William Dalrymple Profile picture
Apr 12, 2021 17 tweets 13 min read Read on X
I'm become very interested in yakshas, yakshis and nagas- classes of sacred beings which seem to be relatively peripheral to modern Indian religion and spirituality, but which dominated much of the art of early India, whether Hindu, Buddhist or Jain.
Monumental stone sculptures of Yakshas —freestanding and carved in the round- begin to appear from the third century BCE, as witnessed spectacular yaksha from Parkham near Mathura made “in the guild of Manibhadra by Gomitaka, a pupil of Kunika."
The Parkham Yakshi (left) is said by the ASI to be the oldest free-standing statue in Indian art, c275 BCE, but the Mathura Museum contains several others that are only slightly younger, 200-100 BCE
From around the same time are the Besnagar Yaksha & Yakshi, icons of extraordinary robustness and power and the ancestor of much subsequent Indian statuary. Like those in Mathura they tall, royally attired, well-fed figures, carrying bags of coins, flasks of medicine & swords.
The Bharhut stupa, c120 BCE, is guarded by a series of nearly-life-sized named Yaksha Rajas: “tamed spirit-deities incorporated into the faith as guardians & devotees of the stupas. They stand asmarkers of the Buddhists’ success in taming & converting troublesome spirit-deities"
For each Yaksha Raja at Bharhut, there are Yakshis, standing in perfect poise, voluptuous figures with sloping shoulders, substantial breasts, narrow waists, a rounded stomach with lightly incised folds, wide hips and strong tapering thighs.
The Yakshis of Mathura are the most gorgeous, auspicious fertility figures resembling palace women in their attire and jewellery, with particular emphasis placed on hips and breasts.
The Yakshis association of fertility is often expressed through a special connection between yakshis and vegetation. It is quite common to see the female figure placed alongside trees, resting an arm across a branch or holding a piece of fruit or a flower.
Some of the most beautiful of the Mathura yakshis, the Salabhanjikas, show Ashoka trees bursting into fruit and blossom at their touch “thus symbolizing the transfer  of the woman’s fertile energy to the tree.”
The beautiful, fertile body of these early Yakshis continue to permeate Indian art and thought, cutting across religious boundaries so that images of woman-and-tree are found in Buddhist, Hindu, Jain contexts, and finally, perhaps most gorgeously, in Mughal & Pahari miniatures.
Meanwhile the Yakshas (left and centre) provided the prototype and inspiration for the first monumental standing Buddha image (rignt) of the Kushan period, which significantly developed in Mathura, one of the main centres of Yaksha worship.
The best of my photographs from my travels in search of ancient India will be on show at @ArtVadehra Delhi next month and @grosvenorart London in July
The Yakshi under her tree reborn in Mughal and Pahari court dress
The Mudgarpani ("Mace-holder") Yaksha (100 BCE), Mathura. This colossal statues stand around two metres tall and holds a mudgar mace in the right hand, and the left hand used to support a small standing devotee or child joining hands in prayer.
And yet more late Mughal and Pahari reincarnations of Kushan yakshis under their trees
So many now wish to see the story of Indian civilization as one of thousands of years of conquest, subjugation& destruction. Yet to me it is the continuities which are most striking, & the way that Indian civilization always succeeded in seducing and transforming its conquerors.
This post has shown how the Kushan motif of the Yakshi clutching a tree, first formed in Mathura c150 CE, continued to be painted in late Mughal and Pahari ateliers well into the 19th century.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with William Dalrymple

William Dalrymple Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @DalrympleWill

Oct 12
New from @EmpirePodUK
THE LOST WORLD OF OTTOMAN GAZA
With the great Eugene Rogan, Professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Oxford Image
The story of Gaza during the Ottoman period is one of the most controversial eras of its history. The early Zionists maintained that Palestine was an almost empty desert, a lost paradise ripe to be saved from the nomads & 'savages' who had wrecked it, "a land without a people for a people without a land."Image
But what was the reality? What does history tell us about the religiously & ethnically diverse population of hundreds of thousands who had aways lived there?

Friend of @EmpirePodUK and the greatest living writer on the Late Ottoman period, Eugene Rogan, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Oxford, returns to the show to separate fact from fiction.

linktr.ee/empirepodukImage
Read 12 tweets
Oct 9
In today's @EmpirePodUK we tell the little known story of how the Imperial Camel Corps- including units from both Bikaner and Australia- helped win the epic 1916-17 Battles of Gaza Image
Image
Image
This largely forgotten World War One campaign that did far more than Lawrence of Arabia to defeat the Ottoman army on Palestine... but the promise of freedom for the Arabs was shortlived... Image
Image
Image
On 9 November, only two days after Allenby's forces entered Gaza, in London the Jewish Chronicle published a new British policy on Palestine. In a brief letter to Walter Rothschild dated 2 February, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour issued the declaration that would come to bear his name
linktr.ee/empirepodukImage
Read 5 tweets
Sep 18
New series from @EmpirePodUK
THE HISTORY OF GAZA Image
Gaza is one of the oldest urban centres on Earth, and in this series we are exploring its long history. It was first referred to by Pharaoh Thutmose III in the 15th century BC when it was known as Ghazzati.... Image
Image
Image
Image
Palestine is also one of humanity’s oldest toponyms, and records of a people named after it are as old as literacy itself.
On the temple of Medinet Habu near Thebes there is inscribed in hieroglyphs the name of the people who had invaded from the North who the Egyptians knew as the ‘Peleset’. The inscription dates from the time of Pharaoh Ramses III, and was carved in 1186 BC. The cuneiform inscriptions of the Assyrians mention the ‘Palashtu’ who lived on the southeastern Mediterranean coast from about 800BCE. The Book of Genesis in 21:34 says clearly that after migrating from the city of Ur, that the Patriarch Abraham lived “in the land of the Philistines.” Herodotus, the Father of History, describes the same area as “Syria Palestina” (Παλαιστίνη) around 480BCE.Image
Read 13 tweets
Aug 17
Don't miss this week's @EmpirePodUK Partition double bill:
The Creation of Pakistan... and
Why India was Split in Two Image
Part One: Jinnah, Ruttie & the Idea of Pakistan
How come Jinnah was originally know as the Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity? Why did he initially accept that Pakistan could be part of an Indian Federation? When did Jinnah start to push for Pakistan to be independent from India? What was Direct Action Day in 1946, and how did it start the violence of Partition?
share.google/rpyzvoT4QBpSIP…Image
Dividing India:
Why was the Partition of India and Pakistan so rushed in 1947? How did Partition divide everything from stationery to army boots in a matter of weeks? And how do South Asians today grapple with the memory of the largest forced migration in history?
share.google/EnKs7GPSdhElv6…Image
Read 6 tweets
Aug 8
When the Macedonian soldiers of Alexander the Great first broke into Gaza after the siege of 332BCE, they recorded what they saw and left the first eyewitness account of Gaza that survives.... Image
They recorded the vast stores of incense and spices which the merchants of Gaza had brought overland by camel caravan from southern Arabia. Image
When he was a boy, Alexander had been ticked off by his tutor Leonidas for scooping up handfuls of precious frankincense to burn on the altar as offerings to the Gods. Leonidas had clucked reprovingly, “Alexander when you have conquered the lands which produce these aromatics, then you can scatter incense in this extravagant manner. Until then, don't waste it.” Now Alexander sent to the elderly Leonidas a gift of 500 talents (13.7 tonnes) of frankincense and 100 talents of myrrh, with the message, “I have sent you frankincense and myrrh in abundance , to stop you being stingy to the Gods.”Image
Read 12 tweets
Jul 15
Not Gaza 2025, but Jaffa 1948, after the Nakba
#ThisDidntBeginonOct7 #HistoryRepeating Image
The Manshiya quarter of Jaffa was destroyed in a series of bombardments led by the Irgun during the 1948 Nakba in order to drive out its Palestinians inhabitants Image
Read 6 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(