India Discovered

by John Keay

  But this raised the most intriguing question of all. The sculptors of Sanchi, Bharhut and Boddh Gaya had carefully avoided any portrayal of the Buddha himself. An empty throne, the sacred Boddhi tree, a footprint or some other symbol was always preferred. There is no known instance of the Buddha being portrayed in human form before the second century AD. Yet the Greeks were now known to have been over-run by 100 BC, at least 200 years earlier. So who carved these Buddhas and, if not the Greeks, who produced these classical forms?

  Speculation and controversy simmered throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Broadly speaking, there were two main schools of thought. In India, Cunningham, recalling the very clear Bactrian influence on the Indo-Greek coins, stuck to the idea that the Greeks must somehow be behind all Gandhara art. He suggested that the Bactrians who settled in the Punjab in the second century BC brought their ideals and their artisans with them: the seeds of classicism were thus sown and lingered on long after the eclipse of Greek political power. He further supposed an early date, about 50 BC, for the arrival of the Kushan invaders. The Kushans, and in particular their king Kanishka, were known to have adopted and promoted Buddhism as zealously as Ashoka. Stupas and monasteries were suddenly in demand, and what more natural than a revival of the latent skills and ideals of their Greek predecessors? Since the Greeks were accustomed to representing their deities in human form, they automatically attempted to portray the Buddha; the Kushans, converts to Buddhism who knew no better, welcomed the novelty. Gandhara sculptors therefore invented the Buddha image and no doubt it was from them that in due course Indian sculptors borrowed the idea.

  Cunningham had the advantage of having discovered many of the sculptures and of having seen most of the others. In India his hypothesis was widely accepted; Major Cole, who himself explored in Swat in 1883 and 1884, was in full agreement. He even revived the idea that the seeds of Hellenism had been sown in the Punjab, not just by the Bactrian Greeks, but by Alexander, In England, though, it was a different matter. On anything to do with Indian art Cunningham now had a formidable rival in James Fergusson, the historian of India’s architecture. Fergusson had never visited the Punjab and, anyway, had left India before the main Gandhara finds. He had seen Leitner’s collection and studied all available photographs; but understandably, his first complaint was that Cunningham was hogging all the finds and consigning them to Indian museums.

  The extraordinary classical character and the beauty of these sculptures & is of such surpassing interest for the history of Indian art, that it is of the utmost importance their age should be determined, if it is possible to do so. At present, sufficient materials do not exist in this country [Britain] to enable the general public to form even an opinion on any argument that may be brought forward on the subject; nor will they be in a position to do so till the Government can be induced to spend the trifling sum required to bring some of them home. They are quite thrown away where they are now; here they could hardly be surpassed in interest by any recent discoveries of the same class.

  This, however, did not stop Fergusson himself from forming an opinion on the subject. Drawing on his considerable knowledge of classical architecture, he made the important observation that Gandhara sculpture owed as much to the Romans as to the Greeks. Indeed, novelties like a figure nestling in the foliage of a Corinthian capital were quite late developments in Roman provincial art (about fourth century AD). Fergusson conceded that in its earliest stages Gandhara art might have owed something to the Greeks, but that it covered a much longer period than Cunningham suggested – right up to the seventh century AD – and was therefore contemporary with the empires of Rome and Byzantium. Just how Roman and Byzantine ideas had reached north-west India without leaving their mark on the intervening lands Fergusson could not say. But he suggested that from time immemorial east–west contacts had been on a much greater scale than was generally appreciated. Stacy had claimed that his Silenus discovery supported Sir William Jones’s belief that the gods of India and Greece were somehow interchangeable. Prinsep, and now Fergusson, recalled the tradition that St (Doubting) Thomas had visited the court of Gondophares, one of the Parthian kings of Gandhara. Fergusson also suggested that, if the Bhagavad Gita appeared to contain Christian doctrine, this too was no mere coincidence.

  In short, if Fergusson’s theory was right, just about anything in Indian art and culture which appealed to the Victorians could be explained away as evidence of Greek, Roman, Byzantine or Christian influences. No wonder, then, that in the nineteenth century Gandhara art was the only Indian art that they took seriously. ‘Gandhara sculptures’, wrote Vincent Smith in 1889, ‘would be admitted by most persons qualified to form an opinion to be the best specimens of the plastic art ever known to exist in India.’ They were classical and therefore familiar; they were Buddhist and therefore, unlike Hindu art, comparatively innocuous. And they were controversial – an attraction in itself – but this controversy also raised the possibility of an ingenious and consoling explanation for anything that appeared worthy in Indian civilization.

  As a result, classical influences in Indian art were, for a time, wildly exaggerated. But fashions change. Where Cunningham had noted ‘a boldness of design and a freedom of execution that no eastern artist has ever yet shown’, Fergusson ‘a beauty of surpassing interest’, and Cole much ‘delicacy and taste’, Ernest Havell in 1890 saw only ‘an inferior handicraft & insincerity and want of spirituality; the Buddhas and Boddhisattvas of this period are senseless puppets, debased types of the Greek and Roman pantheon, posing uncomfortably in the attitudes of Indian asceticism’. Havell, admittedly, was as prejudiced against the Gandhara school as Cunningham or Fergusson for it. The problem for all of them was that no aesthetic valuation was worth much until the chronology of Gandhara art, and therefore the inspiration behind it, had been clarified.

  Only with the excavation of Taxila in the 1920s did the necessary evidence come to light. This great site, with its Greek, Parthian and Kushan cities, had been discovered by Cunningham’s Archaeological Survey; but as usual the old general had hastened on after doing little more than establish its identity. It was left to Sir John Marshall, Cunningham’s successor, albeit after a gap of twenty years, to exploit the find. The wealth of sculptural and architectural remains in each of the old cities provided the data for a thorough classification of all Gandhara art.

  Happily, the truth allowed vindication for just about everyone. Cunningham would have been gratified to learn that the beginnings of the school did date back to the first century BC and did represent a revival of Hellenistic art; also that the Kushan period was indeed the most important and that the Gandhara Buddhas were amongst the first representations of the Enlightened One. Fergusson, though, could have consoled himself with the news that he was right about the longevity of the Gandhara school: Marshall identified a quite distinct later school which lasted until the fifth century. He was also right about Roman influence; the classicism of Gandhara seems to have been frequently recharged from the West.

  In the eighteenth century Aurangzeb’s great mosque above Panchganga ghat dominated the Benares waterfront. Built on the site of a vast Hindu temple it helped explain the dearth of pre-Islamic architecture in the sacred city. Yet Benares remained a centre of Hindu scholarship where the first orientalists sought the keys to India’s past. (Watercolour by Robt. Smith, 1833.)

  James Prinsep consulting with Hindu pandits in the Sanskrit College in Benares. Founded by one of Warren Hasting’s protégés, the institution was the first to attempt the systematic collection and study of India’s classical literature. (Lithograph by Sir Chas. D’Oyley.)

  The rock of Girnar in Gujerat, ‘which by the aid of the “iron pen” has been converted into a book’, was discovered by Colonel James Tod in 1822. Carrying one of the longest versions of Ashoka’s edicts, it was used by Prinsep to help decipher the script and establish Ashoka as the greatest figure in India’s ancient history. (Watercolour by Thos. Postans, 19
38).

  Only a few miles from Madras, the temples of Mahabalipuram (here in a painting by Thomas Daniell) puzzled scholars and visitors alike. For they were not in fact architecture but sculpture, each carved and hollowed from a single gigantic boulder.

  “Few remains of antiquity have excited greater curiosity.’ The engineering skills involved in excavating the cave temples of western India suggested Egyptian involvement while their sculptural elegance was ascribed to Greek influence. Not till the 1830s was it acknowledged that they were in fact Indian – Buddhist in the case of Karli lithograph by Henry Salt, 1808), Hindu in the case of Elephanta (drawing by Bishop Heber).

  The ruined temple of Boddh Gaya was being cared for by local Brahmins when Francis Buchanan first identified it as Buddhist. From ancient Chinese texts Cunningham discovered that it was in fact the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment. Rehabilitated, it is today a major centre of Buddhist studies and a place of universal pilgrimage. (Watercolour by ‘J.C.M.’, 1814.)

  The stupas of Sanchi, and particularly the sculpted reliefs that cover their gateways, proved to be amongst the most enlightening finds. When first discovered in 1819, the Indian origins of Buddhism were still unsuspected. Alexander Cunningham pioneered this field of study and was the first to conduct a systematic examination of Sanchi. But not till the 1880s was the site cleared and partially reconstructed. (Watercolour by William Simpson, 1862.)

  A major obstacle to any Victorian appreciation of Indian sculpture was its unabashed sensuality. The yakshis, tree and fertility spirits, once adorned Buddhist stupa railing at Mathura. But exception was made for artefacts of the Gandhara school (first to fifth centuries AD) of the northwest. Here Greek and Roman influence had resulted in the Buddha being decently clothed in a tog and in a Boddhisattva being endowed with classical features.

  Hidden in the jungle, the great temple complex of Khajuraho (tenth – eleventh centuries AD) was rediscovered in 1838; but not greatly publicized. ‘The sculptor had at times allowed his subject to grow a little warmer than there was any absolute necessity for his doing,’ wrote the first visitor with masterly understatement. Many and ingenious are the explanations which have been advanced for the mithunas (love-making groups) and apsaras (dancing girls: which cover the walls of almost all the Khajuraho temples.

  In attempting the monumental task of classifying India’s architecture, James Fergusson dubbed as ‘Indo-Aryan’ those, mainly north Indian, temples with a curvilinear sikhara (tower). The sikhara took many forms, his favourite being this pineapple shape typical of Orissa. The festival of Jagannath at Puri was reckoned one of India’s greatest sights. (Drawing by one of Mackenzie’s draughtsmen.)

  Much of India’s architectural heritage was first brought to notice as a result of the travels of surveyors and map-makers. Colin Mackenzie, India’s first Surveyor-General, encouraged antiquarian research and expected his surveyors, as here, to measure and sketch all buildings of note. (Drawing, possibly a temple at Vijayanagar, by one of Mackenzie’s draughtsmen.)

  After spending twenty years over Taxila, Marshall could hardly be expected to embrace Havell’s damning aesthetic indictment. In Gandhara, as in every other school of art, there was good and bad; there was development, maturity and decline; there was experimentation and imitation. In the panel reliefs the compositions were often exceptional and the figures charming. Craftsmanship was sometimes of the highest order; the Boddhisattva bust (from Mardan and now in the Peshawar Museum) was superb, ‘the beauty of the chiselling as clear-cut and precise as could be found in any school of sculpture, East or West’. But there was also much that was inferior and insipid. The nice clear expressions and the noble features which so appealed to the previous generation smacked too much of a ‘smarmy prettiness’. Besides, it was now acknowledged that India had an art of its own that was infinitely more intriguing.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A Little Warmer than Necessary

  Included in the list of places Alexander Cunningham submitted to Lord Canning in 1861 as worthy of immediate investigation by the Archaeological Survey, were two sites of outstanding importance for the study of Indian sculpture. The first was Khajuraho, of which notorious place a solitary report had appeared in the Asiatic Society’s journal for 1839. It had actually been discovered twenty years earlier. Cornet James Franklin, a military surveyor and the brother of the great Arctic explorer, spotted the temples in what was then dense jungle and duly recorded them as ‘ruins’. Unfortunately, Franklin’s handwriting was none too clear: the map makers misread his ‘ruins’ as ‘mines’ and Khajuraho was thought to contain nothing more exciting than old tin workings. The truth was left for Captain T. S. Burt, one of Prinsep’s roving engineers and the man who had procured the first true facsimiles of the Allahabad column inscriptions. While touring in central India in 1838 he heard tell, from one of the men hired to shoulder his palanquin, ‘of the wonders of this place – Khajroa near Chatpore he called it’. By double marches, or rather rides (the palanquin bearer must have been regretting his indiscretion), Burt made up the few hours that he thought would suffice for an inspection, and arrived, all unsuspecting, just as the sun was rising above the jungle.

  I was much delighted at the venerable and picturesque appearance these several old temples presented as I got within view of them. They reared their sunburnt tops above the trees with all the pride of superior height and age&. My first enquiry, after taking breakfast, was for ancient inscriptions and a temple close by was immediately pointed out as the possessor of one. I went there and sure enough there was an inscription in the No. 3 Sanskrit character of the Allahabad pillar [Kutila]&. It was the largest, the finest, the most legible inscription of any I had yet met with and it was with absolute delight that I set to work to transfer its contents to paper.

  A dedicated antiquarian, Burt bent to his task with printer’s ink and wet towels. Like the sportsman who stoops to study a pug mark while, unseen above him, the leopard looks on, he was still blissfully oblivious of what lay in store. He wanted a date and he found it — 1123 in the Samvat era, which meant AD 1067.

  Having done this, I took a look round & and could not help expressing a feeling of wonder at these splendid monuments of antiquity having been erected by a people who have continued to live in such a state of barbarous ignorance. It is a proof that some of these men must then have been of a more superior caste of human being than the rest.

  In a moment he was going to regret these words. Like many of his contemporaries he subscribed to the idea that for centuries Indian culture had been steadily degenerating. At first he thought that in Khajuraho he had found an example of the heights to which it had once aspired. But as he innocently paused to examine the sculptures, he had second thoughts: 1067 must have been well into the period of decline.

  I found & seven Hindoo temples, most beautifully and exquisitely carved as to workmanship, but the sculptor had at times allowed his subject to grow a little warmer than there was any absolute necessity for his doing; indeed some of the sculptures here were extremely indecent and offensive, which I was at first much surprised to find in temples that are professed to be erected for good purposes, and on account of religion. But the religion of the ancient Hindoos can not have been very chaste if it induced people under the cloak of religion, to design the most disgraceful representations to desecrate their ecclesiastical erections. The palki [palanquin] bearers, however, appeared to take great delight at those, to them, very agreeable novelties, which they took good care to point out to all present.

  Burt must have been unusually innocent if he was really surprised by the famous apsaras – seductive nymphs – and the mithunas — the love-making couples (and sometimes quadruples) – of the Khajuraho sculptures. Since the seventeenth century the British had been familiar with the so-called Black Temple of Konarak in Orissa, which boasts similar figures – albeit more blurred by erosion. Near the shore of the Bay of Bengal, the Black Temple was commonly a landfall for ships making for the Hu
ghli river and Calcutta. As it hove into sight the old India hands would take the young ‘griffins’ aside for whispered innuendos about the sexual mores of the Hindu.

  Burt, though, seems to have been genuinely scandalized. Turning in acute embarrassment from his sleeve-tugging bearers, he tried to concentrate on the architecture. In the Khandariya Mahadeo temple, the noblest of the ‘architectural erections’, he determined to get on the roof to inspect the construction of the soaring pinnacles. The only access was from inside, by shinning up the sacred, and not-so-sacred, images.

  From the side wall which was perpendicular I first sent up one of the bearers and then, by laying hold of the leg of one god, and the arm of another, the head of a third and so on, I was luckly enabled, not however without inconvenience, to attain the top of the wall where, on the roof, I found an aperture just large enough for me to creep in at. On entering upon the roof I found that my sole predecessors there for several years before had evidently been the bat and the monkey, and the place for that reason was not the most odoriferous of all places in the world.

  Still wary of the mithunas, but warming to his subject, Burt toured the whole complex. ‘I shall state my opinion that they are most probably the finest aggregate number of temples congregated together in one place to be met with in all India.’ He described in detail the great bull, Nandi, outside the Visvanatha temple and the even bigger image of Vishnu in his incarnation as a boar. By his own calculations this statue, a monolith, weighed sixty-eight tons. The female figure representing mankind, and usually borne aloft on the boar’s tusks, was missing. Considering that Burt was surrounded by female figures, his distress at this discovery is surprising. ‘I would willingly have given a hundred rupees [£10] to have had a good sight of her.’