No Title
C. Sivaramamurti
AN EARLY DOCUMENT OF INDIAN ART: THE CITRALAKSANA Nagnajit Manohar Publications, New Delhi, 1977, 150 pp., Price Not Stated
May-June 1977, volume 2, No 3

Laufer’s German version of the Citralaksana has no doubt been long known to the world of connoisseurs of Indian art. Coomaraswamy, Masson Oursel, Kramrisch and other great writers have indeed used this important document which was recovered from Tibetan, the Sanskrit original having been lost quite long ago. Yet effective use of this text has not been possible for all these years even after the German version was made available over sixty years ago. Scholars in the field of Indian art can not therefore adequately thank the authors of this English version which at once makes the text also available for effective use.

This Citralaksana is an early text to be distinguished from Srikumara’s Citralaksana, a chapter of his Silparatna, a sixteenth century work on Indian art from Kerala. This earlier text of Citralaksana appears rather out of context in the Tibetan Tanjur, though the latter is an integrated part of the larger text, the whole of which is on art. It is fortunate, again, that all possibility of confusion of these two texts has been made impossible by the almost simul­taneous appearance of a translation of this late text by Dr. Asok K. Bhattacharya.

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