A most important
aspect of Indian sculpture is its appeal to the hand, and the sense
of touch. In the West we have taught ourselves almost entirely to
ignore this sense. Indeed, to appeal to it is quite often
considered degrading and morally reprehensible. The pejorative use
of the words sensual or sensuous one often meets in the West
depends largely upon a negative attitude to this whole range of
experience. On the other hand, it is highly significant that the
Indians, when they wished to show the superiority and multiplicity
of powers of a divine person, gave him a multitude of hands. It
will not escape notice either how expressively, and with what
reverence, the hand itself is treated in Indian art.
The absorption in
tactile experience of the ordinary Indian is very striking to the
Westerner. Generalizations about a people are always dangerous, and
there are certainly exceptions to this one. But someone who
has been in India and seen how the people use their hands, patting
mud walls into shape, squeezing together their mouthfuls of food or
even walking along a city street hand in hand, cannot miss the
fact. What Bernard Berenson 'discovered' as the tactile values of
post-Giotto painting in Renaissance Italy are, by Indian standards,
remotely intellectual forms, sifted back into the realm of visual,
non- tactile experience, by being rendered into shadow and
light.
A gesture of the
hand gains its life from the Indian's fund of direct tactile
experience. Life comes from the sculptured outline, with its slow
undulation given by the large unqualified forms, prominent,
self-contained and smoothly executed. Even though the logic of
Indian sculpture is visually clear and consistent, it is a logic
partly derived from the necessities of touch, because the integrity
and force of a tactile experience depend in the last resort on a
pure continuity of the total surface of the work.
Again, the character
of the Indian light is something with which the Indian sculptor has
had to cope. It has determined some of the special characteristics
of Indian stone sculpture, far the larger part of which seems to
have been intended for out of doors. That some of the greatest
works were intended for interiors of caves or shrines does not
affect this factor. Such works were a distinct minority, and
sculptural ideas which did take account of the exterior lighting
were at no particular disadvantage when applied
indoors.
The Indian sun
throws a direct and definite illumination; shadows have clear and
emphatic edges; their dark seems very dark in comparison with the
strength of the light. A sculpture like, say, one of the figures on
the north or south porches of Chartres Cathedral would seem under
Indian conditions to exhibit a rash of shadow spots, which would
destroy the continuity of the surface, and obliterate its
definition. The diffused light of the north enables one to see the
character of the surface in the shadowed parts even of a Rodin
bronze. But the glaring light of India's dry atmosphere makes what
lies on the shadowed side of a form virtually invisible. Hence the
carefully rubbed-down smoothness of Indian sculpture, and hence
again the elaborately exhibited continuity of surface.
