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| Home > Types Of Sculpture > Dance Sculpture > Hand Gestures in Dance Sculptures
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| | Hand Gestures in Dance Sculptures
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Hand Gestures in Dance Sculptures
The greatest wealth of `meanings` in the Indian visual arts is classically conveyed by the gestures of hand. These hand gestures are called as mudras. This can be said as one more function of the magically versatile Indian hand. These mudras have been elaborated to form a language to convey the thought, is rich in its own context. These mudras are so subtle that entire narratives can be expressed through it in the mime alone, without any kind of setting or explanation. Of course, to understand & interpret the language of gesture of the dancer the audience must be able to read the language of the hands.
Such gestures are widely used in dancing figures. They are in the highest degree of stylized movements. May be at some distant period of time, they have evolved from a keen observation of around happenings, customs and creative analysis. These gestures are a kind of residue aroused as immediate emotional expression. For example: the open-palmed hand, stretched downward keeping all fingers in one direction indicates `giving`, or the pointing hand that indicates compulsion or driving. Others are obviously formally imitative in nature such as the clenched fist with first and fourth fingers erect primary means the cow with horns on the head, or the upward-pointing hand with straight fingers gathered together indicates the closed lotus-bud, and all its associated meanings.
In this connection, it is very much interesting to notice that there is virtually no difference, from the sculptural point of view, between the representation of figures of divinities such as Kali Goddess, and those of earthly saints. Only the difference is in demonstrating the self-mortification of a human saint is shown in anything less than his divine body. But, both Buddhism and Jainism treat with respect to saints & believe that they are superior in nature to the gods. As far as sculptures are employed to mean imbuing the radiant, spiritually inflated bodies of the Buddha or the Jinas, there is no any difference from which the divinities of Hinduism are imbued.
Through passing from every generation there are some of alteration in the expression of art. Every generation there have been some of the dominating segment in the society, who would wish to reduce art to a status that is subservient to the prescriptions of an ideology.
As any art is compounded out of the wealth of direct remembered thoughts or by experience & observation, and in this process it involves the whole man, not merely his disciplined brain. And Indian sculpture is meant to take us to the journey of aesthetic ecstasy, which is India`s great aesthetician dignified with recognition as enlightenment. And the only road to that ecstasy is the dedicated absorption of all the suggestions, visual, sensuous, tactile and kinetic, that every work of art has to offer all human being.
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