Divinity as Destiny in Ancient India

It’s a time when India feels the need to tell its story to the world, which, whenever complexities challenge received wisdom, falls back on stereotypes, and in some instances, even archetypes. India’s effective military reaction after the Pahalgam terror was another occasion for some in the international media to reduce a conflict started by religious ter­rorism’s most blatant pro­moter to an inevitable near-Armageddon scenario featuring two nuclear powers driven by hatred and unreason, giving little credence to the historical fact that it was a clash of un­equals. One, a military-Islamic regime with a fragile demo­cratic veneer for which its neighbour, with the largest civil society in the region, is a necessary invocation, an existential urge, to remain nationally alive. The other, at a time when post-democracy is the most shared political anxiety, is everything that a democracy can achieve in a society that defies homogeneity and ideological binaries. That hasn’t stopped analyses that sought the origin of the horror in an ‘authentic’ dispute over territory—when there is no dispute but only the claims of a half-made state. Sometimes nations need to tell their own stories to a world fed on truths filtered through stereotypes. The global whirlwind of telling the Indian story comes at the right time.

Maybe I could have done with­out the above paragraph to enter an ambitious exhibition at the British Museum. Headlines at times are clari­fied by the far ends of history. Ancient India: Living Traditions is an expan­sive and exquisite exploration of the sacred land through civilisational memory. By tracing the antique arc of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, span­ning 200BCE to 600CE, it brings to life how motifs and metaphors, originally in­spired by nature and sculpted with elemental precision, open the doors to the world that was: devotion was destiny. The most benevo­lent nature spirits, yakshas and yakshis, are ferocious in their terracotta mani­festations, but their moods capture the remotest facets of faith. In Room No 30 at the Sainsbury Wing of the British Museum, these primordial personas lead us to religions’ backstories populated by anthropomorphic deities, gods and incarnations, and among them, the nagas and naginis stand out with their coiled enigma.

 

The exhibition gives considerable space to redeeming the great three religions that were born in India from oriental clichés about faith as timeless kitsch. What we gather from Vishnu’s avatars, Ganesha’s gaze, a symbolic representation of the Buddha as an absorbing absence amidst the devotees dating back to 50BCE, the three parts of the Jain universe, to name a few from the evolutionary story of faith told in the imagination of those who lived it first, is the foundational richness of Indian culture. As an epilogue, the show captures the journey of these religions, along the way assum­ing formal variations in the depiction of devotion, beyond India, into Sri Lanka and South­east Asia. Perhaps it is the fluidity of faith that allowed Hindu­ism to remain alive without being supervised by ‘enlightened’ men and held captive by scriptural traditions. The exhibition’s subtitle, ‘Living Traditions’, reminds the viewer that man’s sense of eternity is indebted to cultural memory.

Some viewers may succumb to the cultural temptation of our times: seeing the past through the broken prism of the present. A show like this with its beautiful symmetry of the Great Three and the breathtaking depictions of ancient wisdom and devotion, they may argue, is certain to energise Hindu nationalists, always looking for ancient items to replenish their cultural ar­moury. The historian Peter Frankopan, author of the brilliant The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, reviewing the exhibition in Financial Times, fears: “ By emphasising the localised origins of these religions, the exhibition places them within a context of indigenous genesis, production and dissemina­tion—something that plays strongly towards increasingly strident contem­porary political trends in India, where other faiths, including Christianity but most notably Islam, are presented as be­ing layers that can and (in some minds) should be stripped back.” Is it really a point here? It just shows how we cannot travel in the vast arcadias of our past without subordinating them to current political stereotypes. We have seen the stridency of that approach in post-Floyd America when Cultural Revolution was redeployed by capitalism, when history was proof­read to adhere to the progressive demands of the present. Nothing was sacred. Every­thing required the validation of the freshly minted morality. Can’t we retrieve the in­nocence of seeing, reading and watching without the burden of political pieties? Ancient India will be better appreciated as a wonderful story if we do so.

Now comes gender Gandhism. That Gandhi is a useful invocation in an argument in these fraught times is itself news. When the Supreme Court of the UK ruled that biological sex is what defines a woman, an activist barrister found it as occasion to bash the trans activists’ favourite foe: the richest writer in the English language, JK Rowling (worth £945 million according to the latest ‘Sunday Times Rich List’). Inci­dentally, she too shares the court’s view. There is no limit to the bullying she suffers for her “old fashioned” gender position. The controversial barrister, who earlier said in an interview that he was inspired by Gandhi, has called the author anti-feminist. In a social media spat that ensued, she wrote: “The attempt to redefine the word ‘woman’ by dismiss­ing female biology benefits only men who’ve been eagerly helping them­selves to women’s protected spaces, sport, opportunities and honours [and campaigners like the barrister] believe they’ll go down in history as genderism’s Gandhi.” Rowling calls him Fox Batterer. He was in the news once for battering a fox to death. Poor Gandhi, as usual he seems to be losing the argument without taking part in one.

ancient Indian artBritish MuseumdivinityEnglish languageIndian Gods and GoddessesJK Rowling