CDS (II) 2024 General Knowledge · Question 61 of 120

Correct — C, Both 1 and 2. Chola bronze-casting is the high point of Indian metal sculpture, and it did not invent a separate visual language for metal. NCERT's chapter on Indian bronze sculpture puts statement 1 almost word for word: images were already being modelled under the Pallavas in the eighth and ninth centuries, but ‘some of the most beautiful and exquisite statues were produced during the Chola Period in Tamil Nadu from the tenth to the twelfth century’. Statement 2 is the part candidates hesitate over. A Chola temple kept two images of the same deity — a fixed stone one in the sanctum, and a portable metal one carried out in procession on festival days. Both were made to the same agamic prescriptions: the same attributes in the same hands, the same stances, the same canon of proportion. So the dancing Shiva, the marriage of Shiva and Parvati, the standing Vishnu that you meet in Chola bronze are the icons you also meet carved in the granite of those temples. What differed was the technique, since the metal image was cast by the lost-wax method rather than cut from stone.

• (a)1 only — Keeps the easy statement and throws out the harder one. The metal images were not a tradition apart — they carry the same deities, attributes and postures as the stone sculpture of the same temples.
• (b)2 only — Denies the best-attested fact in the item. The Chola centuries are exactly the period Indian art history singles out for the quality of its metal images.
• (d)Neither 1 nor 2 — Rejects both, which would leave the Chola bronzes unexplained. Nothing in the stem is overstated.

Indian metal icons were cast by the cire perdue or lost-wax process, in which a wax model is coated in clay, the wax melted out, and molten metal poured into the cavity. The method is old — the Mohenjo-daro ‘Dancing Girl’ of about 2500 BCE is the earliest Indian example. Buddhist, Jain and Hindu bronzes survive in quantity from about the second century CE: the Chausa hoard in Bihar, the Akota hoard near Baroda, the Pala workshops around Nalanda and Kurkihar. In the south the line runs from Pallava casting of the eighth and ninth centuries into the Chola period, which produced the pieces museums now compete for, and the craft is still practised at Kumbakonam in Tamil Nadu.

Both statements are safe once you separate technique from iconography. Casting in metal and carving in granite are different crafts with different tolerances, and it is tempting to assume the images that came out of them looked different too. They did not. The metal image existed because stone cannot be carried — the utsava-murti taken through the streets at a festival had to be light enough to lift, and it had to be recognisably the same god as the one in the sanctum, or the ritual made no sense. That requirement is what pins the bronze to the stone image's iconography. Statement 1 is the softer of the two only because ‘aesthetic and technical finesse’ is a judgement rather than a measurement, but it is the judgement every standard text records.

• The lost-wax or cire perdue method was known in India as early as the Indus civilisation; the Mohenjo-daro ‘Dancing Girl’, datable to about 2500 BCE, is the best known early cast.
• NCERT's Class 11 fine-art text places the finest South Indian bronzes in the Chola period in Tamil Nadu, from the tenth to the twelfth century, with Pallava casting of the eighth and ninth centuries before it.
• The widowed Chola queen Sembiyan Maha Devi was the outstanding tenth-century patron of bronze image-making.
• The dancing Shiva as Nataraja was evolved and fully developed in the Chola period; the classic Chola form has four arms.
• A group of bronze statuettes from Daimabad in Maharashtra, datable to about 1500 BCE, includes the well-known ‘Chariot’ with its elongated driver and sturdy bulls.

• Treating metal images as an art apart from stone sculpture; in a Chola temple they are the same icons in two materials.
• Dating the start of Indian bronze casting to the Cholas. Casting is thousands of years older, and the Pallavas were already at it.
• Miscounting the arms of a Chola Nataraja — the classic form has four.

Either as a statements item on Chola metal sculpture, or as a single-answer question on the Nataraja's stance, arms and attributes.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In the study of Indian sculpture, the term cire perdue refers to which one of the following?

  • (a)Lost-wax casting
  • (b)Fresco painting on wet plaster
  • (c)Granite relief carving
  • (d)Terracotta moulding in a two-piece mould

  Answer(a) Lost-wax casting — cire perdue is the French name for the process in which a wax model is coated in clay, melted out, and replaced by molten metal.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which tenth-century Chola patron is particularly associated with the commissioning of bronze images?

  • (a)Sembiyan Maha Devi
  • (b)Rudrama Devi
  • (c)Didda
  • (d)Prabhavati Gupta

  Answer(a) Sembiyan Maha Devi — the widowed Chola queen named in NCERT as the distinguished patron of bronze casting in the tenth century.