Ancient India, Living Traditions
By Ram Prasad, Fellow of the British Academy and Distinguished Professor in the Department Politics, Philosophy and Religion, Lancaster University. Originally published by The Conversation. Article image © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
The British Museum’s Ancient India, Living Traditions exhibition brings together exhibits on the sacred art of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. It also encompasses the spread of the devotional art of these traditions to other parts of Asia.
The exhibition speaks to religious identity and relationships. Buddhism and Jainism distinguish themselves from the vast surrounding traditions that together we call Hinduism; but they have close kinship with it in practices, beliefs and iconography. Museums that have presented sculptures in isolation have usually not attempted to narrate this complex history.
Not all the items displayed, some going back 2,000 years, are of purely historical interest. There are representations of traditions that are continuously living in a way the gods of ancient Egypt or classical Europe are not.
The most instantly recognisable example for visitors of such living ancient tradition is likely to be statues of the elephant-headed deity Ganesha. Visitors can see a rare and valuable 4th century sandstone Ganesha on show. They can also see a small bronze version of that ancient Ganesha that is like the kind you would find in people’s home and to which a quick prayer would be addressed every morning.
The question of how to respect that sense of the sacred while still mounting an exhibition is a moral and aesthetic challenge that few museums (including in India) have started to address. It’s not uncommon to see such pieces wrenched from the reality of their continued practice and presented in secular art displays. Here, however, the curators have tried to make connections between “statues” on display and “icons” in temples and homes.
Finally, there’s the problematic history of the imperial museum and its need to reckon with its past. Most objects on display in this exhibition, and The British Museum more widely, have been presented with scarcely any acknowledgement of how they came to be acquired.
The exhibition makes an earnest effort to tackle most of these issues.
This article was originally published by The Conversation and is partially reproduced here without the permission of the author, who is not affiliated with this website or its views.
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