Landmark in ArtKrishna Chaitanya HISTORY OF THE ART OF ORISSA By Charles Fabri Orient Longman, Hyderabad, 1974, 220 plus clxxx, 75.00 AN ALBUM OF INDIAN SCULPTURE By C. Sivaramamurti 1975, 28.00 VOLUME I NUMBER 3 July - September 1976 Hungarian by birth, Charles Louis Fabri (18991968)
became in later life as much an Indian as an Indologist. He was a member of Aurel
Stein’s archaeological expedition into the heartland of Asia in the thirties,
taught at Santiniketan, was curator of the Lahore Museum, and spent the last
two decades of his life in Delhi as an art critic. The posthumous publication
on the art of Orissa is one of his most important contributions. Though he
himself admits that ‘a strictly chronological treatment of the art of Orissa is
not possible’, he has made a commendable attempt at indicating the main phases
of the evolution of Orissan art. While Konarak and Bhuvaneswar are well-known,
he has been able to cite many hitherto unnoticed edifices in the interior and bring
out their importance in the evolution of artistic traditions. The most
controversial among the views he has tried to establish would probably be the
claim that there was a period of about six centuries at the beginning of the
Christian era during which almost all art in Orissa was of Buddhist origin.
To deal with the last point first, there seems
to be more argument than evidence to support this claim. Fabri admits the
paucity of actual remains, but he argues that the sudden emergence of brahmanical
art in the sixth century with considerable evidence of maturity is inexplicable
without a prior and extended evolution. As he rightly says, Orissa has been
badly neglected in the matter of archaeological excavations. Ratnagiri is the
only site which has been explored and it indicates creative activity of
Buddhist inspiration over a long stretch of time. Fabri claims a span of seven
or eight centuries commencing from the second century of the Christian era.
He feels that if excavations are undertaken in other sites, more evidence to
support his claim would be forthcoming. Meanwhile, he has a tendency to
identify all brickwork as Buddhist and stone construction as brahmanical;
pillared halls are also regarded as evidence of Buddhist sponsorship. The
Sambalpur Buddha images he has analysed and illustrated are indeed
masterpieces. But the basic ambiguity of the situation regarding our knowledge
of the Orissan past is reflected in the ambiguity of his own dating. The text
describes them as belonging to the fourth century; the plates refer to them as
fifth century work. A ... Table of Contents >> |