At the start of this innovative survey the author cautions the reader that he will not be pursuing a “classical art historical approach”, but will be viewing portraits in “early India” – that is, in the centuries prior to the Mughal period – within a broad social and historical context. Because the author's chronological sweep does not go beyond the eleventh–twelfth centuries, his data is mostly confined to stone and metal sculptures, though he occasionally refers to coins with depictions of figures or heads accompanied by engraved names. Yet the author does extend his enquiry to encompass the great Khmer period temples at Angkor. The author argues that these South-East Asian monuments are relevant to his discussion since they belong to the wider Indian cultural and artistic world.
Lefèvre begins his volume with an introduction on the problematics of understanding portraiture within an Indian context, partly laying the blame on a scholarly approach that has stressed idealization and avoidance of naturalism in Indian figural art (pp. 10–11). In his first chapter the author tackles the difficulties of identification, though he is on firm ground with the clearly attested stone effigy of the first-century ce king Kaniska recovered from a Kuṣāṇa dynastic shrine, now in the Government Museum, Mathura. From here he proceeds to devotional portraiture, even though he admits that many of the sculpted human worshippers depicted in the presence of a god or goddess lack identifying labels. In an attempt to solve this difficulty Lefèvre proposes the device of “double-meaning images”. As an illustration he recommends that the tableau of Śiva receiving the goddess Gagā in a tress of his hair sculpted onto a side wall of the Lalitankura cave-temple at Tiruchirapalli be interpreted as a portrait of the early-seventh-century ruler Mahendravarman I Pallava (pp. 41–2). The author notes that Mahendravaraman's inscription engraved on the monument mentions that the king installed an image of Śiva as well as his own portrait. In support of this interpretation the author notes that the wording of the inscription suggests a parallel between the Kaveri river, which flows beside Tiruchirapalli and through Mahendravarman's domains, and the celestial Gagā of Śiva (pp. 45–6).
In the second chapter Lefèvre explores the different kinds of portraits in India and their purposes. Here he considers the stone panels depicting the thirteenth-century king Narasimha Ganga, patron of the imposing Surya temple at Konarak; the inscribed copper statues of the sixteenth-century Vijayanagara emperor Krsnadevaraya and his queens installed in the Venkatesvara temple at Tirumala; and the mural composition depicting the eleventh-century Cola king Rajaraja I with his queens, inside the great temple at Thanjavur. The author then considers the relationship of portraiture and identity, drawing on the evidence of literature to demonstrate the narrative and dramatic possibilities of recognizable likenesses. Here, Lefèvre quotes a conversation from Kalidasa's play Vikramorvasi, in which a jester advises a king to draw a portrait (citra) of his beloved, and then gaze on it as a means of satisfying his romantic longings (p. 68). Such a scene illustrates the role of portraits in “love in separation” plots.
Portraiture as a means of commemoration, especially of a deceased person, is introduced by Lefèvre in his third chapter. Here he refers to the virakkals, or “hero-stones”, intended as lithic records of the death of a warrior or the sacrifice of a widow. The author's investigation of posthumous representations also encompasses funerary and dynastic shrines. These include the Cola-period pallipatai, though monuments mostly lack human imagery. The author then considers how divine images might have functioned as portraits, and, in reverse, how human portraits might have contributed to the person's deification. Such processes seem to have relied partly on the coincidence of names, the god bearing the name of the commemorated person, but with the suffix -isvara or -svamin, in the case of Śiva and Viṣṇu respectively.
In his fourth chapter Lefèvre discusses the cult of yaksas, or “spirits” in early India, which he believes may be related to representations of historical personages. Here he presents the debate about an inscription on one yaksa figure in the Mathura museum that is sometimes thought to mention a fifth-centry bce king (pp. 127–8). Lefèvre extends his argument to encompass depictions of historical figures as religious leaders, especially after their deaths, most famously of Buddha and Mahavira. And though the author attempts to link the first depictions of Kṛṣṇa with an actual heroic/royal person, this reviewer was not convinced.
The fifth and final chapter of the volume is devoted to the artistic creation of portraits. Here Lefèvre draws on iconographic texts, such as the Visnudharmottara Purana, which describes the making of human images, such as mahapurusa and bhupa, or great men and kings (p. 153). Whether such textual prescriptions ever actually dictated sculptural or pictorial figures remains to be demonstrated. From here the author progresses to allegorical portraits, such as that of the fifth-century ruler Candragupta II in the great Varaha relief at Udayagiri, and of the eighth-century Pallava ruler Nandivarman II at Kanchipuram. The latter king was patron of the Vaikuntha Perumal temple at Kanchipuram, the compound walls of which are covered with scenes of coronation, sacrifice, battle and courtly reception. However, the extremely eroded condition of the reliefs means that the identifications proposed by the author (pp. 183–7) can only be speculative.
If the critical reader is left with doubts about some of Lefèvre's suggestions this only reflects the uneven and incomplete nature of the archaeological and literary record. Though Lefèvre's interpretations may elude confirmation, this in no way detracts from what is surely the most wide-ranging and stimulating exploration of portraiture in India yet published.
