The art and architecture of India - Buddhist, Hindu, Jain (Art Ebook)

136 ROMANO-INDIAN ART
•
archaeology, Charles Masson, in the ruins of a
stupa at Bimaran near Jelalabad in Afghanistan.
23 From the fact that a number of coins of
the Saka ruler, Azes, were found with the reliquary,
it used to be assumed that the casket
must be dated in the first century B.C. Deposits
of coins, however, are rather unreliable for purposes
of dating, since they could have been and
often were inserted long after the burial of the
relics. Stylistically, this little piece of metalwork
provides very valuable evidence for the
dating of the Gandhara style and its origins.
The decoration of the reliquary consists of a
band of cusped niches enclosing figures of Buddha,
flanked by Indra and Brahma, just as on
the Early Christian sarcophagi we find a trinity
of Christ revered by Saints Peter and Paul. This
combination of figures and architectural setting,
described by Focillon as 'homme-arcade', is not
found in Roman art before the Sidamara sarcophagi
of the second century a.d. This characteristic
motif of Late Classical decoration is
repeated endlessly on the drums and bases of
stupas in north-western India and Afghanistan.
All these examples obviously can be no earlier
than the third century a.d. The style of the figures
on the Bimaran reliquary, with their voluminous
Classical mantles, likewise corresponds
to the most Western type of Gandhara sculpture
of the late second and early third centuries
a.d. - the style most closely related to Roman
prototypes of the first and second centuries a.d.
It should be noted, however, that the arches of
the arcade are not at all
Classical, but have the
familiar ogee form of the chaitya window.
Probably owing to its political isolation from
India proper and the maintenance of continuous
contacts with centres of artistic activity in the
Roman West, Gandhara art enjoyed a greater
longevity and also maintained a monotony of expression
unlike that of any other Indian school.
It is the very repetition of type and techniques
over a period of nearly five centuries that makes
any kind of chronology on a stylistic basis so
very difficult.
In so far as one can be didactic
about this problem, it can be stated that the
school reached its highest point of production
and aesthetic effectiveness in the first and second
centuries a.d., the period coinciding with
the closest contacts with the Roman world. 24 In
the last centuries of its existence the style becomes
closer to the orientalized style of production
of the Eastern Roman Empire, in which the
old Oriental tendencies towards frontality, abstraction,
and hieratic scaling were beginning to
assert themselves over the humanistic Classical
forms of earlier times.
Presumably the disastrous invasion of the
White Huns in the fifth century put an end to all
further productive activity in Gandhara beyond
the execution of repairs on such monuments
as survived this raid. The Chinese pilgrim
Hsiian-tsang's account of the ruined monasteries
that greeted him everywhere in the Peshawar
Valley is probably an accurate description of the
terrible desolation of this once flourishing Buddhist
centre. The final chapters of Gandhara
art have their setting, not in Gandhara, but in
Kashmir and such remote centres as Fondukistan
in Afghanistan, where artistic activity continued
at least as late as the seventh century 7
a.d.
The architecture of Gandhara reveals the
the same compound of Classical and Indian decoration
and technique as has been exemplified
by the sculpture. It must be remembered that,
like the sculpture, the history of architecture in
Gandhara is in reality a separate, foreign interlude
in the development of Indian art. A twentieth-century
parallel suggests itself in the
attempt of the deposed Afghan King Amanullah
to foist European styles on his country : his
gutted palaces at Jelalabad, the villas standing
deserted and ruinous amid the flower-beds at
Darul-Aman near Kabul are a modern repetition
of the Kushan policy of importing foreign
styles. Anyone who has seen these melancholy
relics of imitations of Sans Souci and Swiss
chalets can appreciate how strange and unaccep-