HKB
of veracity, but it is curious that the elephant should be treated with so much feeling for nature, while the equally familiar horse and ox are always wooden in character.
On the face of the rock-hewn Buddhist temple at Karli, on the Western Ghauts, three elephants affront the spectator, and support the hillside rock on each side of the entrance, with a calm air of competence for their task. In gold, silver, brass, ivory, clay, and wood, elephants serve a hundred purposes, and are drawn and painted everywhere. In such modern work as the tomb of Maharaja Jai Singh at Jeypore, where every detail is treated in a conventional way, and the creature's ears are fluted as regularly as scallop shells, there is still a strong sense of his shape and action. A small pen sketch here given may show this. Centuries had closed down on the ancient freedom, and the Muhammadan canon forbidding the representation of life, though never thoroughly accepted in India, had repressed the plastic instinct. You may hear, when going over palaces in Rajputana, of elaborate carvings in stone, which on a threatening hint from the iconoclastic court at Delhi, were hastily covered up with plaster. In other parts of India recent research has unearthed remains of richly-carved Hindu work, sometimes lying in heaps of broken fragments and bearing traces of fire. But though you expel nature with a pitchfork or shut it up like a jack-in-the-box, it is not to be wholly repressed. Even the Muhammadans themselves do not always obey the law; the Persian Shiahs have never considered themselves bound by it, and modern Indian art is mainly Persian.
For pious Muhammadans it has long been a practice of Oriental penmen, who are often artists, to weave the fine forms of Persian letters into the outlines of animals or birds. I give an example of the Prophet's mystic horse, Borak, which contains a whole litany of prayers. An elephant on the cover, a tiger on the dedicatory page, and the birds over the monogram of the publishers of this book, are also woven in words of prayer. Every creature alive can be thus represented, and the piety of the inscription covers the profanity of the picture. Muhammadanism, like more religions, is full of ingenious little compromises and transactions after this kind. A more frank defiance of the laws by which at the supreme moments of their lives they profess themselves bound, is characteristic of Christians--
"Whose life laughs through and spits at their creed! Who maintain Thee in word, and defy Thee in deed!"
A curiosity of the time is the way in which those who now follow the craft of the Persian limner and often boast Persian descent, have adopted Hindu notions in their work, though still remaining Muhammadan. Some of the best representations in the popular lithographs sold at fairs of the many-armed Hindu divinities are the work of Muhammadan draughtsmen. So in the time of the Mogul power the Court chroniclers were often Hindus who complacently wrote of the pillage and wreck of the temples of their own faith as triumphs over idolatrous infidels and officially lauded the deeds of Muhammadans in phrases of unctuous insincerity.