The Indian sculptors
developed their forms by various means, most of which were
particular cultural inventions. But what were the forms themselves?
If we regard the stone as parallel to the mouthed sounds of speech,
contour and recession as parallel to words, the forms represent the
basic units of expression in sculpture. What is the meaning of
forms like these? How do they convey their extraordinary sense of
quality?
The general forms of
Indian sculpture refer not to a class-system, which is a special
intellectual development in its own right, but-rather, by
association to an ambience of instances, rationalized only as
first- degree universals. Tradition has always been at pains
to preserve these in the forefront of the Indian artistic
consciousness. What appears to the Western reader of Indian
literature as a repetitiveness of imagery-lotus, mountain of
silver, lion voice, for example-has always been an essential
process in preserving India's special type of art.
Here, of course, we
run directly up against the whole question of the analogical
structure of form. Indian texts, like the
Pratimamanalakshanam and the Vishnudharmottaram, make it quite
clear that an Indian sculptor, when he was forming something which
was recognizably part of a human body, like a leg, hand, lip or
eye, should make it the shape of some other thing, and thus
attribute to it a metaphor- the plastic version, as it were, of the
poetic 'her eyes shone from the heaven of her face'. An analogy of
this sort, extended into a ramified structure by means of ambiguity
and amphiboly, forms the life blood of poetry. We may therefore
expect to find the same principle at work in the forms of art. The
Apsarases of Khajuraho are given eyes which, following the texts,
we can recognize as fish-shaped. Indian poetry prepares us to
understand this with its stock epithet for the eyes of a pretty
girl, namely 'silver fishes'. This apprehension of the quick,
flickering glances of a long-eyed girl-like fish in a dark pool-is
clearly meant to be offered to the spectator's mind in the plastic
image no less than in the poetic context.
Exactly this same
process is described, and poetical analogies are suggested, for
many other parts of the body. The trunk of an elephant for the
shoulder and arm, or for the hip and thigh; the bill of a
parrot-the bird of love-for the high, elegant Aryan nose; the lower
petal of a Sesame flower for the lower lip; the strong double curve
of the bow for the expressive eyebrows, and so on. This process of
formal suggestion is conveyed by the actual inflexions of the
surfaces of the conventional sense-units out of which the figure is
composed. The forms are thus made capable of transmitting an
emotional charge. It may seem strange that virtually the same
'situations' were continuously repeated throughout the history of
Indian art. However, as in all the other Indian arts, music no less
than poetry, this was in fact the case. The situations were
constant, though their expression was given different contexts and
varied detail in its development. Indian art has always ploughed a
narrow furrow, long and deep.
The 'meaning' of
forms is thus seen to reside in their suggestions of similar
evocative forms seen and remembered from other contexts. The forms
in question are not merely the strict geometrical forms of analysis
but refer directly back to particular referents in real
experience. They willl therefore have a 'poetic significance'
quite distinct from the prose sense of straightforward analysis and
far more powerful in its emotional effects.
This contrast
between forms of feeling and forms of analysis is an important one
in the whole of art, and can be very clearly seen in a comparison,
say, between Indian or Mexican sculpture and the art of later
classical Europe. Forms of feeling, particularly in a craft
context, generally speaking are laid out in broader units, and
their often deceptively bland or general finish can lead the eye to
believe that the forms are simple or even crude. However, as
forms they have always this reference outside themselves to a nexus
of associated cultural experiences, which are not themselves
referred to in the work of art, taken at its descriptive
level.
