A culture of convergences
pati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) and National Museum with loans from across India and from the British Museum. The stories these objects tell are twofold. India’s long history is revealed across a number of themes: the development of cities, states and empires; of commerce and courtly life; of religion and politics. But this is not India in isolation. Visitors have the rare opportunity to compare Shiva in his dance of destruction to a Hawaiian god of war or a Taíno figure from the Caribbean. They can see an Indian rhinoceros made famous in Europe through a woodcut by the German artist Albrecht Dürer, despite the fact that he had never seen one. To make sense of India, one must understand its relationship with the outside world: its interactions, its analogies, its shifting identity over time and across space.
A history told through things has many virtues. One is the potential to be more inclusive. The written record privileges the literate and primarily the victors who write the official version of what occurred. If you want to tell a story that does not unduly favour one part of humanity, you can do it only through things: objects which escape the official record, or survive where no other record does. The process is not straightforward. Writing history through texts is a familiar process, and we have centuries of critical apparatus to help us assess the written record. With objects, an almost opposite approach is required. Instead of criticism, what we need is an act of imagination, engaging with the artefact as generously as we can to evoke the insights it may deliver, returning it to its former life. A group of large objects welcomes visitors before they reach the main exhibition. At first glance each of these objects, as large objects so often do, stands in its own right. They are not the sort of objects that like to share their space.
They appear, very directly, to represent India and the world. Here are four Indian figures immediately familiar to visitors: Nandi the bull, the winged Garuda, Hanuman the monkey and the Bharvahaka, a yaksha or nature spirit. There is also one of the most famous sculptures of European art: the discus thrower or Discobolus.
They are an improbable juxtaposition. What could be more different? They symbolise East and West. The sacred and the secular. We think we know what is represented here.
But do we? Seeing them together, we begin to notice connections between them. All represent for their viewers, whether in ancient Greece or Rome, Karnataka or Madhya Pradesh, a superhuman strength, from the idealised male body of the discus thrower to the latent force of Nandi the bull. What seems Indian in one context and Greek in another is not so clearly separated when we see the objects side by side: Garuda kneels, ready for flight as the ath-
A history told through things has many virtues. One is the potential to be more inclusive. The written record privileges the literate and primarily the victors who write the official version of what occurred.
It may seem wildly ambitious to tell the history of India in nine stories. Nine hundred might have been likelier, or even 9000. This exhibition is, however, not “the history” of India, but “a history”. And deliberately so, for the partiality of objects is their strength. Objects are particular: rooted in place and time, made by individual hands for a particular purpose. They may be representative, but their force derives from their specific meaning, the one story among the countless possible that only they can tell. There could not be a more important time to view India on the world stage. To mark seventy years since India’s Independence, this collaboration between csmVs, National Museum and the British Museum is a tribute to the country’s spirit of international cooperation. Combining outstanding objects to tell a history of statehood, religion and society, India and the World shows, among its many stories, just how global India has been all along.