Mathura region
Second century CE
Sandstone; 44.3 x 14.6 x 8.9 cm
(17-7/16 x 5-3/4 x 3-1/2 in.)
The William A. Whitaker Foundation
Art Fund, 84.2.1
Provenance: Acquired 3 February 1984
from C.T. Loo and Cie, Paris.
While her exact role has been rendered ambiguous by fragmented arms and legs, it is certain that this figure is a yakshi. These sensual female figures are typically adorned with jewelry and often framed by a tree.1 Yakshis were believed to be so potent that their touch could induce ashoka trees to blossom. By touching a yakshi’s feet, a woman could fulfill her desire for children. The visual appeal and ritual power of such figures made them popular in Buddhist, Brahmanical, and Jain art in the Kushan period.2 Yakshis with their male counterpart, yakshas (Fig. 31), provide both a basic form and a variety of meanings for the deities of these early religious communities. Later apsarasas in Hindu and Jain temples, such as the Celestial Female (Plate 17), can be understood as conceptual and formal descendants of Kushan yakshis.3
The mottled red sandstone of the Ackland’s Yakshi is characteristic of sculpture from the Mathura region, a vibrant center of religious development and artistic experimentation during the Kushan period.4 She displays a Mathuran body with heavy breasts, wide hips, and muscular thighs. Like others from the region, she is adorned with headdress, earrings, necklaces, arm-rings, bangles, and girdle with elaborate clasps. The particular treatment of the sensual female figure and the choice of motifs for her elaborate jewelry distinguish her from those found at other Kushan centers of artistic production, such as Gandhara (Plate 1) and Sanghol (Plate 5).5
Due to the scarcity of standing monuments at Mathuran sites, it is difficult to assign the figure a specific architectural location in a stupa or temple. While most Kushan yakshis were rail figures (compare with Plate 5), she does not bear the mortises and tenons of a rail pillar. Too thin to serve as a post, the slab of stone must have functioned in another capacity, such as a relief panel, a gate (torana) upright or bracket, the base of a water bowl, or a doorjamb.6 MN
1 Coomaraswamy traced the origins of yakshis to an indigenous Indic tradition of worshipping trees and their spirits as part of local fertility cults. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, “Yakshas,” Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 80, no. 6 (1928).
2 A yakshi bracket for a gate was found at a Naga shrine, Sonkh, Mathura district. See Herbert Härtel, Excavations at Sonkh: 2500 Years of a Town in Mathura District (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1993), 413–27.
3 Coomaraswamy, 36, points out “an intimate relation” between yakshis and river-goddesses Ganga and Yamuna at the doorways of many northern medieval temples (Figs. 44, 45).
4 The history of Mathura as a religious site can be traced to a far older date than the Kushan period. For example, Härtel reported that the date for Sonkh can range from the eighth century BCE for the oldest layer, to the eighteenth century CE. On the multi-cultic center thriving at Mathura during the Kushan period, see Chandreyi Basu, “Redefining the Nature of Cultural Regions in Early India: Mathura and the Meaning of ‘Kushan Art’,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2001).
5 Similar examples of Mathura yakshis include Yakshi under ashoka-tree in the Lucknow Museum, illustrated in Coomaraswamy, plate 6; Yakshi bracket from Sonkh, illustrated in Härtel, no. 5; Railing pillars in the Indian Museum, Calcutta, illustrated in Susan L. and John C. Huntington, The Art of Ancient India (New York and Tokyo: Weather Hill, 1985), fig. 8.35; and a railing pillar with a Salabhanjika in the Cleveland Museum of Art, illustrated in Stanislaw J. Czuma, Kushan Sculpture: Images from Early India (Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1985),
fig. 31.
6 See Czuma, figs. 26.2 and 41, for the base of a waterbowl; figs. 34 and 35 for the bracket figures; fig. 34 for doorjamb figures.