caves at aurangabadby carmel berkson

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The Smithsonian Institution Regents of the University of Michigan Caves at Aurangabad by Carmel Berkson Review by: Walter M. Spink Ars Orientalis, Vol. 17 (1987), pp. 183-184 Published by: Freer Gallery of Art, The Smithsonian Institution and Department of the History of Art, University of Michigan Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4629365 . Accessed: 14/06/2014 22:38 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The Smithsonian Institution and Regents of the University of Michigan are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Ars Orientalis. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 185.44.77.34 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 22:38:53 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: Caves at Aurangabadby Carmel Berkson

The Smithsonian InstitutionRegents of the University of Michigan

Caves at Aurangabad by Carmel BerksonReview by: Walter M. SpinkArs Orientalis, Vol. 17 (1987), pp. 183-184Published by: Freer Gallery of Art, The Smithsonian Institution and Department of the Historyof Art, University of MichiganStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4629365 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 22:38

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The Smithsonian Institution and Regents of the University of Michigan are collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to Ars Orientalis.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.44.77.34 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 22:38:53 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Caves at Aurangabadby Carmel Berkson

BOOK REVIEWS 183

publication by Dorothea Sack in this series. Like the basilica, this volume will be the basis for understanding the setting of the mosque. One may also hope that further investigations in Rusafah will expand the very interesting urbanistic discussion begun here by Dr. Ulbert. The German Archaeological Insitute is to be congratulated on its sponsorship of this fieldwork and this publication.

Julfdr, an Arabian Port: Its Settlement and Far Eastern Ceramic Trade from the 14th to the 18th Centuries. (Prize Publication Fund, v. 22). By John Hansman. London: Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1985. $ 40.75

Julfar is the ancestor of present-day city of Ra's al-Khaymah, in the Amirate of the same name at the foot of the Gulf. It was a modest trading port on sea routes connecting Iran, Iraq, and Arabia with the Far East, India, and east Africa. Dr. Hansman's report comprehends several sites excavated in the vicinity of the modern town, including one he identifies as the Julfar of the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries. The Julfar of the thirteenth century and earlier has disappeared, perhaps washed away into the Gulf; the Julfar excavated by Hansman was abandoned after the Portuguese attacked it. Several later military siege camps were also found: those of the Persians in the eighteenth century and of the British in the nineteenth. A glimpse of life in the Persian camp site is provided by finds of fragments of cheap porcelain and glass bangles.

Hansman provides a quite full account of the historical topography of the area, which will be primarily of local interest. He also reports on a small probable mosque and a fort, but they are not intrinsically exciting either. The bulk of the volume concerns the large quantities of Far Eastern ceramics found at the site, including Chinese blue-and- white porcelain from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries and sherds from Viet Nam and Thailand. These ceramics are the real value of Julfar as an archaeological site. Indian cooking pots, simple local wares, and possibly East African pottery were found, as well as a few Persian imitations of Chinese celadon and blue-and-white, but it is the ceramics imported from East and Southeast Asia that are of most interest, and they are of interest in connection with their own chronologies, not those of the Gulf. It is notable that although more than 250 copper coins were found (most of the legible ones from regional mints) the imported ceramics are not generally dateable from their archaeological context at Julfar.

Hansman wisely does not attempt to synthesize this ceramic assemblage with others from circum-Arabian ports such as Qusayr and Siraf, but adds valuable information toward that end. The book has been produced well, with four good color plates and a fine color view of a difficult-to-photograph locale on the jacket. A book such as this makes it clear that for the publication of pottery color is more than worth its cost.

Sarvistan: A Study in Early Iranian Architecture. By Lionel Bier. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986.

Hardly any architectural tradition of the first millenium A.D.is as murky as that of the Sasanian dynasty in Iran. The

appearance of a monograph on a well known building, thought to be a Sasanian structure of the fifth century, is therefore a welcome event. Lionel Bier's Sarvistan provides for the first time reliable plans, elevations, and views of a building in southern Iran that has long puzzled architectural historians.

The materials and techniques of Sarvistan are discussed exhaustively and inconclusively: as Bier shows, there is little consistency in Sasanian architectural technique. He concludes, among other things, that the facing stones were always visible, without a facing coat of plaster to hide them, as has been assumed. I do not follow the argument from technique and decoration that leads to regarding Ukhaydir as a terminus post quem for Sarvistan, since the materials and results are so different. But there are enough hints in the evidence that Bier's dating of the building to ca. 750-950 is convincing (p. 53).

Far more important is Bier's apparently correct solution to the problem presented by Sarvistan's unusual plan, which com- bines many uniquely shaped rooms in an asymmetrical plan that has an unusually open circulation pattern, characteristics

pointed out by Oleg Grabar. Grabar had considered the pos- sibility that Sarvistan was a fire temple but could not rule out the possibility that it was a palace. Helped by his redating of the structure, Bier argues convincingly from the more de- tailed information now available regarding Takht-i Sulayman that the plan is well suited to Zoroastrian ceremonial. And he makes a good argument that Sarvistan's siting in a secluded locale suits the conditions of the still-active Zoroastrian reli- gion after its official suppression by the Muslims. On these grounds Bier puts Sarvistan into the ninth century, but this can be only a guess, and in turn raises the possibility that the technique of construction was deliberately archaic.

All this seems to place Sarvistan more securely than before, and in a different era. Since the building is less connected with other monuments now than it was formerly, it tells us very little about Sasanian architecture, which has now lost a monument from its corpus. Unfortunately Sarvistan seems to say equally little about Islamic architecture in southern Iran in the tenth century. Perhaps it would make more sense to excavate Sarvistan than to worry about its construction technique, but there is still something unfinished here.

Notes

1. "Sarvistan, a Note on Sasanian Palaces," Forschungen zur Kunst Asiens: In Memoriam Kurt Erdmann, ed. Oktay Aslanapa, Rudolf Naumann, Istanbul, 1969, pp 1-8.

TERRY ALLEN

Caves at Aurangabad By Carmel Berkson. 256 pp., 200 pho- tographs, map, glossary, bibliography. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1987. $32.50.

Thousands of people visit the Buddhist caves at Ajanta every year, and perhaps even more visit the great cave-site at Ellora, some 70 miles away. Most of these visitors also travel through the old city of Aurangabad, which, with its crumbling walls and its tattered tombs of the Mughal period, lies between those famous sites. But how many know about, or ever find out about, the fascinating clusters of caves which lie at the

This content downloaded from 185.44.77.34 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 22:38:53 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 3: Caves at Aurangabadby Carmel Berkson

184 BOOK REVIEWS

mountainous edge of Aurangabad itself, a half-hour by motor rickshaw from the center of town? On a busy day in the busy tourist season, a few dozen people at the most travel out to see them.

What makes this neglect surprising is not the fact that the caves are so easily accessible, but the fact that they contain some of the most startlingly beautiful groups of sculptured images to be found anywhere in India. The great virtue of Carmel Berkson's handsomely produced new book, The Caves at Aurangabad (subtitled, Early Buddhist Tantric Art in India), is its lavish and sensitive photo-documentation of these richly carved caves. In her photographs, the sculptures speak from the stone with a calm intensity, revealing her appreciation of their meaning and their power.

The same resonance informs the artist/author's descrip- tions of the "pilgrimage" made by those who, even today, penetrate these deepening sacred structures. Her writing il- luminates the now-abandoned architectural "mandalas", that once were quickened with light and prayer and song. She manages, in her evocative recollections of ancient ceremonies, to bring the images alive both through her writing and her lens.

Admittedly, Berkson's interest is not in the specifics of chronology-that Circe whose allure attracts, and sometimes distracts, the typical art historian. The reader should look to her guidance to learn how the artist worked, rather than when, and forgive her for putting Cave 5 too early and Cave 3 too late. Nor, despite her often insightful commentary, does she claim any particular expertise in the complexities of Buddhist iconography, which was evolving in fascinating ways at this time, as tantric influences were penetrating the region from eastern India. She wisely has sought the authoritative counsel of D. C. Bhattacharyya for this aspect of her study, although in a number of instances, his identifications appear to have been confused in the editing process. Thus, the bodhisattva to the proper right of the Buddha is sometimes identified as Maitreya and the one on the Buddha's left as Avalokiteshvara, rather than the other way around, as we would expect; and the seeming misidentification is compounded by the agreement of the text: "Maitreya, the Buddha to come, stands to the right of the Buddha, bearing a small figure of Amitabha on his crown . .. and standing to the left of the Buddha is Avalokiteshvara ... bearing the stupa or chaitya on his headdress" (p. 80). If such reversals of the conventional identifications were indeed intended by Bhattacharyya, the reader would expect an explanation. By the same token, it is not clear why the unique four-armed figure in Cave 9, with so many "proper" attributes of Avalokiteshvara, even including the antelope-skin (not mentioned), is given a generic classification as "Jatamukuta-Lokeshvara", why the standing Buddha nearby is referred to as "Buddha Bimba", or why the guardian naga in the same cave is referred to as Muchulinda (viz.) Buddha.

Berkson's photographs of the imagery in Cave 3-I am thinking particularly of her penetrating studies of the amaz- ing life-size devotees who kneel along the side walls of the shrine-perfectly capture the expansiveness and heady pride of local patronage in the supercharged atmosphere of the last days of the Vakataka empire. Like the colossal Dying Buddha in Cave 26 at Ajanta, with which they are precisely contem- porary, the ripening fullness of these devotees, the fullness of pride as of power, in fact predicts their fall. Neither Cave 26 at Ajanta nor Caves 1 and 3 at Aurangabad, equally pa- tronized by the treacherous Asmaka feudatories, who orga- nized the insurrection which brought the Vakataka empire

down, were ever finished. With the fall of the Vakatakas, who, during Harishena's reign (ca. 460-ca. 477 A.D.) had sup- planted the Guptas as India's prime power, the Aurangabad region, like most of India, went into a decline for the next few decades. It was only when the Early Kalachuris, who had proved their stature in the west by sponsoring the Great Cave at Elephanta, took over the area, that the situation improved. By about 550 A.D., a vigorous new phase of Buddhist patron- age, apparently tolerated and perhaps supported by the Early Kalachuris, had begun. It was during this latter period, some three quarters of a century from the time when work on Au- rangabad caves I and 3 had been abandoned, that the majority of the caves at the site were excavated.

One needs to clearly distinguish between these two distinct phases of Mahayana activity at Aurangabad, rather than to merge them together, as is done both in this and most other studies. In this regard it is significant that female bodhisattvas-such key figures in the emergent "tantrism" of the latest caves at Aurangabad (Caves 6 through 9), are nowhere to be found in the Vakataka period excavations (Caves 1 and 3). Even at Ajanta, whose iconographic lead Aurangabad follows in this Vakataka phase, images which can reasonably be identified as "Taras" do not appear until the site is on the very verge of its imminent collapse, just after Harishena's death; and so modest are they in their demands- there are only two of them, both appearing in minor contexts in Caves 26 and 1OA-that they have never been published, at least knowingly. By contrast, in Aurangabad Cave 7, somewhat after 550 A.D., having spent a few fertile decades developing in the Konkan, such female bodhisattvas have truly come into their own. As Berkson's reverently ecstatic photographs of the Tara groups in that cave so properly attest, there are no images in the subcontinent which can better serve as embodiments of the authority and beauty of Indian sculpture at its best.

WALTER M. SPINK

Gu shuhua wei e kaobian (Examination and Identification of the Forging of Ancient Calligraphy and Painting) By Xu Bangda. 4 volumes: Part 1, text, 233 pp, 345 black-and-white plates; Part II, text, 225 pp., 472 black-and-white plates. Suzhou: Xinhua shuju, 1984. 38 yuan.

Xu Bangda, China's senior authority on matters of connois- seurship, has been writing incisive books and articles on cal- ligraphy and painting for more than thirty years. While those publications long ago established Xu Bangda's international reputation, the breadth of his expertise has been even more fully appreciated during the years since 1972, when Western specialists have been able to discuss topics of mutual interest with Xu at the Palace Museum in Beijing, where he holds the position of Research Fellow in the Department of Calligraphy and Painting. A major turning point in Xu Bangda's role as China's premier connoisseur came in 1985, when he visited most of the major Chinese collections in the United States. Anyone who had an opportunity to examine Chinese callig- raphy and painting with Xu Bangda during that memorable American tour will long remember the succinct, rapier-like precision of his analyses.

In this magisterial four-volume work entitled, Gu shuhua wei e kaobian (Examination and Identification of the Forging of Ancient

This content downloaded from 185.44.77.34 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 22:38:53 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions