Abstract

The Purāṇas have a special place in the intellectual traditions of India. Hitherto treated as storehouses of myth, cosmology, genealogy, pilgrimage, ritual and religious narratives, their contents are much wider and extend to domains of systematic and applied knowledge. Among them, the Mahāpurāṇas and Upapurāṇas preserve an important body of knowledge concerning the fine arts. The paper reexamines Paurāṇika literature from the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) perspective to understand its role in preserving and transmitting the conceptual foundations of six major fine arts namely music (saṅgīta), dance (nṛtya/nṛtta), architecture (vāstu), sculpture and iconography (pratimā/śilpa), painting (citra) and literature including poetics and dramaturgy (sāhitya/nāṭya). The study, based especially on the Viṣṇudharmottara, Agni, Matsya, Vāyu, Mārkaṇḍeya, Liṅga, Viṣṇu, Bhāgavata and other Paurāṇika traditions, argues that the Purāṇas did not only preserve isolated technical prescriptions, but placed artistic knowledge within an interconnected epistemological framework. The Viṣṇudharmottara Purāṇa is particularly important in explaining the interrelation of artistic disciplines, where knowledge progresses thru music, dance, painting and image-making. The paper reads this structure as typical of the integrative nature of Indian Knowledge Systems, where technical skill, aesthetic experience, embodied knowledge, material practice, ritual meaning and philosophical understanding all work in concert. It claims too that the contribution of the Purāṇas is not necessarily to originate every artistic theory but to collect, re-organise, contextualize and transmit inherited knowledge over generations. When the Puranas are viewed in this light, they become dynamic storehouses of knowledge and a model for contemporary research on Indian art, architectural education, continuity of culture and transmission of knowledge.