Sculptural Programme (Introduction)

Sripura presents a pageant of scriptural programme which includes icons of deities, different religious denomination, animals, maidens, motifs secular things in both stone and metal. Most of the images available now have been preserved either in the Mahant Ghasidas memorial museum of Raiapur or in the archaeological museum of Sirpur while a few are still lying in the premises of the religious shrines. The images preserved in the museums are not stray ones, they were on the body or in the buildings of the religious shrines. The metal images discovered so far are Buddhist icons. They exhibit rare artistic talent, borrowed probably from the Nalanda and North Indian plastic art tradition. The present stock of all these sculptures–lithic and metallic are assigned to 7^th-8^th centuries A.D.

The images brought to light during the excavations of Sri M.G. Dixit and Sri A.K. Sharma, appeared to constitute a fraction of the vast potentials of sculpture. It proved to be true when a vast corpus of stone images of different verities came to light following the excavations of the Baleshvar and Surang Tila temple complexes in the first decade of the present century. Most spectacular, however, are the discoveries of Buddhist images of bronze of which 60 were reported to have been found in 1939 and 87 in 2008. All the varieties of the images present a fairly good picture of the art heritage which was, of course, glorious and help us to trace the socio-religious ramifications of Sripura. It is not possible to give a detailed description of all the icons in the scope of the present write-up. But an attempt has been made to give a systematic picture of the sculptural varieties by categorizing a few specimens of them in context of the religious sects they represent in the following pages.