Chapter Four

THE FINE ARTS

I. Origins of South Indian Art

HEINRICH ZIMMER is one of the writers on Indian Art who traces the art of South India in historical times to trends evident in the Indus Valley finds. In the following reading taken from his masterly volumes on The Art of Indian Asia, Vol. I, pages 24 to 36 passim, Pantheon Books, New York, 1955, the author finds relationship between the seals and the dancing figures found at Mohenjo-daro, and the later animal art and the bronzes of Southern India.

WE ARE FAR from understanding at present the rich vocabulary of symbols on the seals of Mohenjo-daro; nevertheless, the more we comprehend of them the more it becomes apparent that the religious civilization of the Indus in the third millennium B.C. was the source of many of the traditions prevalent in Central and Southern India today. The Indus cities reveal fundamental elements and striking details that were completely foreign to the religious and literary traditions of the Aryans, but which reappeared in Indian art and religion (first among the folk, then among the governing classes) when the Aryan domination of Northern India began to wane during the second half of the first millennium B.C. Their return to the surface can be studied in the early Buddhist monuments of Bhārut and Sāñcī. And their continuing force became increasingly evident with relentlessly rising tide of śivaite Hinduism. The common occurrence of the lingam and yoni in orthodox, so-called "Aryan" temples, and the recognition of the great goddess in medieval and modern India as the peer of (or even as superior to) the greatest of the gods, marks the resurgence of an archaic,