When Indian gods travelled across oceans and eras

WHILE on a visit to London this summer, I was invited by an English friend to tour the British Museum's well-received exhibition 'Ancient India: Living Traditions'. Displaying strikingly beautiful exhibits, the museum describes it as "one of the first major exhibitions in the world to look at the ancient devotional art of India from a multi-faith, contemporary and global perspective."Dating back over 2,000 years, the exquisite sculptures, paintings, manuscripts and texts explore the origins of Buddhist, Jain and Hindu art in nature spirits as the earliest subjects of devotion — precursors to the development of Jainism, Hinduism and Buddhism.What is distinctive about this exhibition is the way in which the over 180 items on display have been curated by the team, led by Sushma Jansari, into a coherent story about the interconnections and dissemination of the three living religions. Art associated with these religions is, of course, scattered worldwide in museums and other locations. But generally, the artifacts are presented as discrete entities, without such a broad contextual frame.For me, as an Indian, the figures of familiar deities, nature spirits and teachers/gods — such as Ganesha, Lakshmi, Buddha — came to life as a powerful narrative about the genesis and dissemination of these faiths. And from the perspective of my English friend, the items also accrued historical meaning, beyond simply being exotic oriental objects derived from colonial history.The exhibition is not just a feast for the eyes; it is a multi-sensory experience of a multi-religious universe. The three religions have been brought to life with nature, temple sounds and a swathe of background colours, often striking shades of green, to convey greenery of the Indian landscapes.Prefaced by an introductory panel and text, the exhibition opens with a section on ‘Nature Spirits’, reflecting the animist communities of early India, which was a world of forests and rivers in ancient rural settings. We see statues of male and female nature spirits, known as yakshas and yakshis, as well as of serpents, known as nagas and nagins — precursors of the familiar snake deities popular in all the three religions.The next section covers Jain and Buddhist art, with a separate segment on Hindu art. The artifacts are exquisite; they seem to commune with one another. One is reminded of the cross-pollination of religious meaning, evoked by deities like Shiva, Parvati, Ganesha, Vishnu and Lakshmi, in different and complex iterations. For instance, a figure of Lakshmi is described in the caption as: "The goddess Lakshmi has yakshi origins and is one of most popular deities of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Basalt lintel from Pitalkhora Cave Maharashtra, 200-400 BCE. This figure is from a Buddhist context. Here she sits while elephants pour water over her…[here she is] Gaja Lakshmi — elephant Lakshmi in Sanskrit — so successfully conveys the message of abundance and fertility that representations have changed little over thousands of years."Next, we are led to a section called ‘Beyond India’. It tracks the influence of the earliest Indian gods and religions as well as the artistic, cultural and philosophical traditions accompanying them beyond India. In these artifacts, we see beautiful iterations of Hindu and Buddhist deities in regions as far as Afghanistan in the west, Sumatra, across the Indian Ocean in the south, and China and Japan in the east to Siberia in the north.For some viewers, the influence of Indian religions on theological, cultural and economic discourses across such large swathes of South East Asia may come as a surprise. Again, some breathtakingly beautiful items are on display, such as the gleaming figure of the Buddhist goddess Tara and a Buddha figure made of volcanic stone from Java.The curators have also worked with Jain, Buddhist and Hindu community partners in the UK to incorporate contemporary religious practice in the exhibition, including films about worship and rituals in their lives. The concluding section displays images of rituals and ceremonies in contemporary UK, such as the immersion of Ganesha in River Mersey in 2014.The final panel, ‘A Shared Future’, reiterates a celebration of syncretic harmony among these religious traditions and their sacred images in the UK with this caption: “The arrival of South Asian, East Asian and Southeast Asian diaspora communities in the UK means that the devotional art of these three religions and many others is now a part of the shared British cultural life.”While the multi-sensory, colourful experience is compelling, we are also led to consider the origin of the objects on display. Where are they from? How did they get to the British Museum? Information about each object is displayed below it. It was not surprising to see that many items were brought from India during British rule and are now a part of the British Museum's collection. Others were loaned by some Indian museums and European sources.This display reinforces the fact that the excavation/acquisition of artifacts, including sacred art and objects of worship, was intrinsic to the colonial "passage to India", reflecting a sense of entitlement on both individual and institutional levels. One description, for instance, shows the journey of a major monument wrested from its foundations by the colonial rulers: "Amravati Stupa Andhra Pradesh AD 50-100 excavated in 1845 by Sir Walter Elliot (1803-1887) and taken to Madras (Chennai) where it was placed in Old College at Fort College at Fort Saint George and then in the Government Museum. In 1859, it was sent to the East India Company's India Museum and then to the British Museum in 1880."These revelations notwithstanding, the impact of the exhibition is immersive. We are left with the impression of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism as being capacious, generous and syncretic religions. Following the deities across time and space, we recognise their rich legacy, found in the cross-pollination of art, culture and religious practices.This legacy bears no resemblance to the Hindutva angle being articulated in India today — an ideology linked to singular and rigid interpretations of Hinduism associated with specific figures and sites, such as Ayodhya. The sensory experience of religious art and practice and the open and fluid notions of a multi-religious faith, as presented in this exhibition, run counter to the Hindutva ideas of exclusion and purity.Jyotsna G Singh is Professor, Michigan State University.

When Indian gods travelled across oceans and eras

Jyotsna G Singh

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