by John Keay
Kincaid seems to have kept quiet about the torso for five years, and then to have offered it for display at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It went on show in the 1890s and quickly caused a sensation. By 1910 other museums in Europe were rumoured to be negotiating with the owner. ‘Rather than risk any rumpus that would ensue if it came out that Germany had bagged the torso’, the government authorized its purchase for a not over-generous £80.
The Sanchi torso is now one of the Victoria and Albert’s most cherished possessions, and the most revered masterpiece of Indian art outside India. There is something hypnotic about that stylized but supremely graceful pose, something deeply sensuous about the swelling flesh gently submitting to the hard ornamentation of necklace and girdle. Yet, despite its celebrity, its origins confounded the experts until very recently. It was in 1971 that its pair was discovered amongst the broken statuary originally unearthed by Major Cole. From the pair it was possible to deduce its identity – the Boddhisattva Avalokiteswara – as well as its original position and its date – about AD 900. Until then it had usually been hailed as a classic piece of Gupta sculpture (fourth to fifth century AD). Before that, it was considered a typical specimen of what Kincaid called ‘Indo-Grecian art’ of the first century AD. Perhaps nothing more clearly illustrates the gradual development of European understanding and appreciation of Indian sculpture. And particularly significant is the point that initially its claim to serious attention, indeed its acceptance by the museum, rested on the supposition that its inspiration was Greek. Hellenistic influence provided the first, and in the nineteenth century the only, stimulus to the study of Indian sculpture.
To discover how it was that Greek ideas influenced Indian art and who these Indo-Greeks were, it is necessary to turn again to the 1830s, that most productive period in Oriental studies, and to Prinsep and his colleagues. It is also necessary to introduce yet another source material for the reconstruction of Indian history – ancient coins. Colonel James Tod, the man who discovered the Girnar inscription and most of the other antiquities of western India, is usually credited with launching Indian numismatics. During his long stay among the Rajputs in the 1820s, he casually amassed a collection of some 20,000 coins. Every conceivable size, shape, denomination and metal seemed to be represented and many were clearly very old; some even bore the then undeciphered Ashoka script. If such a collection was representative, then clearly there were enough old coins about to justify serious study. If their legends could be read, their symbols and portraits identified, and their distribution plotted, much might be learnt about India’s dynastic history.
Tod made a start, arranging his collection in broad groups and commenting on them as best he could. Well represented were coins of the main dynasties from the time of the Guptas right up till the Mohammedan conquests. Indeed, India’s medieval history has since been largely reconstructed on the basis of numismatics. Tod’s collection included a few coins which, to judge by the scripts, were earlier than the Guptas. And there were one or two that appeared to be not Indian at all, for they bore dual inscriptions, one indecipherable and the other, quite definitely, Greek.
When General Ventura unearthed a hoard of such coins in the Manikyala stupa, interest quickened. From classical sources it was known that after Alexander the Great’s invasion in 326 BC his conquests in north-west India had been lost; but it was also known that a Greek kingdom had lingered on, indeed prospered, for many decades in northern Afghanistan, or Bactria. The coins now coming to light looked like the work of these Bactrian Greeks. As well as the series bearing dual inscriptions, there were some particularly fine specimens, perhaps the most magnificent coins ever minted in the ancient world, bearing just a Greek legend. ‘King Demetrius’, ‘the Great King Eucratides’, ‘King Euthydemus’ they declared; and there he was, a fine patrician profile with dramatically classical features and wearing a hat that looked like a centurion’s helmet with just a hint of solar topi. On the reverse there was often a naked, muscular Hercules. Moreover, Demetrius, Eucratides etc. were all confirmed as kings of Bactria by the classical authors.
Spurred on by these unexpected discoveries, General Ventura and his fellow officers in Ranjit Singh’s service scoured the Punjab for more stupas and bombarded Prinsep with their finds. Within a matter of months the Asiatic Society’s collection of coins had grown tenfold. And still they kept coming. British travellers to Afghanistan and Central Asia added to the flood and none more so than a mysterious figure who called himself Charles Masson. Masson claimed to be an American citizen – which was not as far-fetched as it sounds: Ranjit Singh employed several Americans. But in Masson’s case the nationality, like the name, was assumed. He was in fact one of British India’s outcasts – a deserter from the East India Company’s ranks, whose real name was James Lewis. Masson’s origins, like his later life, are shrouded in obscurity, but for ten perilous years, during most of which he lived and travelled in disguise amongst the fanatical Afghans, he played a role of great importance and considerable daring. In British India he faced a court martial if he returned; in Afghanistan, a knife in the back if he was unmasked. Yet somehow he managed to survive, to reach Kabul, to identify the only strong man in the maelstrom of Afghan politics, to ingratiate himself, and to win a pardon from the British in return for acting as their informant. Almost incidentally, he also revealed to the outside world the archaeological wealth of the Kabul area and in the process discovered one of Asia’s most important sites.
In 1832 he had heard ‘strange stories of the innumerable coins and other relics’ to be found on the plain of Begram, twenty-five miles outside Kabul. Anxious not to arouse suspicion, but ‘intensely excited’, Masson went to investigate. The people on the spot denied all knowledge of antiquities and spoke only of the danger from bandits. But at last an old, and presumably desperate, Mohammedan produced a small, defaced and utterly worthless coin. Masson paid two paise for it and the floodgates opened.
[This] induced the appearance of others, until the Hindus ventured to bring forth their bags of old monies from which I selected such as suited my purpose. I had the satisfaction to obtain in this manner some eighty coins of types which led me to anticipate bright results from the future. The fears and scruples of the owners had been overcome&. Before the commencement of winter, when the plain, covered with snow, is closed to research, I had accumulated 1865 copper coins, besides a few silver ones, many rings, signets and other relics. The next year, 1834, the collection which fell into my hands amounted to 1900 copper coins, besides other relics. In 1835 it increased to nearly 2500 copper coins, and in 1836 it augmented to 13,474 copper coins. In 1837, when I had the plain well under control, and was able constantly to locate my people upon it, I obtained 60,000 copper coins, a result with which I was well pleased.
It must rank as one of the greatest numismatic hauls of all time. Masson also located and explored some fifty stupas in the same area, and in return for a small grant towards the expenses, gave his collection to the Asiatic Society.
But even this was not the extent of his contribution. For Masson, unlike Ventura, was more than just a field-worker. Though a man of modest education, he was soon studying his coins and it is to him, along with Prinsep and the young Cunningham, that we owe their early identification. Roughly speaking, the coins bearing Greek legends spanned a period of 400 years and charted a gradual waning of Greek influence. The beautifully modelled coins of Alexander’s successors gave way to progressively less imposing portrayals and poorer engraving. Hercules was replaced by elephants, lions or bulls. The royal names became less obviously Greek, the noble Greek profiles were replaced by a running wind god with spiky hair and a Mithraic pedigree, with symbols from Buddhist and Hindu mythology, and with a strange war-like figure, bearded and booted with legs wide apart.
In these hybrid coins, which were quite as un-Indian as they were un-Greek, Masson and Prinsep quickly recognized that they had stumbled upon an important and hitherto neglected aspect of India’s pas
t. From both classical and Chinese sources it was known that waves of barbarian invaders had swept through Afghanistan and into north-western India during the empty centuries that stretched between the Maurya empire of Chandragupta and Ashoka (third century BC) and the empire of the Guptas (fourth century AD). Identifying these various newcomers and getting them in the right order was a major problem. But it seemed that the Bactrian Greeks were the first culprits. Emulating Alexander, they occupied the Punjab in the second century BC and raided deep into the Ganges basin and down the Indus. Then came Scythians from beyond the Oxus, who overran the Greeks in both Bactria and the Punjab. By about 50 BC the Scythians, or Sakas, controlled the Punjab as far south as Delhi. They in turn were succeeded by the Parthians from Persia in about AD 25 and then by the more important Kushans, a tribe originally from Chinese Central Asia. During the first century AD, the Kushans ruled from Peshawar an empire that stretched as far east as Benares and south to the deserts and jungles of central India.
Matching the various invaders to the different series of coins, and then peopling each dynasty with the kings recorded on the coins, became, for Masson, Prinsep and Cunningham, a highly competitive game. Cunningham in particular was most possessive about his tally of newly-discovered sovereigns, as year by year they pieced together this most confusing period of Indian history. With Masson providing the lead, Prinsep the dedication and Cunningham a few inspired guesses, they also deciphered the unknown script which accompanied the Greek legends. Unlike the Gupta and Ashoka scripts, it read from right to left, like Arabic, and was evidently derived from Aramaic. In 1872 Cunningham discovered a new Ashoka rock inscription which was also written in this script. The rock was at Shahbazgarhi, in the foothills north of Peshawar, and so it was established that this Kharosthi script, borrowed from the Middle East, was as old, if not older, than Ashoka Brahmi.
Whether the art of writing was introduced into India from outside, or whether it was an indigenous development, is still a moot point. But clearly many ideas and influences had penetrated the Indian subcontinent from the north-west. Throughout history the north-west frontier had been more often wide open than not. While the Bactrian, Saka and Kushan empires had actually straddled the Khyber pass, the constant spate of conquests had systematically eroded cultural barriers and washed down onto the Indian plains a rich topsoil of Persian and Mediterranean skills and ideals.
The most obvious example was in the coins themselves. At the time of the Maury as, Indian coinage was still the unadorned lumps of metal marked with a simple punch that had been in circulation from the earliest times. But the idea of a minted coinage, incorporating a design or portrait and a legend, dates only from the time of these invasions. The evolution of a specifically Indian coinage is clearly marked in the coins of western India, where markedly Indian profiles start to appear about the second century AD. By the fourth century, the distinctive gold coinage of the Guptas was in circulation throughout north India.
In literature, it has been suggested that Sanskrit drama owed something to Greek influence; Indian playwrights like Kalidasa may have inherited some of the conventions of Greek comedy as performed at the Bactrian court in the Punjab. In architecture there is a more obvious connection. The temple of Jandial at Taxila in Pakistan has Ionic columns and a lay-out not unlike that of the Parthenon on a reduced scale. It could hardly look less Indian and indeed it is not Indian; built by Parthian invaders at the beginning of the first century AD, it was probably used by fire-worshipping devotees of the Persian god Zoroaster. But the significant point is that this temple is the earliest structural, as opposed to rock-cut, temple on Indian soil. So did the ancient peoples of India learn about architecture from the invaders? The answer is certainly no. They had been building on a grand scale in wood and brick for centuries. Megasthenes’ description of the gigantic royal palace at Pataliputra is in itself enough to prove the point. But Hellenistic buildings like Jandial did have some impact. In the Himalayan valley of Kashmir the foreign style caught on and produced a distinctive and enduring school of building which employed classical pillars, trefoil arches and triangular pediments.
However, it was in the working of stone and in sculpture that foreign skills really made their mark on India. Craftsmen and masons seem to have moved about the ancient world more freely even than ambassadors. Cunningham was probably the first to remark that the Ashoka pillars with their bell-shaped capitals bore a striking resemblance to the pillars of Persepolis, the ancient Achaemenid capital of Persia. The highly developed modelling shown in the lion capitals found at Sarnath and Sanchi suggested an already well-developed style which must mean that Ashoka borrowed both the idea of the pillars, and the masons to carve them, from Persia.
At Bharhut and Sanchi, Cunningham found yet more evidence of foreign craftsmen. He thought he recognized Kharosthi writing on the best of the carved reliefs at Bharhut, and he explained the disparity in the quality of some of the Sanchi reliefs by assuming the more finished panels were the work of imported craftsmen. As if to prove his point, he discovered at Besnagar, only a couple of miles from Sanchi, a small pillar with an inscription which declared that it had been erected by a Greek called Heliodorus during the first century BC – the period when the gateways were erected.
Few, however, and certainly not Cunningham, would deny that the inspiration for both the Ashoka columns and the Sanchi reliefs was Indian: they owed as much to earlier indigenous skills in wood and ivory carving as to Greek stone masons. The true Indo-Greek sculptures (called Gandhara, after the name of the region between the Indus and Kabul) were, however, a very different matter.
In 1836 Lieutenant-Colonel Stacy, one of Prinsep’s most dogged collectors, was presented with what looked like a massive font carved from a single rectangular block of the local sandstone. It had been found near the city of Mathura, between Agra and Delhi. On the front and back were lively reliefs, and it was the unmistakably classical appearance of these that prompted Stacy to make an immediate report to the Asiatic Society.
The obverse represents Silenus [Bacchus’ alcoholic counsellor] inebriated; he is reclining on a low seat or throne, supported on either side by a young male and female Grecian. Two minor figures support the knees; the attitude of Silenus, the drooping of the head, the lips, and powerless state of the limbs, give an accurate representation of a drunken man. The figure of the youth and the maiden are also in appropriate keeping. The whole is evidently the work of an able artist who could not possibly, in my opinion, have been a native of India.
On the other side there were more Bacchanalian figures. The females showed some concessions to Indian tastes, especially in the lovingly exaggerated bosoms; but they were fully clothed – an unusual circumstance in itself – and their clothing was distinctly Greek, a pleated tunic and flowing drapery that brushed the ground. How on earth had such an improbable piece turned up on the banks of the Jumna?
Prinsep immediately guessed that there might be some connection here with the Indo-Greek coins. But he had serious doubts about it.
The discovery of a piece of sculpture bearing evident reference to Greek mythology & might excite less surprise after the elaborate display we have lately had of coins found in upper India and the Punjab with Greek legends and a combination of Greek and Hindu deities. Yet in fact the latter offer no explanation of the former.
Silenus, Bacchus, Dionysos – none of these appeared on the coins and neither was there any Hindu god with whom they might have become identified. Moreover, Bacchic worship did not seem to have featured in Greek Bactria.
Stacy’s font therefore remained an unexplained mystery. Only after the British annexation of the Punjab in the late 1840s was anything quite like it found. As usual, Cunningham was in the forefront of the new discoveries. Returning from his abortive boundary commission in Ladakh in 1848, he headed west of Kashmir in search of Fa Hsien’s route through the mountains. In the foothills north of Peshawar, he found the ruins of what appeared to be a monastery incorporati
ng Corinthian capitals. The statuary was equally classical and he brought back a whole camel-load. Further excavations were carried out at the same site in the 1850s, and the whole collection was sent to London for the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace. Sadly, it perished in the famous fire before it had even been photographed.
Europe had to wait another ten years for a good look at Gandhara sculpture. Dr Gottlieb Leitner, educationist, ethnologist, explorer extraordinary and one of India’s most maligned eccentrics, could never resist a sensation. As a schoolmaster in Lahore he spent his vacations wandering in the hills to the north, and in the Swat valley he first encountered Gandhara art. Though neither an archaeologist nor an art historian, he immediately recognized a controversy in the making. He returned to London in 1868 with several crates of statuary.
By now it was established that, despite their classical features, these statues, and the sites from which they came, were for the most part Buddhist. There were exceptions – the odd figure that was straight from classical mythology or Roman history – but even Stacy’s Silenus was being identified with the Buddhist yaksha, Kuvera. Not that this made the phenomenon any less puzzling. A Buddha in a toga, a Buddha nestling amongst the acanthus leaves of a Corinthian column, a Boddhisattva with moustaches and wearing Athenian sandals? It was all too absurd. Yet for once there was no gainsaying the evidence. As Buddhist scholars had already observed, rigorous iconographic conventions governed any representation of the Buddha. Amongst these were such distinctive features as the protuberance on the crown of the head, the elongated ear lobes, and the suggestion of a third eye in the centre of the forehead. All these were scrupulously incorporated in the Gandhara sculptures; though the figure might look like a good copy of the Apollo Belvedere, there could be no argument that it was in fact the Buddha.