1 - Shifting Horizons

Summary

An Indocentric lens shaped the early interpretation of the cultural heritage of Chinese Turkestan at sites such as Khotan and Dunhuang. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Buddhist studies, the discovery of Gandhara, and the German, French and Raj-sponsored archaeological explorations along the ancient Silk Roads opened a new perspective on the spread of Indic art, culture and religions beyond the Himalayas. The recovery of this Buddhist past, and the art historical interpretation of the finds, were closely linked to debates on Gandhara’s cultural heritage and the importance of the ‘Greek factor’ in Indic/Asiatic art, a question which preoccupied Indian and European experts such as the French art historian Alfred Foucher. This chapter explains how ‘Indic’ gradually replaced ‘Greek’ as the superior classicism and civilizing impulse traced in Central Asia and shows how Aurel Stein’s notion of ‘Serindia’ was incorporated in the interwar Greater India imagination. GIS-members reframed the Far Eastern odyssey of Buddhist doctrine and art as a glorious saga of Indian civilizational diffusion, and a crucial chapter in the formation of an ancient Indian cultural empire.