5 June 2025 | Guest lecture by Dr Ashwini Lakshminarayanan, Cardiff University

Abstract

It has long been recognised that the bases of Buddha and Bodhisattva schist statues from the ancient region of Gandhāra depict to some extent scenes that echo ritual practices that were normative for the region. While they have been the focus of sporadic assessments in the last decades, this paper is a systematic analysis of statue bases coming from ancient Gandhāra, a region located in the Northwest part of the Indic subcontinent, within the wider context of Gāndhārī donative inscriptions and Chinese travelogues. Dating broadly from the second century CE onwards, the statues bases, this paper argues, were a new venue to visually reinforce the ritual efficacy. As part of the systematic analysis, this talk showcases a work in progress, shedding light on the conventions used on statue bases and the actions of figures represented within them.

Bio

Dr Ashwini Lakshminarayanan is a Maria Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at Cardiff University leading the project ‘GRAVE: Gandharan Relic rituals and Veneration Explored’. This project analyses the visual material from Gandhāra (present day Pakistan and Afghanistan between the 1st and the 4th centuries CE) in its socio-religious context, focussing on contemporary Gandhari relic donative inscriptions and later Chinese accounts of relic veneration in the region. Besides rituals, Ashwini Lakshminarayanan’s work also focuses on gender, multi-cultural and multi-religious interactions within the Kushan kingdom.