Reading Time: the Sarnath Buddha and the Historical Significance of Donor Portraits in Early Medieval South Asia

How was time conceptualized and represented in Indian art? Through case studies re-examining a few canonical examples in Indian art, from Sarnath Buddha, to Udayagiri Varāha tableau, to Ajanta’s Cave 26, this essay demonstrates that the carefully composed insertion of miniature human donor figures can be taken as a visual clue to understand how the sense of history and time was experienced and articulated in ancient India. By adjusting our view to the periphery of a visual program, we may recognize a previously unnoticed female donor figure on a famed fifth-century stone stele from Sarnath depicting Buddha’s first sermon. While we lack detailed historical information on such images’ production and use, a scale-oriented formal analysis of human figures along with the analysis of epigraphic and literary evidence can help appreciate an artistic strategy developed to capture multiple temporalities. The present study contends that the introduction of human body as a portal for collapsing multiple temporalities in one medium, i.e. sculpted religious image, developed in a cultural milieu in which political actors and artistic communities began to innovate strategies to collapse the distance between the narrative time and the lived, historical time.