Articulating Dancing Bodies: Social and Pictorial Representations in Early Buddhist Arts from India

Early Indian art—predominantly under Buddhist influence—presents a range of figure representations in everyday contexts. Though the sculpted images are produced in the religious domain, their pictorial tool is guided by the conventions as well as strategies of presentation of human life through the artistic procedure with an idea to create a contextual representation of an artistic impression of lived realities. There are solo figures as well as narrative panels including those of historical personas. Their gestures and postures in the artistic narratives become important indicators to convey the nature of subjectivity and human interactions. These moving and dancing bodies are represented as individual images as well as a part of narrative panels mainly in the life events of Buddha as well as in the depictions of some historical events. Not only the body of the protagonist but also the body of other characters are depicted with equal care and attention and are important as tangible remnants. For example, the figures in the Jataka stories in Ajanta painting belonging to different historical periods provide clear socio-historical frames of reference that can be re-affirmed through textual narrations of the time. This chapter studies the representation of the dancing bodies from the early historic period till the fifth/sixth century CE to contextualise the creation of these narratives around the patronage, the sociocultural milieu, and ritualistic functions of the moving bodies in Ajanta, helping to construct the discourse around the means and the end sought through these depictions and the artistic desire.