India Discovered (14 page)

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 incorporating 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.

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.