CHAPTER FOUR

THE ORIGIN OF PORTRAITURE AND THE REPRESENTATION OF HEROES

So far, I have tried to show, on the one hand, that portraiture was not only an ubiquitous but also an ancient practice in early and, on the other hand, that there are a lot of common features between portraits and a more religious and divine iconography. In this chapter, I would like to examine more closely these issues, this time in an his- torical, that is to say chronological, perspective. The main idea—quite in tune with what has been said in the previous chapter regarding the myths on the origin of images—is that ‘portraits’ and ‘divine images’ more or less derive from the same sources, that is representations of heroes, deified or not. If, up to now, this study rested on relatively firm ground, we are now in the realm of hypotheses; therefore, the following pages should be read as tentative ones, because it will be sometimes difficult or even impossible to put forward indubitable proofs. However, it is my hope that there will be enough converging arguments as to give a plausible picture of the beginnings of portraiture and iconography in South Asia.

1. Portraiture in pre-and proto-historical times

If there is a question to which it is difficult to answer, it is the age of the most ancient portrait in India. Reasons for this are various: the disappearance of a large number of portraits probably made of perishable materials, the uncertainty about the chronology of early Indian art and the dating of a large number of works in particular, and the impossibility to find, for the most ancient times, a document used to identify unambiguously a particular image as a portrait. To make matters worse, the first proper artistic events to develop in the Indian subcontinent—namely the production of the Indus cities, or even before—are related with civilizations whose links with the Vedic one remain problematic. I can then only express assumptions or rely on probabilities, bearing in mind that a portrait is defined by the three 120 chapter four criteria expressed at the beginning of this study: intention to portray someone specific, perception of an image as a representation of this person and function of the image. On Neolithic sites, such as , or Nindowari, many human figurines in terracotta have been unearthed, exclusively female for the most ancient periods, then both male and female.1 Beyond the differences in style and modes of figuration, one can hardly see por- traits in these figures, since stylization is very obvious. However, we can note that most of them have been found in quite diverse archaeo- logical contexts which are never the original one: they seem to have been thrown away, because of a very occasional use—which leads us again to the function issue. In one case, at Mehrgarh, a figurine has been found in a tomb in the hands of the deceased, close to her face. A careful observation of these small clay images—especially the presence of holes—suggests that they had probably no divine function but were associated with temporary rituals of a more or less magical nature, perhaps a kind of healing.2 On this assumption, we could therefore interpret these figures not as portraits, of course, but as some sort of substitutes for those who possessed them. Among the images unearthed on the Harappan sites, almost none seems to represent a deity.3 Of course, it is not sufficient to say that they conversely represent real characters. However, doubts may be raised, especially if one considers the image conventionally called the ‘priest-king’. It belongs to the later phase of occupation of Mohenjo- daro (between 2100 and 1750 BC). The identity of the character is particularly problematic; moreover, many elements of this sculpture could have been brought from Mesopotamia, but, at the same time, we know that some Mesopotamian sculptures represented real people, for example the statue of Satam (2400–2350 BC), grandson of a king of Uruk, kept at the Louvre.4 Therefore, identifying the ‘priest-king’ as

1 Jean-François Jarrige et al., Les cités oubliées de l’Indus. Archéologie du , Musée national des Arts asiatiques Guimet (16 novembre 1988–30 janvier 1989) (Paris: RMN, 1988), 65–70. 2 Catherine Jarrige, “Human Figurines from the Neolithic Levels at Mehrgarh (Balochistan, Pakistan)”, in South Asian Archaeology 2003, ed. Ute Franke-Vogt and Hans-Joachim Weisshaar (Aachen: Kommission für Archäologie Aussereuropäischer Kulturen, Linden Soft Verlag, 2005), 34. 3 Leaving aside the very problematic case of the seals bearing the so-called proto-Śiva . 4 Jarrige, Cités oubliées de l’Indus, 196.