After the review week I was very excited to start the new project. Earlier this week we went to the CSMVS museum where we visited four sections- miniature gallery, coinage, cloth gallery and the sculptures gallery. I was particularly very interested in the sculptures gallery because I had worked on that for my previous project and was planning to work on that for the coffee table book too. In this gallery there were many sculptures that were brought from different temples all over India. I closely observed these sculptures and took pictures so that it helps me in my next project.
In this class we were finally going to talk about the Indian Subcontinent. We studied about almost all major civilisation in the world but we barely did anything about India except Indus Valley civilisation so I was very keen to know more about the civilisations that existed in India. We didn’t go much in detail because this was the first class. We were told the story of the ‘Phyrric Victory’ and some other stories of Alexander and his funeral where everyone started fighting for his throne before his body was cold. This clearly showed that power was as important in the past as it is today. We spoke about the ‘Wars of Diadochi’ and Selokos Nikator after which we jumped to the Nanda empire and the Mauryan empire. We saw the rise of Hinduism, racism and caste systems during this period. The story of Ashoka was quite shocking because I had never heard something like this before. He killed 99 of his cousins for power. We spoke a little about the difference between Gandhara school of art and Mathura school of art. Buddhism rose in this period(500AD). We concluded this class with talking about the Mahajanapadas on which we were going to have a detailed discussion in the next class.
AYUSHI JAIN 