The face with its elegant profile, high forehead, full cheeks and rounded oval, is framed in free-flowing/ and curly hair. Crafted in stucco, this figure of a deva or again a genie was brought to light in 1926-1927 by Jules Barthoux, an archaeologist of the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan (DAFA). It comes from a niche open onto the courtyard of one of the two great stupas raised within the enclosure of the Buddhist monastery of Tapa-Kalan at Hadda, a renowned pilgrimage site. At one time it had been paired with another one and paid tribute to a great Buddha placed at the centre of the niche. The youth’s figure stood out from the wall, evolving from a barely suggested bas-relief to an almost total haut-relief, thereby borrowing an illusionistic process inherited from Greece and attested by the 1st- 3rd centuries, in the Kuchan period, to the North of the Amou-Darya River, former Oxus.
The stupas, niches and chapels of the Buddhist monasteries were abundantly adorned with episodes from Buddha’s life or devotional scenes in which numerous figures in various attitudes represented related divinities.
The work attests to a variety of influences, drawn from the North-West of the Indian sub-continent and the Gandhara sculpture school, and more broadly Hellenistic aesthetics. This eclectic style, the quality of the modelling of the faces, the exceptional realism of this art, as well as its exquisite refinement, fully justify Hadda’s outstanding position among the various artistic schools that developed through the expansion of Buddhism in Eastern Afghanistan and then Central Asia.
