SCULPTURE OF INDIA

THE immense outpouring of art which began more than 5,000 years ago in the fertile Indus Valley has flooded over to enrich the lives of millions in India, Central Asia, China, Java and Cambodia. But because the main stream of Indian art flowed away from the sources that were to nourish Western art, Indian sculpture has remained something strange and remote to Western sensibilities.

Now helping to bridge the gap between East and West are such carefully selected collections as that recently acquired by Philadelphia's Museum of Art (opposite). Containing 49 carved stone sculptures and temple fragments ranging from a 2nd-to-1st century B.C. sandstone relief on a post of a temple railing to a four-faced Siva-Linga that once topped the central column of a Hindu shrine, the collection covers more than 15 centuries, together makes up what museum officials unhesitatingly call "the most important group of Indian stone sculptures to be seen outside of India itself."

For Western eyes accustomed to classic Greek sculpture, which took as its ideal the figure of the perfect athlete or full-proportioned woman, it is immediately apparent that the goal for Indian sculpture was something quite different. The answer lies in the Indian belief that the aim of life is moksa, release from physical surroundings, and that art should contribute to that goal. Indian artists took their clue from the discipline of yoga, made their ideal the image of a mystical, purifying lightness signifying release from physical bondage, which they called the "subtle body," and believed to be the very form of the gods.

The effort to capture this quality of inner release in stone permeates Indian sculpture, whether in the trancelike images of Buddha that reached their peak in the 4th-to-5th centuries, or later in the undulating figures that encrust the great Hindu temple buildings of the null centuries. One such temple figure, Worshiping Goddess, although now defaced and devoid of some of its multiple arms and symbols, would still speak to the devout. Her ample breasts and hips hark back to primitive man's fertility figures; her divine power is shown by her effortless grace as she sways in the dance, oldest Indian image of the gods and nature in its creative aspect. The goddess indicates by her overlong eyes, high-arched brows and attenuated fingers, touching in prayer or greeting, the inner spiritual tension meant to guide the viewer in his devotions. For the Indian sculptor, such works of art were a combination of ritual and magic that made his craft a profoundly religious calling. Says Philadelphia's Indian Art Curator Stella Kramrisch: "The many gods of India would have no existence on earth were it not for their portraits in stone and bronze, and their temples."

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