Sculpture, Painting and Numismatics

• Item 1, Ajanta, qualifies and is the point of reference for the whole tradition. Its murals, executed in tempera on a prepared ground of clay, cow dung and rice husk finished with lime, span the Satavahana and Vakataka phases and carry the Jataka narratives, the Bodhisattva Padmapani and Vajrapani of Cave 1 and the Mahajanaka and Vessantara cycles.
• Item 2, Lepakshi, qualifies. The Virabhadra temple at Lepakshi in Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh carries the finest surviving Vijayanagara period murals, painted on the ceilings of the mandapas in ochre and vegetable colour with strong linear outlines, and the ceiling of the ardhamandapa is described as the largest mural on a single surface in India. It is also known for the hanging pillar and the monolithic Nandi.
• Item 3, Sanchi, does not qualify. Sanchi is the type site for early Buddhist stupa architecture and for narrative relief sculpture on the four toranas, dating to the Mauryan foundation and the Satavahana period gateways, but it has no mural painting; the confusion arises because it is a Buddhist site of the same broad period as Ajanta and because narrative art on both is dismissed as decoration by the careless reader. The official answer (b) follows. The elimination route is Sanchi, whose association with relief carving rather than painting removes option (c), after which the question turns on whether the candidate knows Lepakshi, which is the fact actually being tested.

• Pairs 1 and 3 are correctly matched and pair 2 is not, so the official answer is (c).
• Pair 1 is correct: Cave 26 at Ajanta, a chaitya hall of the Vakataka phase, carries on its left wall the great reclining Mahaparinirvana image of the Buddha, some seven metres long, with celestial beings rendered in the space above the figure and the grieving disciples below, the contrast between serene detachment above and human grief below being the point of the composition.
• Pair 3 is correct: the vast open-air relief at Mamallapuram, carved on two adjoining granite boulders under the Pallavas in the seventh century, is variously read as Arjuna's penance for the Pasupata weapon or as the descent of the Ganga, the natural cleft between the boulders serving as the course of the river.
• Pair 2 is incorrect: the celebrated Varaha panel showing the boar incarnation raising Bhudevi from the waters is at Udayagiri near Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh, a Gupta period rock-cut site of about the early fifth century, and is read as an allegory of Chandragupta II's conquests. Mount Abu is famous for something else entirely, the Dilwara Jain temples with their marble ceilings and pillars, which belong to the eleventh to thirteenth centuries and are architecture rather than narrative relief. The item is decided on pair 2, and rejecting it removes (a) and (d).

• Option (a) is correct. The Bodhisattva Padmapani, so named for the lotus held in his hand, occupies the left wall flanking the antechamber of Cave 1 at Ajanta, facing the Bodhisattva Vajrapani on the right, and belongs to the Vakataka phase of the fifth century. It is the single most reproduced image in Indian painting, admired for the modelling achieved through tonal gradation, the downcast contemplative expression conveying karuna, and the fluent outline.
• Option (b) is wrong: Badami has Chalukyan rock cut cave temples with some surviving mural fragments, but nothing of this celebrity, and its reputation rests on sculpture.
• Option (c) is wrong and is the most respectable distractor, since the Bagh caves in Madhya Pradesh do carry Buddhist murals closely related in style and period to Ajanta, but the Padmapani is not among them.
• Option (d) is wrong: Ellora's fame rests on rock cut architecture and sculpture across Buddhist, Hindu and Jain excavations, above all the Kailasa temple, rather than on painting, though traces of murals survive there. Governing principle: attach each site to the art form that made it famous, Ajanta to painting, Ellora and Badami to rock cut architecture and sculpture, and Bagh to painting of the Ajanta family but at a lower order of preservation and renown.

• Option (d) is correct. Bani Thani is the signature image of the Kishangarh school of Rajasthani painting, associated with the reign of Raja Sawant Singh, who wrote devotional verse under the name Nagari Das, and executed principally by the painter Nihal Chand in the middle of the eighteenth century. The subject is traditionally identified with a singer at the Kishangarh court, and the figure has been called the Indian Mona Lisa. Its formal signature is unmistakable: an extremely elongated face and neck, an exaggeratedly arched and extended eye tapering to a point, a sharply pointed nose and chin, and a stylisation so pronounced that it approaches abstraction, set within Vaishnava themes of Radha and Krishna.
• Option (a) is wrong because the Bundi school is marked by lush vegetation, dense forest and water settings, vivid skies and a distinct treatment of animals and hunting scenes.
• Option (b) is wrong because the Jaipur school runs to large formal portraiture and durbar scenes under strong Mughal influence.
• Option (c) is wrong because the Kangra school belongs to the Pahari group, and though it too is Vaishnava in theme and delicate in line, its faces are softly rounded and naturalistic and its settings are the hills, which is the opposite of the Kishangarh stylisation. Governing principle for this family of questions: identify the school by the treatment of the human face and by the landscape convention, not by the subject, since Radha and Krishna are common to several schools.

Hence (d).

The Dancing Girl is a bronze figurine about ten centimetres high, excavated at Mohenjo-daro in 1926 and now in the National Museum in New Delhi, giving (c). Its importance lies in the technique as much as the subject: it was cast by the lost wax or cire perdue method, in which a wax model is coated in clay, the wax melted out and molten metal poured into the cavity, demonstrating that Harappan metallurgy had mastered a sophisticated casting process. The figure stands in a relaxed posture with one arm heavily bangled, and is valued for conveying naturalism and movement at a very small scale.

• Option (a), carnelian, is wrong as the material of this piece, though it is closely associated with the Harappans, who made long barrel carnelian beads that travelled as far as Mesopotamia and are among the best evidence of that trade.
• Option (b), clay, is wrong here although terracotta figurines including the mother goddess figures are abundant at Harappan sites.
• Option (d), gold, is wrong; Harappan gold survives as jewellery and ornaments rather than figurative sculpture. A related item to keep distinct is the steatite bearded priest king from the same site.

• Statement 1 is correct, since Amaravati stands on the right bank of the Krishna in Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh, in the lower reaches of that valley, an area that also holds Nagarjunakonda, Jaggayyapeta and Ghantasala.
• Statement 2 is incorrect and is the eliminator. The Amaravati mahachaitya was the largest stupa in India, with a drum diameter of roughly fifty metres against about thirty six metres for the Great Stupa at Sanchi, so ranking it second to Sanchi reverses the position.
• Statement 3 is correct, because the Amaravati idiom of slender, animated figures in crowded narrative panels shaped later Andhra and Pallava work, and Amaravati limestone slabs and the style derived from them travelled to Sri Lanka and to sites in Southeast Asia along the maritime routes. Hence 1 and 3 hold and (b) is correct. (a) drops the well attested statement on artistic influence, while (c) and (d) accept the false size comparison.