ABSTRACT
In reading the delightful ‘Digit’ I came upon a passage which has helped my consideration of the sculptured forms of women in India. I could not imagine why – even in graceful sculpture – the female body was, to my eye, so unpleasantly enforced; when, lo, this is what I read in the Digit book to-day – after a string of similes of the beauties of Anangarágá – “and Hémacumbhiní, for thy bosom resembles a pair of golden gourds; and Pulinákrití, for the curves of thy hips are like the swell of a river bank.”2 – This exactly resembles the female form divine of the Indian mind, even in the earliest and their most human like sculptures. The similes are delightful: for example, “for thy intellect is like a diamond needle”; amongst 17 of them in one passage3 at the end of a quite successful climax to the beautiful story of the ‘Digit of the Moon’. The book seems to me to be excellently well translated. Do you know anything of F.W. Bain?4
