A Catalogue of the Gandhara Sculpture in the British Museum.

• Author: Brown, Robert L.
• Position: Review

By W. ZWALF. Two volumes. London: BRITISH MUSEUM PRESS, 1996. Pp. 423 (text), 16 color plates; pp. 355 (plates), 680 black-and-white illustrations.

The British Museum in London has a rich collection of sculpture from ancient Gandhara, material that dates from around the first century B.C. to the sixth century A.D. Gandharan sculpture, identified by its style, comes from the northwest portion of the Indian subcontinent, around Peshawar and Islamabad on the upper reaches of the Indus River system in modern Pakistan, but stretching into modern Afghanistan as well. W. Zwalf has written a catalogue of the British Museum's Gandharan collection, 680 objects, all of which are illustrated in the second volume of the two-volume work. The catalogue is a massive project well matched in its thoroughness and detail to the enormity of the collection itself, and will be an invaluable resource for art historians, archeologists, and Buddhologists.

The preface of the first volume is divided into ten sections. The first deals with the geography and history of the region. With a constant flow of peoples into and through this crossroads of Asia, the complex story bears frequent retelling. Section two deals with "the remains of Gandhara," which, as Zwalf points out, are predominantly Buddhist monasteries, all of which are now in ruins. The result is that the extensive amount of sculpture in stone and stucco in private collections and museums around the world has never been placed securely into its original architectural context - without which we cannot say exactly how the sculpture was used. Add to this that only a handful of objects are dated by inscriptions (and even these are in debatable eras), which epitomizes the highly problematical nature of Gandharan scholarship. Zwalf adds to these concerns "the apparent monotony and resistance to stylistic analysis of the sculpture [and] the problematic nature and transmission of the Western component" (p. 20). I might add yet another problem that Zwalf does not allude to - that of the many very good recent Gandharan fakes (a concern he does not have to address directly in the catalogue itself due to the fact that most of the sculptures were collected at an early date; only one object is questioned).

Zwalf does not attempt to resolve the many questions which swirl around the study of Gandharan sculpture. He is very cautious in all of his discussions, and prefers to present alternatives and their scholarly references...