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A First-Century Stele from Sriksetra – Pamela GUTMAN & Bob HUDSON
“Indian culture is complementary. It was not imposed. It was called for from within Southeast Asia. The people wanted something different on top.” Paul Mus, lecture at Yale, 8 November 1966
A sandstone stele (Fig. 1) discovered at Sriksetra (Śrīkṣetra), Central Myanmar (Burma) (Fig. 2),1 in the 1970s and currently on display in the National Museum, Yangon (Rangoon), can now be dated to around the beginning of the first millennium of the Common Era. It is possibly the earliest Indic sculpture in Southeast Asia. It will be posited that the stele illustrates an aspect of the adaptation of Indian ideas of power and with it the spread of Buddhism and Brahmanism in the early urban context. One side of the stele illustrates three men. The central figure, apparently a leader or a cult figure, holds a massive weapon and is flanked by smaller figures that also hold symbols of power. The other side shows a throne surmounted by a canopy with two women in attitudes of respect on either side.
The stele was published by John Guy, who identified it as a “warrior stele” with stylistic affinities to the early sculpture of Andhra Pradesh and dated it to circa 4th-5th century CE. He noted that the central figure resembled the club-bearing guardian figures from the Khin Ba hoard, which influenced his dating, and identified the objects held by the flanking figures as a garuḍadhvaja and a cakradhvaja suggesting a Vaiṣṇavite allegiance among the ruling elite at Sriksetra.
Hero or warrior stones seem to have arrived in the art of Andhra and Tamil Nadu during the Tamil Sangam period, around the 2nd to 3rd centuries CE, although they differ from the Sriksetra stele in nature, content and artistic expression. A further stylistic analysis and investigation of the provenance of the Sriksetra stone indicates an earlier date. While there are no obvious prototypes for such a stele in India, the massive size of the stone and some later sculpture implies that it might derive from a local tradition involving the ritual use of large stones, while the style of the sculpture itself suggests a south Indian prototype.
