Indian Art and Letters

Author(s): India Society
Publisher: India Society

Page 47

Archaeological Explorations in India, 1932-33 At Taxila, where excavations have been in progress since 1913, Sir John Marshall was engaged on the clearance and conservation of the Buddhist monastery at Kalawan (Fig. 1), which turns out to be the largest monastery so far brought to light in the north-west of India It comprises three separate blocks of buildings, ranged one above the other on the hillside terraces. The middle block, which covers an area of about 150 yards east and west by 100 yards north and south, comprises three large courts of cells, a group of dining and assembly halls, and spacious courts of stupas and chapels. The inscription engraved on a copper plate, which was discovered in the previous year in one of these stupa shrines, has been published by Professor Sten Konow of Oslo, and reveals the fact that the old name of this monastery was Chadasila, and that the shrine in which it was found was erected by a female lay-worshipper in the year 134 (of an unspecified era), corresponding approximately with the year A.D. 76. This record is of importance, not only as confirming Sir John Marshall's views as to the chronology of Saka and Pallava rulers of Taxıla, but also for the instructive light that it throws on the history of the Gandhara school of sculpture, since it enables us to date with comparative confidence the Gandhara reliefs with which the stupa shrine referred to was decorated. An interesting feature of this monastery is the presence of three strong-rooms, which may have been intended for the storage of the property of the monastery-e.g., copper bells, etc. Sixty coins, ranging in date from Hermæus to Hormazd II., were found in this monastery; and in a niche in front of one of these strong-rooms was a group of unusually wellmodelled terra-cotta figures. At Nalanda, District Patna, eight monasteries, a large stupa, and other
structures had been brought to light in previous years. Another monastery (No. 9) has now been exposed by Mr. G. C. Chandra. The portable antiquities recovered from this building include an interesting collection of some seventy-five bronze or copper and stone images representing the Buddha . Dhyani Buddha Vajrasattva (Fig. 2), Manjuari (Fig. 3) and other Bodhisattvas, Tara, Trailokyavijaya (Fig 4) and other Buddhist and Brahmanical gods and goddesses (Fig. 5). Most of the bronze or copper images were gilded, and on one of them the gilt is remarkably well preserved (Fig. 2). The pedestals of some of these images are moreover ornamented with semiprecious stones, while the eyes, urna marks on the forehead and the edges of the drapery are picked out in silver or platinum. As the bulk of the bronze images hitherto found at Nalanda had been recovered from the monastery of Balaputra of the Sailendra dynasty of Suvarnnadvipa (Sumatra), which stood on the site of monastery No. 1, Dr. Bosch, a Dutch scholar, had expressed the opinion that these statues were purely Hindu- Javanese bronze work, and that
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