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JAINA BIBLIOGRAPHY
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sculpture. Some critics have even suggested that it must be assigned to a period when the influence of Hellenic art on India could be invoked to account for the carver's mastery of and atomical form. The fact remains that this figurine, excavated under scientific conditions, belongs to the pre-historic or Indus Valley period and is to be dated in the later third millenium B. C. It will become apparent, too, on comparision with a typical Greek representation of the nude, that the figure is completely Indian in character and execution and, in a sense, diametrically opposed to the Hellenic ideal.
Pp. 15-16. Although it is impossible to tell the exact inconographic significance of the nude image from Harappa, it seems almost certain that it must have been intended as a deity of some sort, . ......this statuete is completely Indian in the sculptor's realisation of the essential image, a symbolic rather than descriptive representation of anatomy, in which the articulation of the body is realized in broad convex planes of modeling. The one quality which may be discerned here that is peculiar to many later Indian examples of plastic art is the suggestion of an inner tension that seems to threaten to push out and burst the taut outer layer of skin. Actually this is a technical device by which the sculptor revealed the existence of the breath or prāņa filling and expanding the vessel of the body. The fact that the figure appears pot-bellied is, therefore, iconographically completely right and truthful. It is not intended as a caricature in any sense, since this distension resulting from yogic breath control was regarded as an outward sign of both material and spiritual well-being. We have in this statuette, too, what is certainly the earliest exhibition of the Indian sculptor's skill in producing not only a sense of plastic volume but also in representing the soft quality of the flesh. This is not a literal imitation, such as one finds in Western sculpture, but a suggestion of fleshiness by such properly sculptural and abstract devices as the interlocking of the smooth and softly modeled convex planes of the torso and the exaggeration of the depth of the navel.......... It anticipates the technique of countless images of indian Gods made centuries after its fashioning in the third millenium B. C.
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Stella KRAMRISCH. The Art of India. London, 1954.
P. 16. There is a deep meaning inherent in things that were made at the beginning of time. The original mcaning remained and reinforced the context when the Vedic alter came to be given its Buddhist or Jain equivalent in the stūpa, which is funeral and cairn in one.
P. 34. The two kinds of form, one Buddhist and Jain and the other Hindu, coexist in the styles of the various regional schools.
P. 37. In Rajasthan, the delicacy of wnite marble images expands with its warmth and softness the austerity of Jain images (Plate 54).
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