Ancient Indian Art & Architecture: Temples and sculpture

Gandhara sculptors in the north-west used grey-blue schist and later stucco, and their work shows Hellenistic and Roman modelling absorbed through Bactria and Parthia. Their princely Bodhisattvas wear turbans, heavy jewellery and often moustaches. Spotted red sandstone from the Sikri area is the stone of Mathura, not of Gandhara.

The Bhutesar pillars come from the Bhutesar mound at Mathura and belong to the Kushana period (about second century CE). Carved in Mathura's spotted red sandstone, they show full-bodied female figures, with a bird cage, a wine jar or a bathing scene, each standing on a dwarf. Their fleshy volume continues the indigenous yaksha-yakshi tradition seen earlier at Bharhut and Sanchi.

NCERT says images of the Vaishnava (mainly Vishnu and his forms) and Shaiva (mainly lingas and mukhalingas) faiths are found at Mathura along with Jaina images, though Buddhist images are the most numerous. It also says the Mathura Buddha is modelled on earlier yaksha images, while the Gandhara Buddha has Hellenistic features. But NCERT notes that images of Vishnu and Shiva are represented by their ayudhas (weapons), not by their mounts.

Gandhara sculptors of the north-west worked mainly in grey-blue schist (and later in stucco). Mathura is known for its spotted red sandstone, not black basalt. The Bharhut railing and gateway, now in the Indian Museum, Kolkata, are carved in red sandstone of the Vindhyan region. NCERT notes that Mauryan pillars such as the Sarnath capital were carved in polished Chunar sandstone. So pairs 1, 3 and 4 are correct.

NCERT's box on the Katra mound Buddha says he sits in padmasana on a lion throne, with the right hand in abhayamudra raised a little above the shoulder and the left on the thigh. The two crowned attendants are Padmapani (holding a lotus) and Vajrapani (holding a thunderbolt). NCERT stresses that the sanghati covers only one shoulder and clings to the torso, with a very large halo decorated with simple geometric motifs.

NCERT narrates that in 1796 a local raja who wanted to build a temple stumbled upon the ruins at Amaravati and decided to use the stone. Later Walter Elliot, commissioner of Guntur, collected sculpture panels and took them to Madras; these came to be called the Elliot marbles. By the 1850s slabs had gone to Calcutta, Madras and London. Statement 3 describes Sanchi, not Amaravati: it was Sanchi's eastern gateway that the French and English agreed to copy in plaster, and Amaravati's torana has disappeared.

John Marshall excavated the shrine in Block F of Sirkap, the Indo-Greek and Saka-Parthian city at Taxila. The base of its stupa has pilasters of the Corinthian type separating three kinds of niche: Greek pediments, bell-shaped chaitya arches and Indian toranas, with a double-headed eagle perched on one of them. It is a textbook example of the mixed architectural vocabulary of the north-west in the first century BCE and first century CE.

Taxila (Punjab) and the monastery of Takht-i-Bahi near Mardan (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), both World Heritage sites, are in Pakistan, as is Butkara in the Swat valley, excavated by an Italian mission. Hadda, the source of thousands of stucco and schist sculptures, lies near Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. So three of the four are in Pakistan.