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

THE PERIOD OF THE HINDU DYNASTIES 301
Draupadi's rath. It consists of a one-storey
square cell surmounted by an overhanging,
curvilinear roof, suggestive in its shape of the
modern Bengali huts. There is every reason to
believe that this, like so many forms of structural
Indian architecture, is an imitation of a prototype
constructed of bamboo and thatch. The
resemblance to the sikhara suggests that this
most characteristically Dravidian element may
also have had its origin in the form of a bamboo
hut or temple car.
In the consideration of the art of the Hindu
Renaissance it is impossible to treat of sculpture
apart from architecture, since to an even greater
degree than in the earlier periods the carving
literally melts into the architectural enframement
that supports it. The plastic adornment of
the raths consists of images of Hindu deities set
in niches on the exterior of the shrine, and also
of panels illustrating legends of Hindu mythology
ornamenting the interior of the sanctuaries.
The figures appear to be a development
from the style of the Later Andhra Period,
rather than from the Gupta school. They retain
the extremely graceful attenuation of the forms
at Amaravati, and are animated by the same
feeling for movement and emotionally expressive
poses and gestures. A new canon of proportion
is notable in the heart-shaped faces 22 with
their high cheekbones and the almost tubular
exaggeration of the thinness of the arms and
legs. In the reliefs decorating the raths the forms
are not so completely disengaged from the
background as in the Andhra Period, but seem
to be emerging from the matrix of the stone.
The greatest achievement of the Pallava
sculptors was the carving of an enormous granite
boulder on the seashore with a representation
ofthe Descent ofthe Ganges from the Himalayas
[234]. To give the reader an idea of the scale of
this gigantic undertaking, it may be pointed out
that the scores of figures of men and animals,
including those of the family of elephants, are
represented in life size. The subject of the relief
is that of all creatures great and small, the devas
in the skies, the holy men on the banks of the
life-giving flood, the nagas m its waves, and the
members of the animal kingdom, one and all
giving thanks to Siva for his miraculous gift to
the Indian world. The cleft in the centre of the
giant boulder was at one time an actual channel
for water, simulating the Descent of the Ganges
from a basin at the top of a rock. We have here
a perfect illustration of that dualism persistent
in Indian art between an intensive naturalism
and the conception of divine forms according
to the principles of an appropriately abstract
canon of proportions. We have, in other words,
the same distinction between the divine and
the earthly as is noticeable in El Greco's 'Burial
of the Count of Orgaz', in which the figures in
the celestial zone are drawn according to the
Byzantine canon of attenuated forms for supernatural
beings, whereas the personages in the
lower, earthly section of the panel are painted in
a realistic manner. In the relief at Mamallapuram
the shapes of the devas, moving like
clouds across the top of the composition, have
the svelte, disembodied elegance of the art of
Amaravati. By contrast, no more perfect realizations
of living animal types are to be found anywhere
in the sculpture of the Eastern world.
This vast, densely populated composition, like
the Chalukya paintings of the Ajanta caves, is
no longer confined by any frame or artificial
boundary, but flows unrestrained over the entire
available surface of the boulder from which it is
carved [235]. Just as the space of the relief as a
whole is untramelled and, indeed, seems to flow
into the space occupied by the spectator, so the
individual forms in it are only partially disengaged
from the stone which imprisons them.
One has the impression, indeed, that they are in
continual process of emerging from the substance
of the rock itself. There is the same
suggestion of the birth of all form from Maya
that was so apparent in the Sunga reliefs at
Bhaja. As the late Dr Zimmer expressed it: