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| Home > Types Of Sculpture > Numen and Form
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| | Numen and Form Sculpture
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India is famous as the land of villages. In these villages, the life of villagers was very hard. The aim of the villagers in their lives was very much simple that reveals around the marriage, birth, & working in fields for living till the death. So, villagers` life was primarily depended to be called as good or bad on the fertility of the earth. Further, the visitations could be caused in their life through diseases and the tax gatherers to make their situation worst.
 The nature of the Indian climate was very uncertain, as it is today. As in a year, the peasant could suffer in summer from blazing heat and choking dust, followed in the months of monsoon by the flood situation, when the land in glimpse of the eye could be seen that is covered with raging water; then in December he must be raising his crops, if he was to survive the succeeding months of drought.
In most of the year, due to inadequate monsoon, the life of farmers or an ordinary man revolved around question of the water. Cholera or smallpox and many other diseases were some of the intimate companions in his life. In overall, he had the most direct possible experience of the forces governing growth and decay, life and death.
Numinous Of Countryside
The direct consequence of this situation made him vividly aware about the numinous in  his own countryside. All the forms existing around him were symbolic in appearance & primarily based on the experiences that are deeply engraved on his spirit. And over the period of time, all these forms had been gathered into a symbolic language of images. With the help of this symbolic language, the man started presenting himself - to show the ultimate realization of what he is, where he is going, from where he has come, in the colours of horror situation, in sensual delight, awe, disgust and wrath. Above all, he was able to develop a virtually immediate perception of the presence at the particular moment of the actual power that rules on his life.
As a result, his countryside or nearby areas were filled with places where divinity used to reside for his help. The places of these divinity-surrounded areas become his shrines or the terminals. As if these places were working as the transcendent power supply from which he could draw the strength he needs to carry on his life. He started giving respect to them & performs appropriate rituals. Each and every village had its own holy spot or shrine. Some of them were at the fields or along the roadside or there were others, marked with dabs or stripes of red paint.
Any small village hallows may includes the stump of an ancient tree with two contorted branching arms, cased in earth and painted with bands of red and white or in can be an anthill from which a mysterious sound was once heard emanating and found daubed with red dots. Even it can be a simple raised plinth under a tree on which fragmentary stone statues of an earlier age are ploughed up from their fields by the peasants or a huge boulder, seen closely in a wall on three sides showing its fourth face wholly painted in red colour or five small stones placed on the bare earth at a hedge corner, crudely splashed with the same colour. All these places were strengthening his belief system.
 Before such simple hallows came into being, offerings of rice, milk and flowers were left on the bare earth or a stone shelf. At certain places the tradition of such offerings grew up to an extent that offering pottery figurines animals, or little human figures were seen as an indicative of the desires of the donor. These are sometimes replaced with sacrificing various animals. The custom still survives of sacrificing goats or buffaloes, at many of the greater shrines in India, especially those of the goddesses Kali and Durga. Once, reported in the south that deeply inspired heroes sacrificed themselves. Even in the modern times also, the custom is occasionally observed. But for the peasant, due to his circumstances continuous animal sacrifice seems as an economic impossibility. Therefore, pottery horses or buffaloes were offered to the deity instead of that. The human figurines made up from clay for example, of Maimen singh in Bengal represent a woman with two children on her arms, refers certainly to the consuming desire of the Indian family for offspring.
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