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History Optional PYQ Master Pack · Model answer

Discuss the experimentations with art and architecture during the Gupta-Vakataka period.

  • UPSC 2018
  • Guptas, Vakatakas and Vardhanas

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To speak of "experimentation" rather than mere production is to claim that Gupta-Vakataka artists were solving new formal problems — how to render spiritual serenity in stone, how to move a shrine from a cave into free-standing structure, how to make a painted wall breathe with narrative movement — and that these solutions were not…

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What the full answer covers

  • Sculpture: refining a synthesis rather than inventing from scratch
  • Architecture: from rock-cut hall to free-standing shikhara temple
  • Ajanta: the Vakataka contribution and the peak of the cave idiom
  • Excavation and the sculptural-architectural programme
  • The murals
  • Coinage as a minor but telling experiment
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