تلخیص
Kashmir is bountifully rich in its heritage -her magnificent monuments, creditable
inscriptions and exotic sculptures are known world over. Of these, a considerable number
of stone sculptures remain mostly in the museums and private houses across the globe for
their rich and prolific artistic traditions or are worshiped in the temples in Kashmir or
elsewhere. Most of the surviving sculptures were created to serve a religious purpose as
they depict divinities or mythical stories of the two earliest faiths in Kashmir, Buddhism
and Brahmanism. Most of these cult icons are recognised by the emblems or gestures they
display in addition to iconography. For the excellent manifestations the codified physical
descriptions of the iconographic forms were faithfully followed and the artists just added
the aesthetic sensibilities and technical skills to produce the master pieces. ‘Most
visualisations provide basic scheme for the artists to embellish with the aesthetic tastes
and changing fashion of their own age’ (Pal 2007:65). Many of these evolved and
developed on account of ideas and philosophies of the peoples who traveled to and fro on
the historical Silk Route for the caravan traffic of commodities and mercantile or else
because of the zeal of the missionaries who continuously traversed this diamond path.
Apart from political or cultural reasons the artistic fraternity got dislodged in Gandhara
to take asylum in the Valley of Kashmirand created manifestations that display crosscultural fertilisations. Given the intimacy of the relations Gandhara and Kashmir
enjoyed, the paper aims to highlight how and when Gandharan elements of Hellenism
was introduced in the art of Kashmir.
AIJAZ A. BANDEY. (2014) Hellenism in Early Kashmir Images, Pakistan Heritage, Volume 6, Issue 1.
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