Hindagala

At the rock temple of Hindagala, in the hills above Kandy, rock inscriptions of the sixth and seventh centuries stand beside a single painted fragment from the same age, evidence enough to date the shrine’s founding and its earliest painting together. Scholars place the fragment in the later Anuradhapura period, close enough to Sigiriya’s reign of Kashyapa I that some read the two as near contemporaries, or Hindagala’s work as following it by as much as a century; the honest range to give is the sixth to the seventh century, tighter than the eighth-century ceiling sometimes quoted, and anchored to Sigiriya’s own late-fifth-century date rather than left to float free of it.

Where Sigiriya gives celestial women, Hindagala gives two scenes of Buddhist narrative. One shows the two merchant brothers Tapassu and Balluka offering alms to the Buddha, among the earliest episodes in the Buddhist canon. The other, better known, shows the Buddha worshipped by the god Indra, called Sakka in the island’s own tradition, during his visit to the Indrasala cave in Magadha, the episode narrated in the Sakkapañha Sutta. This Indrasala-cave scene should not be confused with a second, much later mural inside the same shrine, painted in the Kandyan period, which shows a quite different subject, the lord of the Tusita heaven fanned by two attendants; that painting belongs to a different century and a different hand, and to mistake the two is to mistake the shrine’s one classical survival for a far later repainting.

The Indrasala scene matters beyond its own borders. Hindagala’s fragment is reckoned among the largest surviving paintings of the classical era to take the Buddha himself as its subject, a distinction that sets it apart from Sigiriya, whose maidens are decorative or celestial rather than doctrinal, and from most other early fragments, which survive too small or too damaged to carry a full narrative scene. In a period when almost no painting has come down to us at all, a fragment large enough to hold a recognisable sermon is itself a rarity worth stating plainly.

As painting, the fragment speaks in the classical line. The scene is set down in a fluent drawn outline over a lime-plaster ground, the figures grouped about the seated Buddha in the earth reds and ochres of the early palette, and the drawing carries the same sureness of contour, giving the body its volume without the help of shadow, that the Sigiriya painters worked in a century or so before. Its value is partly that: in an age from which so little painting survives, Hindagala is a second point, after Sigiriya, at which the classical hand and its handling of a whole narrative scene can actually be seen.

What can be seen today owes something to a twentieth-century recovery as much as to the original hand. In 1937 the Archaeological Survey removed later overpainting from the shrine’s walls, work that had covered the old fragment for centuries, and found the Anuradhapura-period painting beneath still legible. The site’s heritage record cites the fragment as a reference point for the classical style’s dating and its narrative conventions, drawing on Ananda Coomaraswamy’s History of Indian and Indonesian Art of 1927 and on Senarath Paranavitana’s work of 1950. Much has faded since, and the exact source and precise century remain matters of scholarly estimate rather than settled record, but Hindagala’s importance is not in doubt. It is one of very few threads back to the painting of the early island, in a country where almost nothing else of that painting has lasted. As at Sigiriya, the hands that made it left no name behind.

Sources

1. Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. History of Indian and Indonesian Art. 1927.
2. Bandaranayake, Senake. The Rock and Wall Paintings of Sri Lanka. Colombo, 1986.
3. de Zoysa, Asoka, and Vajira Nalinda Jayathilaka. Buddhist Image Houses.