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Synopsis Idea and Image in Indian Art presents an exercise in the understanding of a few of the fundamental imaginative and aesthetic values of Indian art. The exercise makes full use of the archaeology and iconography of Indian art, but is not concerned with either. Its principal concern is Indian art, the author underlines. What in Indian art this exercise seeks to explore, is the nature and character of the relationship between IDEA and IMAGE, both in a process of change through time under the stress of situations which were socio-religious and ideological as much as aesthetic and technical. From the rich repertory of ideas or themes on which imaginative and intellectual speculation in India as articulated in literary language, have always been very subtle, abstruse and abstract, the author has chosen three, with a view to find out as to how these IDEAS were concretized in terms of IMAGES through the medium of the plastic language of sculpture, and how the forms of IMAGES in their turn,