the annals and even traditions of those nations who from time to time have peopled or desolated it.’ In fact such things as literature, architecture and painting came right at the end of his list. The physical and natural sciences had a vital role to play in the discovery of India, and to many this was what it was all about. The revelations of every bug and butterfly collector, of every meteorologist and seismologist, are beyond the scope of this book; such specialized studies contributed more to the advancement of their individual sciences than to the understanding of India. But in a very different class are those broader fields of survey indicated by Jones — geography, ethnology, botany and zoology. The government itself recognized this, devoting considerable sums of money to them and, in the case of India’s geography, promoting one of the most ambitious undertakings of the nineteenth century.
Jones’s insistence on scientific enquiries was not simply a reflection of his own extraordinary range of interests. In those days there was no such thing as the ‘two cultures’. Men of learning took a lively interest in both the sciences and the arts. The journals of the Asiatic Society carry no fewer, and perhaps more, contributions on birds, plants and tribes than on buildings and inscriptions. When Jones died, his fellow members desired to immortalize his memory: instead of erecting a monument or founding a scholarship, they named a tree after him, the Asoca jonesia. No doubt the great man would have been deeply touched by this apt and modest memorial.
Right from the start, the discovery of India had been more than a cultural and historical exercise. Thomas Coryat, the eccentric Elizabethan traveller, had told the emperor Jehangir that he had four reasons for visiting India. First-very diplomatic – was to see the Great Moghul; second, to see an elephant; third, to see the Ganges (‘captain of all the rivers in the world’); fourth, to get a passport for Samarkand. John Marshall – not the twentieth-century archaeologist but his seventeenth-century namesake – ‘the first Englishman who really studied Indian antiquities’ – was equally intrigued by natural phenomena. His observations on Ashoka pillars and Hindu mathematics are punctuated by enquiries about the sex life of elephants, ‘mairmaids’ (only found in Mozambique, where the natives ‘do often ly with them when they catch them’), and the salinity of sea water (according to the Hindus, ‘one of Adam’s sonnes drank up all the water and then pissed it out again, which made it salt’).
To many of the early scholars, including Jones, the height of the Himalayas was as intriguing an enigma as the antiquity of Sanskrit. Cunningham was a notable ethnologist; Fergusson’s first work was not on architecture but on the geography of the Ganges delta; and Prinsep’s not on inscriptions, but on the topography of the Benares area. The important role played by surveyors and engineers in the discovery of India’s antiquities has already been noted: Khajuraho was discovered by Franklin, and the painted caves of Bagh by Frederick Dangerfield, another surveyor. But these were essentially chance discoveries; by the time the mapmakers reached central India, the degree of professionalism demanded of them usually precluded other interests.
This was far from being the case in the early days of the Survey of India. In the south, where the mapmaking started, surveyors were encouraged to extend their enquiries well beyond the purely geographical; most of south India’s antiquities were first made known in their reports. In 1799, Tippu Sultan of Mysore had been finally defeated by the forces of the East India Company and its allies under Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington. The whole of peninsular India lay exposed to the British, and the new century dawned with a flurry of surveying aimed at exploring the upland interior and at establishing cartographical contact between the east and west coasts.
This surveying took three distinct forms. There were route surveys, which could provide an interim picture of the country and its main arteries, as well as constituting a preliminary reconnaissance for the other surveys. A topographical survey filled in all the detail essential to a map. A trigonometrical survey aimed at establishing a framework of precisely determined positions and at laying down the geographical proportions of the peninsula.
Dr Francis Buchanan was despatched from Madras on a series of route survey journeys north and west across Mysore and Kerala in 1800. This was the same Buchanan who later carried out a similar survey in Bengal and Bihar, and who at Boddh Gaya reached some important conclusions about the origins of Buddhism. A Scot by birth and a surgeon by training, he was typical of that class of pioneers whose accomplishments were so varied that he is almost impossible to classify. His researches into Buddhism and Indian antiquities are more than matched by his work as an agriculturalist, a botanist and a zoologist; he later founded India’s first zoo, and his last post was as Superintendent of the Calcutta Botanical Gardens.
The extent of his interest is reflected in the objectives of his survey in Mysore. These are minutely detailed in the title of the book that resulted: A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar, performed under the orders of The Most Noble the Marquess of Wellesley, Governor General of India, for the Express Purpose of Investigating the State of Agriculture, Arts and Commerce, the Religion, Manners and Customs; the History, Natural and Civil, and Antiquities in the Domains of the Rajah of Mysore and in the Country acquired by the Honourable East India Company, in the late and former Wars, from Tippoo Sultan. With such a title there was no need for an introduction. Day by day, Buchanan recorded his observations. With an eye for new crops that might benefit British India, he paid particular attention to agriculture. He despatched vast quantities of seed to Calcutta and when seed was not available, he carefully drew the plant in question. By May 1801, with the rains just breaking, he was exploring the tobacco growing areas west of Mysore city when he stumbled upon the first of the famous Chalukyan temples. He was not impressed: the building was ‘utterly destitute of either grandeur or elegance’, and as for the sculpture, ‘I have not yet had the good fortune to meet with a Hindu image that was tolerable’. Next day he reached Halebid. In size, at least, the main temple ‘exceeded any Hindu building I have seen elsewhere’ and he much admired the highly polished pillars. But the famous sculpted friezes still did not please him.
Its walls contain a very ample delineation of Hindu mythology; which in the representation of human or animal forms is as destitute of elegance as usual; but some of the foliages possess great neatness.
On the basis of an inscription, he dated the temple to 1280, and he correctly identified Halebid as the capital of the thirteenth-century Hoysala Ballala dynasty.
Next came Belur. The temple was again too ornate for his taste; but his day was made by a chance meeting with some cochineal farmers. Here was an unusual branch of husbandry, and one that intrigued Buchanan greatly. The farmers, or rather drovers, were herding their livestock along the cactus hedges. As the scarlet insects devoured one plant, a small colony was set to work on the next. In a good year the farmers expected to harvest close on half a ton of dead and dried insects. With indigo rivalling opium as India’s most lucrative cash crop, Buchanan could see a rosy future for cochineal.
As the rains grew heavier and the going harder, he reached Sravana Belgola three days later. This was the most important Jain shrine in southern India. Already Buchanan, who had just returned from Burma, was far more drawn to Buddhism and its sister religion, Jai
nism, than to Hinduism. In particular he looked forward to seeing ‘the colossal image of Gomata Raja’. This statue, which towers above the lake and Jain temples, is reputedly one of the highest free-standing sculptures in the world. Ironically, though, Buchanan, the first visitor to Sravana Belgola, failed to see it.
This [the statue] I was not able to visit, owing to an inflammation that attacked my eyes the day before, and rendered the light almost intolerable. I sent my painter and interpreter to inspect the hill.
They reported the statue as seventy feet high, and the painter did a sketch which, as the Duke of Wellington would observe, bore not the slightest resemblance to the original. Next day Buchanan was worse. He was quite blind, and had to be carried to the nearest military base for treatment. It was three months before he could take to the field again and complete his survey. His report, in three volumes, was published in 1807 and remained the most reliable and exhaustive description of Mysore throughout the nineteenth century. It was reprinted in 1870 and is still a classic.
Fergusson declared the colossal statue of the Jain saint ‘among the most remarkable works of native art in the south of India & Nothing grander or more imposing exists anywhere out of Egypt and, even there, no known statue surpasses it in height.’ He thought it must have been carved out of an existing rock pinnacle rather than erected on site. Coomaraswamy would agree, giving its date as AD 983. The site, though, appears very much older, and legend has it that both Chandragupta Maurya and Ashoka visited it.
