CDS (II) 2020 General Knowledge · Question 66 of 120

Correct — C, 3rd century CE. The Gandhara sculptors began in stone — the grey-blue mica schist and green phyllite quarried in the Swat and Peshawar country, which is why a Gandhara Buddha in a museum so often has that distinctive dark grey-green sheen. Stucco, a lime plaster modelled over a rough core, appears alongside stone from about the 1st century CE and steadily takes over, and by the 3rd century it has displaced stone as the working material. The reason is practical rather than aesthetic. Stucco could be modelled quickly and cheaply, took fine surface detail and paint, and suited the large monastic building programmes of the later period, where hundreds of figures had to be produced for a single stupa court. Britannica puts it as stucco 'used increasingly after the 3rd century CE'; the paper's stronger phrase 'completely replace' is the exam's own.

• (a)1st century CE — Too early. The 1st century CE is when stucco starts appearing beside stone, in the early Kushana period, but schist is still the dominant medium of the great narrative reliefs of that phase.
• (b)2nd century CE — The 2nd century CE is the high point of the stone school under Kanishka and his successors, when the finest schist Buddha and Bodhisattva images were carved. Stone had not been displaced yet.
• (d)5th century CE — By the 5th century the question no longer arises. Gandhara's monasteries were in decline, and the shift to stucco had happened two centuries earlier.

The Gandhara school flourished in the north-west of the subcontinent, roughly the Peshawar valley, Swat and Taxila, from around the 1st century BCE to the 5th century CE, with its peak under the Kushanas. It is the school that first gave the Buddha a human form on a large scale, and it did so in a visual language borrowed from the Graeco-Roman world: wavy hair, a toga-like robe with heavy naturalistic folds, and an almost classical treatment of the face. Its Indian counterpart at Mathura worked in mottled red sandstone and drew on indigenous yaksha types instead.

The question is really about a sequence, and a sequence is easier to hold than an isolated date: stone first, stucco later, with the changeover in the 3rd century. If a date must be guessed, reason from the school's own chronology — Kanishka's 2nd century is the golden age of carved schist, so the material change has to come after it, and the school fades in the 5th, so it must come before that. The two stones named in the stem are worth remembering as a pair, because 'green phyllite and blue-grey schist' is the standard textbook description of Gandhara's medium and turns up in exams on its own.

• Gandhara sculptors used grey-blue mica schist and green phyllite in the earlier phase; stucco appears from about the 1st century CE and dominates from the 3rd.
• Stucco is lime plaster modelled over a core; it was cheap, quick, took fine detail and was usually painted.
• The school flourished from about the 1st century BCE to the 5th century CE, peaking under the Kushanas, and Taxila was the leading centre.
• Gandhara is one of the two schools credited with the first anthropomorphic images of the Buddha, the other being Mathura, which worked in mottled red sandstone.
• The Gandhara style is marked by Graeco-Roman treatment — wavy hair, a toga-like sanghati with deep naturalistic folds, and classical facial modelling.

• Attaching red sandstone to Gandhara; that is Mathura's material.
• Assuming stone was abandoned the moment stucco appeared. Both were in use together for two centuries.
• Dating the material change to the school's peak under Kanishka in the 2nd century rather than to the 3rd.

As a date or sequence item on the shift of material, or as a school-to-medium match pairing Gandhara with schist and Mathura with red sandstone.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Gandhara school of sculpture is best known for working, in its earlier phase, in which one of the following materials?

  • (a)Mottled red sandstone
  • (b)Grey-blue schist and green phyllite
  • (c)White marble
  • (d)Polished Chunar sandstone

  Answer(b) Grey-blue schist and green phyllite — mottled red sandstone belongs to Mathura and polished Chunar sandstone to the Mauryan pillars.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Gandhara school of art reached its peak under the patronage of which one of the following dynasties?

  • (a)Mauryas
  • (b)Kushanas
  • (c)Guptas
  • (d)Satavahanas

  Answer(b) Kushanas — the school flourished under Kanishka and his successors in the first centuries CE.