2. "Pagoda Tree": Plants and Other Foliate Motifs on Indian Coins through History
Roots of Wisdom, Branches of Devotion - Plant Life in South Asian Traditions - Fabrizio Ferrari
Shailendra Bhandare [+]
Ashmolean Museum (University of Oxford)
Description
For millennia trees have been a part of India's sacred landscapes. They have been worshipped for the spirits that dwell upon them, as objects symbolizing plenitude and wish-fulfilment and in the context of ritual and totemic significance. Coinage offers a mirror to explore these tropes in the association trees have had in the cultural and historical past of India. This paper describes salient representations of trees on Indian coins and explores the themes pertaining to their raison d'être. While the focus of the paper lies on coins from c. 5th century BC - 5th century AD, we will also see how foliate motifs continued to feature in Islamicate coinages of India, where other representations were not encouraged and, in some instances, carried on standing for what exactly they did in the pre-Islamic past, thereby alluding to an interesting continuity in the representational tradition.