But for lovers of India and especially of Hinduism, the image on this page is typically iconic. If I sleep on my left side, it is my first visual experience each morning. Shiva Nataraj sitting on my bedside table, is the Lord of the Dance; that dance being the dance of creation/destruction and back into creation again. For the devout it resonates with the sacred syllable OM (or more precisely AUM) which not only holds it and everything else in being, it is it.
Roberto Calasso, the author of ‘Ka’ a modern retelling of Hindu mythology, tells of that same Shiva and his shakti (the feminine source of his strength) Parvati locked in unending sexual congress.
Monotheism to its endless shame, to mankind’s enduring spiritual poverty and our continuing misuse of the earth, has found and continues to find such imagery difficult.
More mundanely as you come up the escalator at Piccadilly Circus London Underground Station, going west up Piccadilly keeping on the right hand side, you are likely to fall into step with cultured people going to the Royal Academy. Most of them will currently be going to the Auguste Rodin Exhibition, though the more perceptive or attentive will go upstairs too, when they discover Rodin’s debt to and appreciation of Indian sacred sculpture.
This exhibition of approximately forty bronze sculptures explores the artistic and cultural riches of the Chola dynasty of southern India between the ninth and thirteenth centuries of our era. Throughout their rule the Cholas were great patrons of the arts and oversaw an extensive programme of temple construction. Portable bronze sculptures, revered as physical manifestations of the Hindu gods, were produced to fulfill public functions and preside over specific festivities. Chola bronzes are widely considered to be among the finest works of Indian sculptural art.
Inside every male philosopher/theologian there is probably a grubby schoolboy trying to get out. When that philosopher/theologian comes from a western perspective, he probably also enjoys eastern art because much of it is supremely erotic. Whether it’s true also of female theologians/philosophers I have no idea, but… What is certainly true is that the repression of fertility cults, by, for example the ancient Israelites in their assumed ‘Promised Land’ – indeed the whole mess of sexual repression, the aftermath of which the modern world is only just and maybe too late, coming to terms with, rooted in as it is, and to a certain extent, perpetuated by the three monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – has created a slant on the way the world ought to be, that makes it hard for many people to escape from.
On the other hand Hinduism, with its awareness and acceptance of the raw earthiness of all life, sees no difficulty. In Southern India, portable icons of the gods came into existence for a very particular purpose – to allow the parading of the deity away from the temple sanctuary for both the god’s pleasure and the spiritual benefit of devotees. In a practice that continues to the present day, the god or goddess ventures forth both to see and to be seen – darshan.
The production of such cast metal icons was related to a wave of devotional Hinduism that swept across southern India from the 6th to the 10th centuries CE. They provided a visual focus for the writings of Hindu poet saints, creators of the ‘bhakti tradition’ who in large measure were responsible for the democratizing of worship. The technique was essentially simple. Wax resin sculpture was encased in layers of clay; the clay was then heated and the molten wax drained off to be replaced with bronze.
The result is stunning: 40 of them in this exhibition – some minute – others awesomely larger than life.
We all know that what the world looks like depends entirely on where you are sitting at the time and who it is that is looking. The wisest of us get off our backsides and move somewhere else to see how things change. Well a trip to this exhibition in Piccadilly, London up till the 26th February might well be that somewhere else.
Ken Smith is Letters Editor,Editor of Portholes and a SoF trustee.
Review of Chola Sacred Bronzes of Southern India at the Royal Academy, Piccadilly, London.