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

72 THE EARLY CLASSIC PERIODS
•
device of an earlier Cakravartin. 13 From the
stylistic point of view we notice first of all that
the body of the bull is still partially engaged in
the core of the block of stone from which it was
carved. Aesthetically this serves to connote the
virtual emergence of the form from the matrix
of the rock in which the sculptor saw it imprisoned.
As a technical safeguard it prevents
the legs of the image from breaking under the
weight of the body.
Very much the same conglomerate rearrangement
of older western Asiatic forms that
characterizes the Asokan columns is revealed in
another relic of Maurya times, a colossal capital
recovered during the first excavations at Pataliputra
[23]. It has the stepped impost block,
side-volutes, and central palmettes of the
Persepolitan order; the bead and reel, labial,
and spiral motifs on the lateral face are all of
western Asiatic origin; and the rosette ornament
of the abacus recalls the frames of the
great friezes at Persepolis. Although these
elements are combined in a manner different
from that of the Iranian capitals, they suggest
not only this prototype but, largely through the
at Pataliputra are all parallel derivations from
one original form such as the Aeolic or, as
has been suggested by at least one scholar,
from a Sumerian pictograph symbolizing
polarity. 14 In the same way, the striking
resemblance of this capital to what appears,
at first glance, to be a debased form of Ionic
in the architectural brackets found in the
dwellings of modern Kurdistan, suggests that
these simple wooden post-tops and the Maurya
capital are both descended from forms of great
antiquity, forms of folk art that survive almost
unchanged through many strata of culture. 15
The form of the Pataliputra capital with its
distinctive projecting volutes is preserved relatively
intact for at least a century, as may be
illustrated by an example of the Sunga Period
in the museum at Sarnath. 16 Thereafter in the
development of the Indian order it is replaced
by the more truly Persepolitan form with
addorsed animals. It should be stressed that
this capital is more properly described as
western Asiatic or Iranian, and must not be
regarded as an imitation of Greek Ionic: the
classic orders found their way to India only
during the Parthian and Kushan occupation of
23. Capital found at Pataliputra
the regions south of the Khyber Pass.
The official foreign art sponsored by Asoka
endured no longer than the rule of the Dharma
which he sought to impose on his Indian
empire: it was presumably unpopular, perhaps
because it was symbolic of the Dharmaraja's
suppression in his edicts of festivals and other
aspects of popular religion.
Of much greater
final importance for Indian art was the stone
sculpture of completely Indian type. Specimens
of this survive in the shape of colossal statues of
yakshas or nature spirits of Dravidian origin,
profile of the projecting volutes, also the Greek
Ionic. The explanation of this strange kinship
probably lies in the fact that the Greek Ionic,
the Persepolitan capital, and the present variant
one of which, now in the Archaeological
Museum at Muttra, is more than eight feet
high [24].
17
This statue has been the subject of
considerable controversy since the time of its
discovery at the village of Parkham. It was once
identified as a portrait statue of a king of the