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

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bow, emphasizes their strange and burning intensity.
There is in this figurine an appropriately
horrid suggestion of the famine victim and, in
the spider-like limbs, a reminder of those artificially
made cripples that flail their broken
legs in every Indian bazaar. The rendering of
the emaciated figure has nothing to do with the
realistic definition of wasted anatomy as we
know it in such Hellenistic works as the Alexandrian
statuette of a sick man: 3 the very
abstraction of the tubular limbs and the exaggerated
attenuation of the torso, especially in
the great distance between pelvis and thorax,
not only emphasize the nature of the famineracked
body, but impart a certain grandeur to
the seated figure by thus increasing its height
and bestowing a regal bearing on this most
frightful of Indian goddesses.
The most famous and dramatic of the images
of the South Indian school are those of Nataraja,
or Siva as Lord of the Dance [259]. To the
Dravidian imagination, Siva's dance, the Naddnta,
is the personification of all the forces and
powers of the cosmic system in operation, the
movement of energy within the universe. In
him they have their dayspring and in him their
death. 4 'This plastic type, more than any other,
expresses the unity of the human consciousness,
for it represents equally religion, science, and
art. This unity has illumined the imagination
of the philosophers of many races; but the Indian
Nataraja may well be claimed as the clearest,
most logical, and impassioned statement of
the conception of life as an eternal Becoming'. 5
Siva's dance personifies his universe in action
and destruction. This is his dance in the last
night of the world when the stars fall from their
courses and all is reduced to ashes, to be ever
rekindled, ever renewed by the boundless power
of the Lord. Siva is personified as the universal
flux of energy in all matter and the promise of
ever-renewed creative activity. 6 The dionysian
frenzy of his whirling dance presents a symbolic
affirmation of the eternal, unseen spectacle of
the dynamic disintegration and renewal, birth
and death, of all cosmic matter in every second
as in every kalpa of time - the same illusion of
endlessly appearing and vanishing forms that is
implied in great monuments of Indian art from
Bhaja to Mamallapuram.
One of the greatest Nataraja images is preserved
in the museum at Colombo [260]. It
was found in the ruins of one of the Hindu
temples at Polonnaruwa, and may have been
imported from the workshops of Tanjore in the
eleventh century. The figure, a perfect fusion of
serenity and balance, moves in slow and gracious
rhythm, lacking the usual violence of the cosmic
dance; this is a cadenced movement communicated
largely by the centrifugal space-embracing
position of the arms and the suggestion of the
figure's revolving in space. The turning effect
259. Bronze Nataraja from South India.
Madras, Government Museum
that comes from the arrangement of the multiple
arms, one behind another, and the torsion
of the figure, emphasized by the directions of