Indian Art and Letters

Author(s): India Society
Publisher: India Society

Page 52

Archaeological Explorations in India, 1932-33 L. P. Pandya, have been examined by Mr. K. P. Jayaswal, who assigns them to circa 2000 B.C. It is interesting to note that Sir John Marshall has discovered similar engravings on a number of boulders on the River Indus near the town of Attock. One of these boulders, however, also bears a few Kharoshthi characters, and the presumption is that these scribblings are of a date later than the Kharoshthi characters in question.
In the Indian Museum at Calcutta the gallery of the Gandhara sculptures has been rearranged and the sculptures reclassified according to subjects represented by them. Five silver punch-marked coins from the Rajshahi District, which were added to the coin cabinet of this museum, are the earliest coins so far found in Bengal. The new acquisitions also include a rare stone image of Harihara attended by Surya and Buddha. An interesting Gandhara stone relief in the collections in the Peshawar Museum had hitherto remained unnoticed. It represents the reception of Gautama Buddha at the deer park (Sarnath) by his five comrades soon after his enlightenment at Bodh Gaya near Gaya. In conformity with the account given in the Vinaya Pitaka one of the monks in the sculpture prepares a seat for the Master, another brings water for washing his feet, while a third holds a fan.
The Allahabad Municipal Museum, which was started only a few years ago, already contains a considerable number of valuable antiquities brought together by Mr. B. M. Vyas, executive officer of that municipality. Two of the acquisitions made during the years under review are terra-cotta toy carts, which date from the third century A.D. and were collected at Kosam (ancient Kausambi in the District of Allahabad). In the cart (Fig. 10) are seated two rows of three passengers each, the middle one in each case being a woman. The hair of the woman in the left-hand row is being pulled by the man seated behind her. The other row consists of musicians. At first sight it seemed as if these carts were representations of the well-known Sanskrit play the Mrichchhakatika of Sudraka, the woman in the left-hand row being Radanika, the maid-servant of the hero Charudatta.
Other noteworthy sculptures in this museum are: a fragment of a door lintel, which must have been carved with figures of the four noble animals (Fig. 1) of the Buddhists, like those found on the abacus of the Asokan capital at Sarnath ; Krishna lifting the Govardhana hill; images of Jaina Tirthankaras and a beautiful head of Siva from Kosam ; an image of the goddess Sitala riding on a donkey and a Bodhisattva or a Yaksha of about the second century A D., both from Pratapgarh ; and terra-cotta figurines depicting styles of costume, coiffure, etc.
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