The Guptas established peace and prosperity throughout the lands under their rule. This political stability resulted in a golden age comparable to that of Greece. The centuries of Gupta rule saw great advancements in the arts and sciences, and they established a distinctly Hindu culture. As for Buddhism, its heyday in India was over, and from then on, its influence would be strongest outside the country of its birth.
Nonetheless, one of the outstanding examples of painting from the Golden Age of Gupta India can be found in the Buddhist temples of Ajanta (ah-ZHAN-tah) in central India. The temples themselves, carved from solid rock, are a work of art. Their walls contain numerous scenes from the life of the Buddha. Like much art from the Gupta era, these paintings are highly realistic in their portrayal of human figures. Even the chemical makeup of the paints themselves shows great technological advancement.
Prince Gautama and female figure, cave painting at Ajanta, India. Corbis/Charles & Josette Lenars. Reproduced by permission.
Making something stick to a surface is not always easy, as anyone who has ever tried to tape a piece of paper on a concrete block wall knows. The Buddhists of Ajanta, in order to make their paints adhere to the rock walls of the caves, used a mixture of clay, straw, hair, and even cow dung. They covered this with white plaster, and then while the surface was still wet, painted scenes on them. Italian artists of the Renaissance, such as Michelangelo (1475-1564), would use similar methods some twelve centuries later.
The Gupta age was also rich in sculpture, most of it with religious themes. These included statues of Hindu gods such as Shiva as well as figures of the Buddha. Even the coins issued by the Gupta Empire showed impressive-looking deities such as the Hindu god of war, Kartikeya (kar-tee-KIE-yah), shown with six heads and ten arms. As for the architecture of the Guptas, many of its notable examples could be found in the many Hindu temples built during this time.
The Guptas also built schools, where children were educated in the rich literary history of their people. Students began school at the age of nine, but where they went from there depended on their caste. By then, the original four castes had developed into thousands of groups. Children of the lower castes learned practical trades such as woodworking and textilemaking. The children of the higher castes, by contrast, studied the Upanishads, the Ramayana, and the Mahabharata [see sidebar, “Classes, Castes, and Segregation”]. When they finished their secondary education, they might go on to one of the universities established under the Guptas' reign, where they could study subjects ranging from agriculture to philosophy.
As advanced as Gupta arts and education were, however, the most outstanding features of the civilization were its achievements in the sciences, including medicine and astronomy, and in mathematics. In medicine, Indian surgeons set broken bones and even performed plastic surgery, a type of operation to change a person's physical appearance. Still more remarkable were the Indian doctors' discoveries regarding what modern people would call germs and viruses. It appears that they understood the importance of maintaining a clean, sterile environment for performing surgery—something Western doctors would not figure out until the 1800s.
Research by Indian scientists and physicians in the area of immunization also proved to be about 1,500 years ahead of its time. To protect someone against a disease by injecting them with the thing that causes that disease might seem completely backward, but as modern scientists know, that is precisely the way to protect people against smallpox and similar viral infections. Smallpox was a major problem at the time of the Guptas, and doctors figured out that by injecting patients with a diluted form of the cowpox virus, they could protect them from the horrible illness.
In the realm of astronomy, the Indians figured out that planets and moons are not sources of light (as many Westerners continued to believe for centuries) but rather reflect the light of the Sun. They were also aware that Earth is round and that it revolves. Indian mathematicians developed the system of ten numerals used today. These were later adopted by the Arabs, and thus came to be known (incorrectly) as “Arabic numerals.” They also used a decimal system, understood diffi-
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