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Narrative as Icon: The Jātaka Stories in Ancient Indian and Southeast Asian Architecture
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Chapter
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64 Narrative as Icon: The Ja −taka Stories in Ancient Indian and Southeast Asian Architecture Robert L. Brown The jâtakas are stories, often very good ones, filled with what makes stories interesting (action, intrigue, romance, love, death, the marvelous) and constructed around plots that have the twists and turns and unexpected events to keep the listener or reader fascinated. Each deals with a past life of the Buddha by narrating various individuals’ actions described in a chronological sequence. The listener or reader mentioned just above implies a spoken, or possibly a written, text. But the jâtakas were frequently represented visually in the art of India and Southeast Asia, and placed within architectural contexts. It is some of these representations that I wish to discuss here. Scholars make certain assumptions with regard to the visual representations of the jâtakas, or more broadly, to visual representations of stories, and I wish to challenge some of these assumptions. One assumption is that the same things (the narrative content, the story line) hold the attention of the viewer of the jâtakas and the attention of the listener/reader. Does the narrative content of the stories interest the worshiper, and if so, how does the story content relate to the written text and to the image? And, can assumptions regarding the nature and function of the word texts be applied to the visual texts of the jâtakas? I wish to argue that considering the visual representations of the jâtakas on certain ancient Southeast Asian and Indian monuments as illustrated versions of the word stories is incorrect. These visual images, in my opinion , are not present on the monuments to tell stories at all, but are there with an iconic function. The jâtakas were considered as units, functioning within the context of the monument as a whole and with particular nonnarrative roles defined by their locations and uses. The Indian Monuments I want to begin with some comments on Buddhist narratives on Indian monuments. An article on the topic of Buddhist narrative in early Indian art, Vidya Dehejia’s “On Modes of Visual Narration in Early Buddhist Art,”1 quickly focuses some of the issues for us. Dehejia has used for her analysis Indian art that dates from Bhârhut (ca. 100–80 B.C.E.) to Aja»πâ (ca. 460–480 C.E.), and includes both sculpture and painting. Her categorization divides the way narrative content is visualized by analyzing its artistic organization, such as monoscenic narratives, synoptic narratives, conflated narratives,2 and so forth. There is one basic verbal or textual story, but it can be told in a number of different artistic modes. As she bases her identification of visual narrative forms in Indian art on scholarship of narrative in Western art, one might initially ask how it relates to Indian art. Perhaps visual narrative types are universal, but even so, one might wonder if similar formal arrangements indicate similar intentions or meanings in Indian and Western art. At least we might anticipate the possibility of explicating visual narrative types in Indian, not Western, terms. For example, Dehejia uses the Ajâtaùatru pillar from Bhârhut (see fig. 1), which has three life-scenes of the Buddha stacked one above the other to illustrate what she calls “static monoscenic narration, diachronic mode.”3 The arrangement of the scenes is the miracle of Ùrâvasti at the bottom, next the descent at SâΩkâsya, and at the top, the preaching in Indra’s Heaven. Dehejia’s main assumption in explicating the arrangement of these three scenes is that they would have been “read” diachronically as if mimicking a verbal or written narrative sequence. Indeed, that the visual should be read as if illustrating a verbal narrative is the major assumption of her article. If the Ajâtaùatru pillar scenes are put into a chronological narrative order, the events begin at Ùrâvasti (bottom), then move to Indra’s Heaven (top), and end at SâΩkâsya (middle), so that Dehejia suggests that the “viewer must move” from the bottom to the top panel and “end with the central panel.” She feels that because the SâΩkâsya and Ùrâvasti panels have a similar composition (crowds of worshipers centered on a tree above a throne), “in isolation , [the Indra’s heaven scene] would present problems of identification,”4 Narrative 65 as Icon [3.141.47.221] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 09:31 GMT) Figure...