Slow looking at the sculptures of Amaravati

Beyond words, really

Feb 08, 2026

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Last week I introduced the great stupa at Amaravati, now completely collapsed but once the most important Buddhist centre in ancient India. I’d seen carvings from the stupa at a recent visit to the British Museum, and had been inspired to find out more.

I can’t quite understand now how I seem to have got through a whole degree in Indian art without really taking in how extraordinary these carvings are.

The main texts on Indian art that I was reading certainly mentioned them, with one describing them as ‘peopled by a host of graceful, elongated figures who imbue sculpted scenes with a sense of life and action that is unique in Indian art’1, and another saying;

In the mature phase, decorative elements reach a suave richness never surpassed even by the finest Gupta works. In the narrative scenes, the deep cutting permits overlapping figures on two and even three planes, the figures appearing to be fully in the round. The superlative beauty of the individual bodies and the variety of poses, many realising new possibilities of depicting the human form, as well as the swirling rhythms of the massed compositions, all combine to produce some of the most glorious reliefs in world art.
JC Harle, 1986:38

Perhaps the reason I never noticed these sculptures during my studies was because, despite all of this glowing praise, there were almost no images of them in the books. The books can’t reproduce more than a certain number of images, and it always ends up being a lot of words.

The more I look, the more I see. The carving above is identifiable as early, because the Buddha is represented by the empty chair, rather than as a human. To the left and right of the chair, a finely bejewelled couple, perhaps the king and queen who sponsored the carving, though Elsner2 only mentions a king. Such incredible detail in their ornaments. Only two other men, behind the chair, presumed to be monks. All of it encircled by worshipping women, with a female musician on the right, who’s wearing a sacred thread, so we assume is high class? That might be unusual for a musician? I’m fascinated by the woman bottom right, who seems to be more than worshipping, or even dancing. Her whole body is thrown backwards, in what Elsner calls an ‘ecstatic form of prostration’.

He suggests that these gestures are borrowed from dance movements, but different:

The appropriation of dance postures for devotion is different from the representation of dance as a theatrical activity, subject to the human voyeuristic gaze.
Elsner, J. 2024, Amaravati, p146

He says no more about this. Is he implying something like whatever is going on in Bernini’s ‘Ecstasy of St Teresa’, an image that always foxes me as to what on earth it thinks it’s actually portraying3?

It’s interesting to see these devotional practices (which seem to be being carried out almost exclusively by women in these images) so soon after the Buddha’s death. Within a few hundred years, a human who discovered a different experience of being, who taught a very practical path toward the resolution of human suffering, is turned into a supernatural being who needs to be worshipped and adored.

In this relief I’m fascinated by the hands. Those hands, splayed out in adulation with all their fingers on the base of the pipal tree, another non-representational form of the Buddha. The detail of all those heads crowded together at the back, who must once have had such beautiful faces. Their earrings, and bracelets, and hair ornaments. The woman to the left of the tree, supporting whatever she’s carrying on her angled hip, the two women left and right bent inwards, making offerings. The huge bracelets around their ankles, in one case almost reaching the woman’s knees, and the curious body shape that you see on most of the women throughout the sculptures; two or three folds of skin or fat, but a narrow waist, which then fans out to wide hips, with large navels.

The panel below has been interpreted as a king and queen being entertained at court, and though the queen has been partly obliterated, you can see her left hand resting on the king’s thigh. He seems to be resting his hand on her shoulder.

Again, the faces and the jewellery show such fine detail, as does the bench behind the women at the bottom. The hands of these women, their fingers and fluid shapes.

The shape of the hand, below, of the woman to the left of the king.

Finally, the relief that most arrested me when I was looking at it in the museum.

It’s more damaged than the others, but on the left you can still see this wondrous array of female musicians with their backs to us, their long hair in complicated braids wound around their heads, running down their backs, and even the strings of the instruments they’re playing.

Entertainment, again, for two kingly men, although the women on the right also have their own chairs, and possibly servants.

The detailed patterning on the side of their chairs, their massive heavy ankle bracelets. The arm resting on the back of the chair, and that arm hanging down, outside of the frame, to the ankle bracelet.

I said last week that I would say something about the reason that all of this beauty was made, intending to find something out about how these depictions of worldly life fitted in to the overall purpose of a monument that was designed to be used, to have a function; to work on human minds, monastic and lay, in a particular way.

Well, I’ve realised that I can’t do that in a week. There’s far too much complexity involved. I’m going to have to slowly read Elsner’s book and see if I can find a way to answer my questions about all of this, and report back at some point in the future.

I’m going to end with this image of one of the pillars from the outside railing of the stupa4. Apparently every one of the circular lotus flowers was made slightly differently.

Art Pilgrim

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