was a youth among the cowherds: "She possesses solid breasts, great buttocks, a narrow waist. She is bending with the very weight of her buttocks, solid loins, and elevated breasts. Her nose puts to shame the beak of the prince of birds." Of all these fair attributes the present figure exhibits only the last-but that to a most remarkable, even obtrusive, degree. The others have been replaced by their opposites. And this brings us to the special meaning of this amazing image. Kālī is the goddess represented, and she has cymbals in both hands, which means that she is paying worship to some god. But who, we may ask, can be the god whose favor is courted by Kālī, as by a devotee? Kālī, the Great Goddess, is the highest feminine principle in the universe. The answer to the question, therefore, must be śiva Mahādeva, the Great God, the supreme male. III. Early Dravidian Temples Dr. CHARLES FABRI, after his long study of Indian Art concludes that the Art of the South has been neglected. The following brief extract is from page 20 of his book, An Introduction to Indian Architecture, Asia Publishing House, Bombay, 1963. IT HAS BECOME increasingly clear to serious scholars that We have been making a great mistake by concentrating so much on Northern Indian art history only. It is now proved that South India, far from lagging behind the North in development, or copying Northern prototypes, has often been in the forefront of stylistic development; in any case, sculpturally and architecturally, South India has always been at least level with Northern developments. This certainly is true of the Buddhist period. Sculptural and architectural remains-stūpas and monasteries-at Amaravati, Nagarjuna-konda (both in Andhra State) and other sites, are as old as any Buddhist remains found in the North; the earliest images, e.g. go back to the 3rd century B.C., and these sites in Andhra take on the lead in the period from the 1st century B.C. to 4th century A.D. So far as the earliest Hindu temples are concerned, here too a great error had crept into our art histories. It has been, quite wrongly, surmized that the rock-cut temples, the "Five-Rathas," of Mamallapuram1 (near Madras), date from about A.D. 600 or later; their actual date, however, is the 5th century A.D., the purely classic ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1 The name "Mahabalipuram" is a popular modern distortion. |