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

WALL-PAINTINGS AND MINIATURES •
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suggest danger, and their imminent mating
anticipates the girl's desire. The ribbon of
lightning in the sky not only echoes her frail
beauty and the zigzag gold of the hem of her
garment but, as a poetic metaphor, symbolizes
the climax of desire. Like a musical refrain, the
twining net of branches repeats the rhythms of
the cobras and the lines of the girl's body. This
cadence of lines, the calculated fragility of
form, and the poetic setting unite to enhance
and interpret, metaphorically, the passion of
love, and stylistically present the last refinement
of Pahari art.
We have followed the course of Indian art for a
period of more than three thousand years. In
that span of centuries we have seen hardly any
deviation from a way of presenting the divine in
artistic terms which was already fixed in that
immemorial time of the Indus civilization. If
there has been deviation from the tradition, it
has been not so much change as variety, imposed
by new iconographical demands and the gradual
acquisition of a greater and greater technical
skill in all the crafts serving the Indian religions.
Just as the essentials of the Indian temples of the
Gupta Period and the Hindu Renaissance are
iconographically and technically present in the
prehistoric ashlar dolmens and the Vedic
altars of brick, so that final triumph of the Dravidian
genius, the Nataraja, is only slightly
removed from the mysterious dancing figure
from Mohenjo-daro. In architecture either the
simplest or the most baroque fabric can symbolize
the world and the body of God, just as the
elementary ideograph of a dancer in sandstone
and the dynamic image of the Chola metalworker's
art can symbolize the endless change
within the cosmic scheme. These similarities,
this continuity in a tradition spanning more
than thirty centuries, do not constitute monotony
or repetition. Indian art in the great variety
of its expression has only the limitations of what
was to be expressed, and, as an art both hieratic
and popular, has perforce repeated themes from
the epics, the romances, as well as the incarnations
of the great gods that are a part of the
race, its heritage and its desire.
We are apt to forget that anything like art can
be a necessary part ofa racial or national heritage.
It is this, together with the gradual growth of
methods of making icons and temples appropriate
to Indian needs, that makes for a sense
of unity and continuity in the art of India
unmatched in any other racial tradition. Many
instances could be cited of the survival of the
tradition of technical skill and iconographic
observance in building and image-making even
in modern times. Something of this continuity
may be seen in the constitution of the Indian
flag, dominated by the dharmacakra and composed
of three bands of colour typifying the
various mystic meanings of the number three
in Indian metaphysics. Similar, but less happy,
is
India's adoption of a 'restored version' of the
Asoka lion capital at Sarnath as a national
emblem.
The concern of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain
art has always been the directing of men to
union with the Great Beings that it reveals in
tangible form. To that end no skill, nor time,
nor patience could ever be too much. The works
of art were guide posts to lead men by slow
apprehension or sudden intuition to find the
treasure hid in the shrine of their own hearts,
the seat of the Buddha, of Vishnu, of Siva. In
our own quest, religious or aesthetic, they may
discover for us a similar treasure.