The Theory of Citrasutras in Indian Painting

A Critical Re-evaluation of their Uses and Interpretations

Isabella Nardi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134165230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte asiatica

This new reading of the textual evidence has crucial consequences on how not only the citrasutras, but the whole scientific literature on the visual arts, has to be evaluated

It fills a significant gap in Indian scholarship

Despite its specialist focus, it is relevant as a guide for those studying Indian painting and Indian art in general

It should also be of interest to scholars of Sanskrit scientific literature and South Asian studies

Additionally, it should attract attention from academics in the field of Western art and Western treatises on art and want to engage in a comparative study of Western and Eastern views on art

1
THE TEXTS, THEIR TRANSLATIONS AND INTERPRETATION

In this chapter, the citrasūtras will be briefly presented together with the scholars who have interpreted and translated them. The first section will introduce the earliest citrasūtras which are the Citralakṣaṇa, attributed to Nagnajit, and the Viṣṇudharmottara Purāṇa, and then it will examine later texts. Finally, the interpretations and ideas about them in the secondary literature to date will be discussed, highlighting problems and limitations of this research.

The early texts

The Citralakṣaṇa of Nagnajit survives only in Tibetan, though it is originally a Sanskrit text.¹ Although this research deals with Sanskrit sources, this Tibetan text is fundamental to the study of Indian citrasūtras, because at some point in its history the Citralakṣaṇa was translated from Sanskrit into Tibetan and it can therefore be treated as a text belonging to the Indian tradition. Today it is considered to be one of the earliest texts on the subject, together with the Viṣṇudharmottara Purāṇa. As it is now, the Citralakṣaṇa contains three chapters, though it may have been longer. This is because reference to other topics is found in Chapter 3, in particular there is mention of thirty-six types of countenances whose descriptions find no place in the text (Goswamy and Dallapiccola 1976, pp. 26–27).

The Citralakṣaṇa is ascribed to Nagnajit, whose identity is a matter of debate.² Furthermore, the date of the Citralakṣaṇa composition is unknown. Goswamy and Dallapiccola explain that:

Unfortunately, because of the Sanskrit original having been lost, it is not possible to draw any conclusions regarding dating on the evidence of language and style. All things considered, however, we feel that the work may roughly be assigned to the early Gupta period. The mythology to which references are made in the invocation and [in] the text is developed, and [is] essentially Pauranic in its framework, and this may keep us from dating it quite as early as Laufer would have us do . . . Bhattacharya, on the strength to the reference to Nagnajit in the Bṛhat Saṃhitā regards the work as having been completed by 6th century, a century that he regards as significant for the history of Vāstuvidyā.

(1976, p. xiii)

If we consider the content of the text, which will be examined in the next chapters, we can see that there are similarities between the Citralakṣaṇa of Nagnajit, the Viṣṇudharmottara Purāṇa and the Bṛhat Saṃhitā (AD c.550)³ so that we can accept the date of the text as ‘early Gupta period’ and assume that Nagnajit was the author mentioned by Varāhamihira in the Bṛhat Saṃhitā.

The first Western scholar who dealt with the Citralakṣaṇa was Berthold Laufer in 1913, who edited and translated it from Tibetan into German. The German translation was subsequently translated into English by Goswamy and Dallapiccola in 1976, with the title An Early Document of Indian Art. In 1987 Asoke Chatterjee Sastri translated the same text from Tibetan into English with the title The Citralaksana: An Old Text of Indian Art. In his work he also tried to reconstruct the Sanskrit version of the text.

The Viṣṇudharmottara Purāṇa is by far the most translated and interpreted of all the available texts on painting.⁴ The date of the Viṣṇudharmottara Purāṇa is widely contested,⁵ but considering the affinity of content between the Citralakṣaṇa of Nagnajit and the Bṛhat Saṃhitā, the Viṣṇudharmottara Purāṇa may also belong to the Gupta period (AD 450–650).

The Viṣṇudharmottara Purāṇa was known up to the Akbar period. Dave (1991, pp. 52, 58) argues that the oldest of the manuscripts used in her work is on birch bark whose use came to an end from Akbar’s time. The manuscript used by her can be dated to approximately the late sixteenth century and we can say that the Viṣṇudharmottara Purāṇa was transmitted in written form up to this date. This fundamental point exemplifies that a text cannot be seen as belonging to a defined period of time or to a particular school of painting but rather as being continuously handed down to posterity because it is considered as a valid source of traditional knowledge.

The entire text of the Viṣṇudharmottara Purāṇa contains various topics and it is divided into three parts, the section called citrasūtra includes chapters 35–43 in the third part of the text. Its first edition was published by the Venkatesvara Press in 1912 in Sanskrit. It is on the basis of the Venkatesvara edition that Stella Kramrisch published in 1924 the first English version of the text entitled The Visnudharmottaram (Part III): A Treatise on Indian Painting. After this translation there is Priyabala Shah’s edition of the text in 1958 entitled Visnudharmottarapurana Third Khanda in which she adds more manuscripts to the Venkatesvara edition. This edition was followed in 1978 by Sivaramamurti’s Citrasutra of the Visnudharmottara, in which he translates the text improved by Shah offering a new interpretation of it. The best study carried on so far is Parul Dave Mukherji’s The Citrasutra of the Visnudharmottara Purana (2001) in which in addition to the manuscripts used by Shah in her critical edition two more manuscripts from Nepal and Bangladesh are used to eliminate some problems affecting the understanding of the older editions.

Later texts

Other important texts that contain a citrasūtra section, and provide a wide range of interesting views on art and painting, are the Samarāṅgaṇa Sūtradhāra of King Bhoja of Dhārā dated to c.1000–1050, the Aparājitapṛcchā ascribed to Bhuvanadeva dated to twelfth century, the Abhilaṣitārthacintāmaṇi and Mānasollasā of King Someśvaradeva also dated to c. twelfth century and the Śilparatna by Śrī Kumāra of Kerala dated to the middle of the sixteenth century. All these texts are characteristically encyclopaedic, dealing with a wide range of topics from astrology to architecture, medicine, geography and gemology.

The Samarāṅgaṇa Sūtradhāra is believed to have been written by (or at least for) King Bhoja of Dhārā who was a patron of the arts and a great writer. This king was also the writer of other kinds of treatises like the Śṛṅgāraprakāśa on poetics. He was a great theorist and his views on rāsa expounded in the Samarāṅgaṇa Sūtradhāra are revolutionary with respect to the traditional views on the subject.

The first Sanskrit edition of the Samarāṅgaṇa Sūtradhāra was published in 1925 by Ganapati Sastri. The original manuscripts of the Samarāṅgaṇa Sūtradhāra are in a poor condition which does not easily permit making a good collated edition and translation of the work. This is especially true for the parts relating to painting and iconography in chapters 71–83. According to Bhattacharya (1976, pp. 11–13), the edition of 1925 was prepared on the basis of three manuscripts, of which only one, belonging to the Central Library of Baroda, contains the chapters relating to painting and iconography.

The Aparājitapṛcchā ascribed to Bhuvanadeva is a śilpa text traditionally associated with the nāgara school of architecture and may be dated to around the twelfth century. The text incorporates all the arts including architecture, sculpture, painting and music. The first edition of the text was published in 1950 by Popatbhai Ambasankar Mankad. This edition was followed in 1987 by Dubey’s Aparajitaprccha – A Critical Study, which involves a commentary and translation of portions of the text, but the section dedicated to painting is not comprehensive, nor does it show much evidence of scholarly critical research. Dubey (1987, pp. 3–4) states that the Aparājitapṛcchā is more than a century later than the Samarāṅgaṇa Sūtradhāra. There are a number of similarities and parallels in the texts, but the key point is that the subjects acquired from the Samarāṅgaṇa Sūtradhāra have been elaborated and amplified by the Aparājitapṛcchā rather than examined anew. The Aparājitapṛcchā, which literally means ‘the questions of Aparājita’, is primarily an exposition of principles of the science of vāstu by Viśvakarman, who solved a series of questions put to him by Aparājita, one of his mind-begotten sons (Dubey 1987, p. 7).

The Abhilaṣitārthacintāmaṇi and Mānasollasā have been attributed to King Someśvaradeva of the Western Cālukya dynasty, who ruled around AD 1127–1138. The Abhilaṣitārthacintāmaṇi was published in Sanskrit, with an English introduction in 1926 by Shama Sastry. In 1939 G.K. Shrigondekar published the Mānasollasā. These two texts contain five sections, each of which is divided into twenty chapters dealing with all the branches of knowledge. The sections explaining painting are the third prakaraṇa of the Abhilaṣitārthacintāmaṇi and the third viṃśati of the Mānasollasā. Although they have two different titles, the parts dedicated to painting of each text are believed to be identical and included in the upabhoga- viṃśati or ‘the section on enjoyments’.

The Śilparatna is a text written by Śrī Kumāra, under the patronage of King Devanārāyaṇa, who ruled in Travancore in the later part of the sixteenth century. Śrī Kumāra was a brahman, son of Śrī Rāma born in the lineage of Bhargava. The Śilparatna is divided into two parts, the first of which has 46 chapters and the second with 35 chapters. The section that we call Citralakṣaṇa is chapter 46 of the first part. The first part of the text was edited in 1922 by Ganapati Sastri. A few years later (1926–1928) Coomaraswamy attempted the first translation of the Citralakṣaṇa of the Śilparatna which was not very successful for our understanding of the text. In 1974 Asok K. Bhattacharya published a translation of the same chapter, with a commentary that claims to prove that Kerala artists used the text as a guide.

The aforementioned texts are considered, in secondary literature, the main citrasūtras. They are discussed in the main works on the subject such as Shukla (1957), Bhattacharya (1976) and Chakrabarti (1980). Together with those texts, there is another group of śilpa śāstras associated with the theory of painting. These texts deal with topics related to painting or mention painting itself and will be used in this study to strengthen our views. Among them are: Nārada Śilpa Śāstra (especially chapters 66 and 71), Śivatattva Ratnākara, Mānasāra, Mayamata, Matsya Purāṇa, Varāhamihira’s Bṛhat Saṃhitā, Nāṭya Śāstra of Bharata, Devatāmūrtiprakaraṇa of Maṇḍana Sūtradhāra, Vāstusūtra Upaniṣad ascribed to sage Pippalāda, Citrakarmaśāstra ascribed to Mañjuśrī, Pratimāmānalakṣaṇa, Śukranīti and the Sudhālepavidhāna.⁶ These texts are equally important to our understanding of the theory of painting, but their significance has been underestimated by many scholars. In this study, all these sources will be used to clarify some important concepts.

Interpreting ...