Landmark in Art

Hungarian by birth, Charles Louis Fabri (1899­1968) became in later life as much an Indian as an Indologist. He was a member of Aurel Stein’s arch­aeological expedition into the heartland of Asia in the thirties, taught at Santiniketan, was curator of the Lahore Museum, and spent the last two decad­es of his life in Delhi as an art critic. The posthu­mous publication on the art of Orissa is one of his most important contributions. Though he himself admits that ‘a strictly chronological treatment of the art of Orissa is not possible’, he has made a commendable attempt at indicating the main phases of the evolution of Orissan art. While Konarak and Bhuvaneswar are well-known, he has been able to cite many hitherto unnoticed edifices in the interior and bring out their importance in the evolution of artistic traditions. The most controversial among the views he has tried to establish would probably be the claim that there was a period of about six centuries at the beginning of the Christian era dur­ing which almost all art in Orissa was of Buddhist origin.

To deal with the last point first, there seems to be more argument than evidence to support this claim. Fabri admits the paucity of actual remains, but he argues that the sudden emergence of brahmanical art in the sixth century with considerable evidence of maturity is inexplicable without a prior and extended evolution. As he rightly says, Orissa has been badly neglected in the matter of archaeo­logical excavations. Ratnagiri is the only site which has been explored and it indicates creative activity of Buddhist inspiration over a long stretch of time. Fabri claims a span of seven or eight centuries co­mmencing from the second century of the Chris­tian era. He feels that if excavations are undertaken in other sites, more evidence to support his claim would be forthcoming. Meanwhile, he has a tend­ency to identify all brickwork as Buddhist and stone construction as brahmanical; pillared halls are also regarded as evidence of Buddhist sponsor­ship. The Sambalpur Buddha images he has analy­sed and illustrated are indeed masterpieces. But the basic ambiguity of the situation regarding our knowledge of the Orissan past is reflected in the ambiguity of his own dating. The text describes them as belonging to the fourth century; the plates refer to them as fifth century work. A lot more evidence will have to come in before the complex interactions in the actual evolution gain full clarity in our appraisal. Much of it still lies buried under­ground. Above ground, there have been odd tra­nsformations. A Mauryan piIlar has become, about a thousand years later the linga of the Bhaskaresvara temple. Transplanted Avalokitesvaras have become brahmanical deities. The cult of the chthonic deit­ies has flourished alongside the high classical tradi­tions, Buddhist or Hindu, and influenced the art of both just as Tantrism later blurred the distinction of creed and art between the two.

Art theory has in its archives many ideal schem­ata for the evolution of art—regarding the historical succession of artistic modalities from architecture to painting and of expression from archaic to rococo in an extended parabolic curve. Fabri’s scheme itself is thus not original. But his application of it to the emperical Orissan situation is a solid contribution. Briefly, as he traces it, the cycle of development is from the archaic (third century B.C. to third century A.D.), by gradual discovery of skill and reality, to the idealized perfection of the classical period (fourth and fifth centuries) which slowly gives way to a mannerism first (sixth and seventh centuries) to evolve a glorious baroque (eighth to thirteenth centuries) that ultimately ends in a brief rococo and a deterioration of standards.

For understanding the stylistic changes over the centuries, this scheme is undoubtedly very helpful. But the difficulty with completely deterministic the­ories, like the race-milieu-moment theory of Taine’s or the theory of parabolic descent from classic to ro­coco, is that it cannot accommodate variations of individual creativity. For instance, if the early Naginis and Yakshas have the frontality, rigidity, symmetry and heaviness of archaic art, the Yakshis and dancers of the second century B.C. are light, elegant and caught in gracious movement. The fourth century Buddhas of Sambalpur are not yet classical and if the Ratnagiri sculpture of the Bud­dha calling earth to witness is a classical master­piece, other contemporary sculptures slip not into mannerism but into a lifeless inertness. The dis­tinction between mannerism and baroque, while clear in terms of style, does not always follow the chronological Schedule given by Fabri. He died four years before the publication of the Bonner­-Sarma-Das volume which has thrown new light on Konarak. But it is a vertitable palimpsest of styles, miraculously harmonized. If the temple is baroque in the proliferation of corners in the ground plan, the figure of the Sun God is classical, far superior to the best sculpture produced in Bhuvaneswar two centuries earlier; the female musicians and the dan­cing Bhairavas have an archaic ponderousness in spite of the superb classicizing; the numerous amor­ous couples are baroque in their dynamic posturing; some of the decorative friezes are rococo.

But the fact remains that the volume, in spite of the controversial nature of its central assertions, is a landmark in Indian art history. From the docu­mentary point, the illustrations are adequate. But the work deserved much better photographs and display.

These features have been very well looked after in the album of sculptures brought out by the Nat­ional Book Trust. Belatedly, but now rapidly, Indian publishing is recognizing the rather obvious truth that, in art history, one illustration can convey more than ten pages of description. It is also being realized that genuine interest in art is spreading among laymen; but they have little time or patience for ponderous texts and are happier with tabloid captions giving basic data about period, provenance, theme and style. Dr. Sivaramamurti had given us a kindly and helpful narration of this type in the volume brought out by the Indian Council for Cul­tural Relations as far back as 1961. In the present offering, the text has been still further reduced to a brief introduction of seven pages, the illustrations are more and get better display and the captions give cues which can help the layman to develop his sensibility. Curiously, the sculptural tradition of the Indus Valley civilization is unrepresented in both volumes. Dr. Sivaramamurti is perhaps the most knowledgeable among our art historians regarding the response of the sculptural tradition to impulses from poetry, music and dance and the selections thus offer not only the masterpieces of plastic art but evoke rich and varied humanist associations.

Krishna Chaitanya is a writer in Malayalam and English and an art critic.