The Textual Research On The Relationship Between Gandhāran Sculpture And Folk Literature

In the mid-19th century of colonial India, the archaeological discovery of Gandhāransculptures had amazed the international academic circles. For more than100years, archaeologyteams, which are mainly from India, Pakistan, Britain, France, Italy and Japan, had excavatedmany archaeological sites located in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, the erstwhileGandhāra area and numerous unearthed sculptures sites. These sculptures were mostly made fromthe1st to the4th century A.D. and many of them were created on the basis of prevalent popularfolk tales in that period, which now become important research materials of ancient Indian folkliterature. However, due to the paucity in the availability of written and oral texts of ancient Indianfolk literature, narrative sculptures become the archival record and need to be investigated fromthe regionalized local perspectives. For a long time, scholars studied Gandhāra art mainly from theperspective of archaeology, fine arts and religious statues together with the colonial perspective ofexpansion of the west, but there is a complete negation to the transformations of folk literaryinformation as well as the functioning of literature in a particular historical-cultural context ofGandhāran sculpture itself. Many studies on Gandhāra were caught between the colonialsyndromes of colonial versus nationalistic discourses but a large number of studies are confined tothe sources and development of Gandhāra as a unified pictorial tradition and how thenon-Gandhāran/non-Indian sources have been instrumental in the matrix of Gandhāran style. Thispaper regards Gandhāra sculpture as a corpus of visual text of folk literature, makingcomprehensive researches based on Iconography, Narratology, Communication Studies and othermethods in order to investigate the relation between Gandhāran sculptures and folk literature bydemonstrating graphs as well as texts and to establish the unique literary value that played animportant role in making of the Gandhāran sculptures within the regional context of Indianculture. The introduction of this paper makes a review and a comment on the main academicunderstanding of Gandhāran art in the past hundred years, expounding the significance of theresearch and methods as well. The text comprises of five chapters, dividing the entire study so asto cover five important aspects of Gandhāran sculpture namely tradition of literature in Gandhāra,folktales in narrative sculptures, narrators of folktales, narrative strategies and visual images,existence of the Buddhist texts as performative text. As Gandhāra was located at the crossroads ofcultural exchange, Gandhāran sculptures mainly inherited from Indian folk stories whilehybridized by equally vibrant folk literature of Persian, Greco-Roman and other exotic elements.The Gandhāran narrative sculptures can be classified into two categories: toilet trays and narrativepanels to the then existing religious buildings. The former was mainly about Greek myths and thelatter was mostly about Jatāka tales and Buddha’s life stories.The first chapter discusses the localliterary tradition of Gandhāra area with a historical perspective, expounding the diversity ofGandhāran folk literature. The second chapter analyses the theme of toilet trays, panels of Jatākaand panels of Buddha’s life stories with a literature perspective. The third chapter discusses therelationship among the story-tellers, sculptors and art patrons. The fourth chapter reveals thenarrative strategies of Gandhāran narrative sculptures and folk literature, indicating the differencesbetween visual narratives and existence of oral texts in terms of narrative levels, narrative orderand narrative focus. The fifth chapter indicates how Gandhāra sculpture disseminate the folkliterature with the help of corpus of availability of the visual images like Buddha, Nāga, Yak a,Vajra, Cakra and many other images. The question of assimilation becomes important tounderstand the dynamics of the regional character and the ways the images are constructed.Gandhāran sculptures and folk literature are in isomorphic complementary relations. Thenarrative sculptures preserved the basic content of ancient folk stories, whereas the prevailed textof folk stories now are providing useful references for comprehending narrative details ofsculptures. The research of the relation between Gandhāran sculpture and folk literature mayexpand the dimension of ancient Indian folk literature.