History · Ch 4 — Thinkers, Beliefs and Buildings — Cultural Developments
Grappling with the unfamiliar
Grappling with the unfamiliar
The shock of the unfamiliar
When nineteenth-century European scholars first encountered ancient Indian sculptures of gods and goddesses, they were completely baffled. The images they saw — figures with multiple arms, multiple heads, or combinations of human and animal forms — struck them as grotesque and incomprehensible. Nothing in their own artistic tradition had prepared them for this.
These scholars did what anyone does when faced with something strange: they reached for a familiar yardstick. The only classical sculpture they truly knew and admired was that of ancient Greece. So they began comparing Indian sculptures with Greek ones, and almost always found the Indian examples inferior.
The Greek connection — and a bias
Then came an exciting discovery. In the northwest of the Indian subcontinent — in cities like Taxila and Peshawar — scholars found images of the Buddha and Bodhisattas that were clearly based on Greek models. This made sense historically: Indo-Greek rulers had established kingdoms in this region around the second century BCE, and their artistic traditions had blended with local ones.
Because these Buddha images looked most like the Greek statues the Europeans already admired, they were declared the finest examples of early Indian art. Everything else — the multi-armed deities, the animal-headed gods — was dismissed as crude or bizarre.
This judgment was not based on any objective standard of artistic quality. It was simply a case of preferring what looked familiar.
A universal human strategy …
In situ means "on the spot" — that is, preserving an object (such as a sculpture) where it was found, rather than removing it to a museum. H.H. Cole argued for in-situ preservation; his plea failed at …
Figure 4.29 shows a sculpture of a Bodhisatta from the Gandhara region. The figure is carved in stone and stands upright, draped in a flowing robe that falls in heavy, naturalistic folds — a style directly borrowed from Greek and Roman statuary. His hair is wavy and tied into a topknot, again echoing Hellenistic conventions rather than the simpler, more abstract forms seen in earlier Indian art. The face is serene, with well-defined features: a straight nose, arched brows, and a calm, half-closed gaze.
The image is labelled simply as a Bodhisatta, not a Buddha, because in Gandharan art the Bodhisatta is often shown as a princely figure wearing jewellery and a turban, whereas the Buddha is depicted with a shaven head and monastic robes. Here, the Bodhisatta wears earrings, a necklace, and an elaborate headdress, marking him as a being who has postponed his own enlightenment to help others.
What makes this figure historically significant is what it reveals about cultural encounter. The textbook explains that when nineteenth-century European scholars first encountered Indian sculpture, they found much of it unfamiliar and even grotesque — especially images with multiple arms or animal heads. But when they saw Gandharan Bodhisattas like this one, they were excited. Here was an Indian religious image that looked like a Greek god: the drapery, the posture, the facial type all matched the classical statues they already admired. Because these sculptures were found in the northwest — in cities like Taxila and Peshawar, where Indo-Greek rulers had established kingdoms in the second century BCE — scholars assumed that Greek artists had taught Indians how to make "proper" sculpture. …