ABSTRACT
The author met Michael Meister together with a number of other people in the South Asian Studies Department, in the 1970s, when he gave his first lecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Michael and some of these people became his good friends and he saw them at Penn or in Delhi over the years. Art history was not my major pre-occupation even as a historian of early India. But architecture, and more so sculpture, were significant sources of another dimension of historical data and provided a variant from textual sources. A distinction has to be made between portraits and representations. Indian art has hardly any portraits from pre-Islamic times. Even on coins, there is paucity of portraits although there are suggestive representations, as for example in Gupta coins.
