in 1863–4 (ibid. 53). However, some scholars proposed that, although the
Indian Aryans had diverged from the path of progress, their decline was only
momentary, as they shared the capacity for regeneration inherent within all
Aryans. Among those expressing that opinion was, in 1862, Samuel Laing
(1780–1868), a retiredWnance member of the viceroy’s council, and someone
who became interested in antiquities through his father, an expert in Scandi-
navian literature and antiquities (Leopold 1974: 590n).
For the study of monuments the classical model—that of Greece and
Rome—was taken as a source of comparison. The contrast resulted in Indian
ancient art being perceived as exotic. In some cases priority was given to
Greek art as the yardstick of supreme excellence, against which everything else
should be measured. A certain Captain Robert Melville Grindlay in 1830
argued, regarding the antiquities of Ellora, ‘without presuming to ascribe to
Hindu sculpture the classical purity and elegant proportions of the Grecian
chisel, it may not be too much to assert that it displays considerable grandeur
of design and intenseness of expression’ (Chakrabarti 1988: 31). More positive
comments were also made. In 1861, for instance, in theIllustrated London
Newsa commentator said, regarding the Amaravati marbles and other sculp-
tures at the India Museum in London, that: ‘A more interesting collection of
sculpture does not exist, and many of them (sic) will bear favourable com-
parison with the Elgin marbles in beauty of design, while they greatly exceed
them in point ofWnish and careful execution’ (in Skelton 1978: 298). Yet
Alexander Cunningham, the Director General of the Archaeological Survey of
India, did not share their enthusiasm, commenting in 1875 on the north-
western sculptures:
I do not of course attribute them to actual Greek sculptors, but IWrmly believe that
they owe all their beauty as well as all their truth of grouping to the teachings of Greek
artists, whose precepts were still understood and conscientiously followed long after
the Greek dominion in northwestern India had passed away.
(Chakrabarti 1988: 74).The ideal of simplicity, exempliWed by the classical model, also led to a more
positive consideration of the earliest, more simple Buddhist sculptures and
monuments, and a less sympathetic view towards the later, more ornamented
Hindu art, as expressed by scholars such as Fergusson (Mitter 2001: 2).
Throughout the nineteenth century there was a growing emphasis on the
study of Buddhist archaeology, which came to complement the attention paid
to Hindu traditions initiated in the previous century by William Jones and
others (Mitter 1977: chs. II and III). The focus was on looking for the origins of
Buddhism, and in this context the earliest periods were favoured; later periods
were considered to show a degeneration from an initial, more pure form of
South and South East Asia 225