Indian Antiquary Vol 62

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Charles E A W Oldham, S Krishnaswami Aiyangar, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarka
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 262

240
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[DECEMBER, 1933
With the Muslim conquest the centre of cultural energy shifted to Delhi. The Delhi Sultāns began by building mosques from the debris of temples. Then they set Hindu crafts. men to interpret Islamic forms. Under the early Tughlaqs there was a brief reversion to Islamic purism, but Indian feeling soon re-asserted itself, and the break-away of the lower provinces, Jaunpur and Bengal, involved artistic as well as political independence. The Hindu artists employed by the African Shahs of Jaunpur aimed apparently at novelty and attained it in the Egyptian-like 'propylons' of their mosques. The architects of Muslim Bengal never grasped the spirit of Islamic art, their mosques are ill-proportioned, their decoration overelaborate; the blend of the two cultures is less successful than elsewhere.
C. THE CENTRAL BELT.
The affinities of north Rajpūtānā lie with Delhi, those of south Rajpūtānā with Gujarāt. Malwa and Bundelkhan! are associated in language and culture with the Mid-land; Rewa and the little group of States to the west of it, which constitute Baghelkhand, speak a dialect of E. Hindi. They are in close touch on the north with Allahabad, where Ganges and Jamuna unite, and on the south with the upper reaches of the Narbada and the Mahanadi (the Chattisgarh plain). The Narbada marks traditionally the border between N. and S. India. Across it run the chief routes from Upper India to the Deccan and the sea. Culturally its middle reaches belong to Malwa. It is bounded on the south by the Satpura, Mahadeo and Maikal Hills, a cultural barrier dominated by Dravidian and Munda speaking tribes, which broadens out eastward into the Chota Nagpur plateau. Cross these three ranges, and you are among Marāthās, and Gonds.
The Copper Age culture of the Ganges valley extends oyer the Chota Nagpur plateau and southward into the Central Provinces as far as Gungeria, in Balaghat district, on the watershed between the Narbada and the Godavari. South of this it did not go (Fig. 8).
In the Mauryan period and after, the key positions were Sañchi and Bharhut. Bharhut is in Baghelkhand on an ancient route from Allahabad to Jabalpur. Sañchi lay apparently at the junction of several routes leading from the upper Ganges valley to Ujjain and thence to Paithan and the Deccan or westward to the sea at Broach (Fig. 7). Round Sañchi, where Aśoka carved his edicts, is grouped an instructive series of monuments. The Besnagar pillar is typical; the capital is of Mauryan pedigree, but the shaft is quite un-Persian; it records, in Brahmi characters, its dedication to Vishnu by Heliodorus, a Vaishnava Greek and envoy of King Antialcidas of Taxila at the court of a Sunga king. Near by is a record of the Andhras, co-heirs with the Greeks and Sungas of the Mauryan heritage. Sañchi plainly was the meeting point of Andhra, Sunga and Greek. Sañchi and Bharhut disclose the growth of Indian culture up to Gupta times; and it is in this Central Belt that Gupta art is best preserved (Fig 11). South of the Satpura-Maikal barrier, the Vakatakas took up the Gupta tradition. It was they apparently who passed it on to Ajanta, and from Ajanta the Calukyas, not long after, derived certain Gupta elements in their art.
As already noted, the Central Belt lay within the area of the Northern Style; and it preserves at Khajuraho, Gwalior and other places some of its finest examples. Under the Kalacuris of Jabalpur and Chattisgarh the Gupta and Northern styles were blended. The only part of the Central Belt in which the Muslims won a foothold was Malwa, and here, at Mandu, though not uninfluenced by the decorative taste of Gujarat, they followed Delhi models more closely than any other 'Provincial' school. Of the Gond kingdoms in the south (Mandla, Kherla, Chanda), which held Islam at bay till the eighteenth century, nothing of distinctive artistic interest remains.