Pura Sri: Beauty and Wealth of Ancient India

The Gariga-Gomati-Sai valley is the cradle of human civilization. The first divine instinct in Man (Homo Sapiens) is love for the mother. So the first evidence of Mother Goddess worship came from Newal in the Gariga Valley in the form of a stone-torso representing the lower parts of the Mother Goddess with emphasis on her pudenda, the source of all creation. Another figure of the Divine Mother was found from Belan Valley in the form of a bone statuette belonging to the Upper Palaeolithic period. A site in Madhya Pradesh, Baghor by name, has also yielded a similar evidence. The Upper Palaeolithic engraved core found at Chandravati; Rajasthan supports the symbolic representation of a Mother Goddess and fertility rituals. All these evidences go to suggest that Man had the ability to think over abstract things apart from those related to mundane life and culture. This light of learning and spiritual knowledge had emanated from the East. Here an attempt has been made to show that the art in the Gariga Valley had reached its full flower and fruition by the ingenuity and imagination of the people inhabiting its fertile plains. Certain specimens of the Maurya-Suriga Art of this region are unique and outstanding in the whole repertoire of Indian art. I hope the readers would like to go through the book and evince further interest in the study and understanding of the different aspects of Indian art, history and archaeology.