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

CHAPTER 4
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THE EPIC PERIOD: THE RELIGIONS OF INDIA
If the period between the disappearance of the
Indus civilization and the rise of the first Indian
empire under the Mauryas is almost entirely
barren of any kind of artistic remains, architectural
or plastic, this span of nearly a thousand
years is of inestimable importance for the
emergence of all the great religious systems
that have ever after dominated not only India
but all Asia.
In this brief account of Indian religious systems
it will be possible only to present the barest
outline of their theologies, with specific reference
to those aspects of belief that have a special
bearing on the development of later iconographical
forms in art.
The religions of the early peoples of India are
known as the Agamic and Vedic, or Dravidian
and Aryan. The 1
words 'Agamic' and 'Dravidian'
refer to the beliefs of the indigenous population
of India before the Aryan invasion at the end of
the third millennium B.C. The terms 'Vedic' and
'Aryan' are used to describe the religious elements
introduced by these foreign conquerors.
These traditions contained the beliefs, the philosophy,
and the gods that constitute the religion
of modern Hinduism. This religion is, in other
words, a combination of elements derived from
Aryan and Dravidian sources that began its
development as a separate system of belief early
in the first millennium B.C. The Dravidians imposed
the worship of the lingam and the mother
goddess on later Hinduism. It was the purely
Dravidian cult of devotion or bhakti that installed
the worship ofimages rather than abstract
principles. Among the Dravidian gods were innumerable
place spirits, tutelary deities, and
powers of nature conceived as personal beings.
First are the yakshas, whom we shall encounter
in Indian Buddhist art; they were tree-spirits
who were also worshipped as guardians of the
mineral treasures hid in the earth and associated
with the idea of wealth and abundance. The
female counterpart of the yaksha was the yakshi,
a sort of Indian dryad and the spirit ofthe fertility
of the tree. By association the yakshis came to be
regarded as symbols of the sap, the waters, and
thereby of the fertility of the whole vegetable
and animal worlds. They were specifically invoked
by women desiring children. Among the
Dravidian genii we should mention also the
naga or water spirit, described as serpentine in
form, though in later art the naga is represented
as a human with a cobra hood attached to the
back of the shoulders. All these deities, so deeply
rooted in the belief and superstition of the
Indian people, inevitably came to be absorbed
into the pantheons of both Hinduism and Buddhism
and their art.
Just as Hindu worship is based on the Aryan
householder's duty to his god, his family, and
his tribe, and the Brahmanic daily ritual stems
from the Vedic morning and evening worship
of the sun, so, too, are the Hindu deities descendants
of the Vedic titans. 2 The mighty beings
that the Aryans recognized in the sun, the fire,
the wind, or the water needed no personifying,
although when we first encounter them in
Buddhist and Hindu art they are anthropomorphically
portrayed in accordance with the attributes
assigned to them in the Vedas. In contrast
with Dravidian ritual, which stressed the value
of the worship of specific deities represented by
images in shrines, the Vedic or Aryan tradition
was a worship of the powers of heaven and earth