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Meaning  and  style

             An important and largely unanswerable question is how the present figures related to the entire composition of the painted band extending across the rock-face. Their fragmentary nature and unusual dramatic location have led to the Sigiriya paintings being interpreted in a number of ways, sometimes quite fancifully. Of the proposals that deserve scholarly consideration the three

 most important ones are those of Bell, Ananda Coomaraswamy and Senerath Paranavitana.

             Bell’s idea that they portray the ladies of Kasyapa’s court in a devotional procession to the shrine at Pidurangala is a purely imaginative reconstruction and has no precedent in the artistic and social traditions of the region or the period. It seems quite likely, however, that the court ladies and their costumes and ornaments provided models for the Sigiriya artists and that, as such, the paintings reflect the life and atmosphere, the ideals of beauty and the attitude to women, of the elite society of the time.

         Paranavitana’s suggestion that they represent Lightning Princesses (Vijju Kumari ) and Cloud Damsels (Meghalata) is an interpretation at once more literary and sociological. It forms part of his elaborate hypothesis, which attempts to explain Sigiriya as an expression of the cult of divine royalty, the entire palace complex being a symbolic reconstruction of the abode of the god Kuvera.

         While these identifications may seem to us today an over interpretation too specific to accept in its totality, deriving from Paranavitana’s attempt to see the Sigiriya palace and royal complex primarily as an expression of divine kingship, they do draw our attention to important sociological dimensions in the understanding of ancient works of art. There is no doubt that the spatial organization and symbolism of the Sigiriya complex is profoundly determined by the cult of the king and the ideology of kingship. The great tapestry of paintings at Sigiriya, the palace on the summit and the lion staircase, are all part of a complex ‘ sign-language’ expressing royal power and ritual status.

        Coomaraswamy's identification of the Sigiriya women as Apsaras is in keeping with well-established South Asian traditions and is not only the simplest but also the most logical and acceptable interpretation. Recent studies have reinforced this idea, showing that apsaras are often represented in art and literature as celestial beings who carried flowers and scattered them over kings and heroes as a celebration of victory and heroism. We can say almost with certainty that the Sigiriya ladies are celestial nymphs, very similar in essence to their successors thirteen hundred years later in the ‘daughters of Mara’ panel from Dambulla, but it is also likely that they had more than one meaning and function: as expressions of royal grandeur and status and as artistic evocations of courtly life, with aesthetic and erotic dimensions.

         Such an interpretation, with its varying levels of ambiguity, allows us to accommodate both Bell’s and Paranavitana’s suggestions at either end of a semiological spectrum. It also makes it possible for us to view the painted band at Sigiriya as a rare and early survival of a royal citrasala, or picture gallery, well known in Indian literature and implicit in the Culavamsa account of Parakrmabahu’s palaces and audience halls at Polonnaruva.

         The style and authorship of the paintings have bee as controversial a question as that of their identity. Early writers such as Bell, and even Coomaraswamy, saw them as extensions of the Central Indian School of Ajanta or of several related traditions such as those of Bagh or of Sittanvasal in South India. Bell even suggested that ‘artists trained in the same school possibly the same hands – executed both the Indian and Ceylon frescoes’. These were views expressed at time when very little was known of the extent and character of early Sri Lankan painting.

         Benjamin Rowland was amongst the first to observe carefully the actual painterly technique at Sigiriya and to note in what specific way it differed from Ajanta and other sub continental traditions: The Sigiriya paintings, outside of their exciting and intrinsic beauty, are perhaps most notable for the very freedom they show at a time when the were tending to become more and more frozen in the mould of rigid canons of beauty. The apsaras have a rich healthy flavour that in contrast almost makes the masterpieces of Indian art seem sallow and effete in contrast almost makes the masterpieces of more vigorous than that of the more sophisticated artists of India, so colours are bolder and more intense than the tonalities employed in the temples of the Deccan’ (Rowland 1938:84)

        These insights have been pursued and reinforced by contemporary Sri Lankan scholars, who rightly argue that, while the Sri Lankan paintings belong to the same broad traditions of South Asian art as the various sub continental schools of the time, the specific character and historical continuity of the Sri Lankan tradition give it its own distinctive place in the art of the region. Thus, the Sigiriya paintings represent the earliest surviving examples of a Sri Lankan school of classical realism, already fully evolved when we first encounter it in the fifth century.

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