OCCASIONAL PUBLICATION 86 IICFrom Temples to Museums: Contextualising Sacred Sculptures by Salila Kulshreshtha The views expressed in this publication are solely those of the author and not of the India International Centre. The Occasional Publication series is published for the India International Centre by Rohit Khera Designed and produced by Dee Kay Printers, 5/37A Kirti Nagar Indl. Area, New Delhi-15, Tel.: 011-41425571, Email: [email protected] Occasional Publication 86 From Temples to Museums: Contextualising Sacred Sculptures* Introduction The classic Uma Mahesvara image shows Shiva and Uma seated together on the same pedestal, caught in an intimate embrace. While Shiva may be seated on a stone cushion or lotus throne, Parvati sits on Shiva’s lap or thighs. Parvati is always shown with two arms, while Shiva may have two, four or even more arms. Shiva is depicted as taller, and Parvati small and almost child-like. They are both surrounded by a halo, bedecked in jewellery and carry different ayudha (weapons and ornaments) in their arms. Often their vahanas (animal mounts), Parvati’s tiger, and Shiva’s Nandi bull, and other deities like Ganesha and Skanda, and devotees are also portrayed. The image represents cosmic procreation as well as the synthesis of two powerful and independent deities. I first came across the image of Shiva and Parvati as Uma Mahesvara in the Patna Museum; I was fascinated by the grace of this image as much as by its unabashed depiction of conjugal love. What incited my curiosity was the large number of these images found in the museum. What was the significance of the icon? Why were so many varieties of this particular image found from sites of Bihar over a long time period from the 5th century to the 13th century? Figure 1: Uma Mahesvara, Kashtaharini Ghat, Munger represents the icon in its ‘classic’ Eastern Indian pose; 9th to 10th century; now at Patna Museum, accession no. 6837; photo courtesy AIIS, Gurgaon *Lecture delivered at the India International Centre, New Delhi by Salila Kulshreshtha on 10 January 2018 1 Salila Kulshreshtha My engagement with the Uma Mahesvara icon is neither to describe the scriptural or spiritual meanings that surround it, nor discuss its chronology or evaluate the aesthetics of the sculptures which has often been done in the typical art historical fashion. I approach the Uma Mahesvaramurti in its particular eastern Indian manifestation to trace its original ritual and architectural context. In my perception, sacred images are alive and from the moment of fabrication, through their lives, they inhabit different places, interact with a variety of people and travel large distances; sometimes even undertake air travel crossing international borders. At each stage of their existence, and at each location of their placement, their identity and purpose alters. By tracing the biographies of the Uma Mahesvara images, I will enter the shrines where they were originally located. The original architectural placement of the icons vis-à-vis their later relocation will suggest how their identities have changed and their original purpose has been forever lost; while the sacred sites where they were located were consequently reconfigured and reinvented. Religious icons have been a contested terrain across the world. Their implications and understanding travel further than the artistic or the aesthetic, and inform contemporary preoccupations. As a methodological approach, I will use religious sculptures as the main source of historical investigation, and study them without comparison to textual prescriptions as is the general norm. By highlighting the architectural context and ritual use of the images, I will also create a historical narrative of sites from South Bihar, and a striking aspect of the sites which emerges is their apparent polytheism in motifs, images and sects. It is common to find Buddhist, Jain and Hindu images within the same sacred space and still under worship. At what moment do the sites of South Bihar then begin to acquire a monotheistic Buddhist identity? How were the existing sacred sculptures, especially those under worship, misrepresented to fit a particular notion of the past and a convenient configuration of sacred spaces? Through the course of the paper, I will discuss how colonial interventions in the 19th and the early 20th 2 Occasional Publication 86 centuries reinterpreted the study of this past through the introduction of new disciplines such as archaeology, art history and iconography. By using a particular image type in a regional context, I will highlight significant issues in Indian archaeology such as the reuse and sharing of sacred space by adherents of different faiths, and the rebuilding of temples and consequent reinvention of sites where these images were located and thus situate the icon within a religious context. The region discussed is that of the middle Ganga valley: the area south of the river Ganga in the present day state of Bihar.1 The temples and temple sites referred to are those built from the 8th to the 14th centuries. Current historiographical stance tends to view the region as the original Buddhist homeland, its history framed by the succession of dynasties: the Mauryas, the Sungas, the Guptas, the Pala, the Senas and so on. This traditional historiographical stance, in a typical colonial fashion, divides the history of the region into successive Buddhist-Jain, Hindu and Muslim periods where one religion supersedes the previous one. Within such a model, history becomes fragmented without any scope of sharing or assimilation of religious ideas or ritual praxis. As an alternative historiographical model, historians and anthropologists studying the social dimension of religion and temple architecture from north and east India between the 8th and the 13th centuries have placed them within the paradigm of ‘feudal economies’ of the ‘early medieval period’ where temple complexes and artistic proclivity have been examined as a direct corollary of political systems, personal patronage of rulers, economic decentralisation accompanied by a wave of Brahmanisation in north India (Sharma, 1974; Bhattacharya, 1982; Chattopadhyaya, 2003: 233- 62). The art historical approach has studied religious sculptures from the point of view of aesthetics outlining the meanings, symbols, mythology and physical description of Hindu sculptures (Rao, 1997; Pal, 1988). An alternate approach has surveyed the sculptures as illustrations to religious texts and examined them on how closely they depict the textual descriptions (Banerjea, 1956). In recent years, there has been a shift in 3 Salila Kulshreshtha focus and scholars have dealt with the ritual and architectural placement of the images (Desai, 1996); their cultural significance and purpose (Thapan, 1997; Chitgopekar, 1998); and relocations (Davis, 1997; Juneja, 2001) and so on. The Icon My approach to the Uma Mahesvara images was to first understand the imagery and architectural context of the icon, and I started with a handful of sculptures now found in museum collections across Bihar, published records, online photo archives and catalogues. As expected, while a large number of these images were found in museums and private collections, but a substantial number also lay scattered in various shrines. I then tabulated them across various parameters, including find spot, time period, material used, and stylistic type and mapped them to examine spatial and temporal similarities and variations (Kulshreshtha, 2018). In my first round of the survey of secondary and online sources, I found about 80 Uma Mahesvara sculptures from Bihar. On closer examination of the image type, I realised that there was immense variation in the style of execution of the images—in body posture, placement of hands and legs, facial expression, back slab, subsidiary figures and so on, (Donaldson, 2007). Uma Mahesvara sculptures from Bihar were created in a variety of stones such as granite, sandstone, slate, etcetera and even in bronze and ashta dhaatu (a traditional alloy of eight metals). The most popular stone however was black basalt which is typically associated with images from eastern India between the 8th and the 12th centuries (Kramrisch, 1994:12). The largest concentration of Uma Mahesvara images in Bihar are from the southernmost districts of Patna, Jehanabad, Rohtas, Gaya, Aurangabad, Nalanda and Nawadah and a second pocket of concentration lies along the river Ganga in the districts of Bhagalpur and Munger (see attached map). What struck me is that this is a region seen as the heartland of Buddhism, with Bodh Gaya and Nalanda being premier centres, and Rajgir and Pawapuri are Jain pilgrimage centers. The city of Gaya 4 Occasional Publication 86 meanwhile is associated with the rite of shraddha (the Hindu ritual to honour the ancestors), and is now a preeminent Vaishnava centre. Against this backdrop, the presence of Uma Mahesvara images at all of these sites suggests evidence of a strong Shaiva cult. Figure 2: Map of South Bihar; prepared by Mrs Uma Bhattacharya Over time, I have found more than 150 Uma Mahesvara sculptures from this region alone. The largest number of these images can be dated from the period between the 9th and the 12th centuries, and the oldest image in my data is dated between the 5th and 8th centuries. Later, images found from the 12th to 13th centuries show how the sculptures became more detailed and excessively ornamented over time. 5 Salila Kulshreshtha Sculptures in Museums Figure 3: Bronze Uma Mahesvara, Kurkihar; now at Patna Museum, accession no. 9624; photo courtesy AIIS, Gurgaon Some of the Uma Mahesvara images are presently found in museums and private collections and have been catalogued, and some published. I visited many of these museums, but what was more difficult to track were the Uma Mahesvara sculptures from Bihar which are now present in museums across Europe and the USA. It was both fascinating and astounding to see how these sculptures from the remotest of villages and sites of Bihar have travelled to so many different museums and art collections across the world.