VOL 1 No 2, 2024 Research Article
Tathagata Sagar Pal
Research Scholar, Cooch Behar Panchanan Barma University
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21659/jsae/v1n2/v1n211
[Article History: Received: 21 Mar 2024. Revised: 23 Jul 2024. Accepted: 20 Aug 2024. Published: 04 Dec 2024]
Abstract
The worship of the sun in India can be traced back to the Neolithic period. The sun, as the source of light and heat on the earth, was revered as the creator of life, a powerful entity that must be appeased to gain bountiful production. In the Vedic pantheon, the sun occupied an important position and he was worshipped under various names like Sūrya, Savitṛ, Vivasvat, Pūṣan, and others. Bijoy Kumar Sarkar in his doctoral thesis, Sun Worship and Sun-Images in Early Bengal (2004), has opined that the sun-worship became popular in Eastern India due to the efforts of the ācāryas, the priests devoted to this deity. From the Gupta period, we come across the images of the sun. The prominence of Sūrya in the region continued unabated during the Pāla Kings too. The Pālas, despite being heralded as the patrons of Buddhism, harbored no animosity to the Brahmanical religion. A large number of sculptures of Sūrya, dating back to the Pāla period, bear testament to this fact. This paper would focus on the sculptures of Sūrya that have been preserved at the Cooch Behar Palace Museum and are dated as belonging to the Pāla period. These have mostly been retrieved from various police stations and customs offices of North Bengal. The paper will look at the epigraphs of the time to make an estimation of the prevalence of the solar cult. The Pāla art also marked the zenith of medieval Bengal artistry. The paper, therefore, would endeavor to explain the iconographic details of the sculptures and how they reflect the Pāla art form.
Keywords: Sūrya sculptures, the Pālas, medieval Bengal, socio-historical context, iconography
