The domed entrance hall of the great museum in Mumbai, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), is an exhilarating anthology of India’s architectural styles — Buddhist, Hindu and Islamic, combined with just a dash of British railway gothic. Built around 1910, it sums up in stone much of the history of South Asia.
Normally it leads the visitor swiftly into the neighbouring gallery of Indian sculpture. But for most of next year, it will have a different role. It now houses fragments of two of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and statues of gods from Egypt, Greece and Rome, selected by CSMVS curators from the collections of the Getty Museum, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the British Museum. They will be on show there until the end of October 2024. Entitled Ancient Sculptures: India Egypt Assyria Greece Rome, it is the first long-term display of great sculpture from the ancient Mediterranean ever to be seen in India — and the first stage of a pioneering exercise in global co-curation.
The statues of Aphrodite, Dionysus, Apollo and their companions are the outriders for a long-term partnership between the CSMVS and the three lending institutions, a joint venture in sharing collections and knowledge, all funded by the Getty Trust. (I have been an adviser to the Getty Trust on this project from the beginning.) In 2025 this partnership of museums, again funded by Getty, will bring to Mumbai, this time for three years, more than 100 objects representing the ancient world from Central America to Japan. For all involved, it is a new way of working together.
The sculptures and vases from Berlin, London and Los Angeles now gathered in Mumbai tell a wide range of stories. But they have been chosen by the Indian curators with one common purpose: to allow visitors, and especially students, not just to admire and enjoy great works of art, but to think afresh about the complex links between India and the rest of the world over more than 3,000 years. They are key players in an attempt to write a new history of antiquity — and the part that India played in it. The conquering armies of Alexander stopped at the Indus. So too do many European museums. In the Louvre, for example, the Mediterranean collections extend to include ancient Persia — the world known to the Bible and the classics. The India that traded extensively with Rome, whose pepper was prized all over the empire, is in a separate building in another part of Paris. Not part of our story.
We need a new, more comprehensive, history. India is now the most populous country on earth, playing an ever larger part on the global stage. One in four of its 1.4bn inhabitants is under 15. How do these young Indians, many of whom will not be able to afford to travel abroad, think about their country’s place in the world across the millennia, and about what it means today to be Indian?
As school children and undergraduates, they study — of course — Indian civilisation from the stone age to the present day. In every part of the country, they are surrounded by monuments and works of art which embody the great achievements of their culture. They also study the other great ancient civilisations. But they have for the most part no opportunity to see in the original any of the artefacts — Egyptian, Chinese, Greek, Roman — which might show how those other cultures gave their ideas physical form and aesthetic expression. India’s museums are rich treasure-houses, but they have relatively few objects from outside South Asia. So, unlike their counterparts in Europe and North America, Indian students have little chance to see how their own civilisation takes its place in the wider narrative of humanity, and it is almost impossible for them to understand how much India has given to the world.
The sculptures in Mumbai are seeking to change that. Normally, loan exhibitions run for a brief three months, too short for schools or universities to embark on any sustained teaching based on encounters with actual objects. The much longer timescale of these loans will allow new kinds of learning and teaching, from primary school to graduate level — in Mumbai, in the state of Maharashtra and across India. The CSMVS is uniquely well placed to do this, for under its director-general, Sabyasachi Mukherjee, it has built an outstanding record of achievement in education, working with schools in even the poorest parts of the city and the state of Maharashtra, and become admired nationwide.
Discussions with a group of universities from across India are under way on an even more ambitious project, to be developed in association with Cambridge university’s Global Humanities Programme. The exceptional length of the loans makes it possible for universities to devise a bespoke curriculum, mixing virtual teaching with museum visits, specifically designed to take advantage of the presence of the objects. Lectures and seminars will be given by both Indian and international scholars: among these, there will be, crucially, specialists from the source countries — offering a rare range of perspectives and new understandings.
The museums of Europe, North America and India have been exchanging temporary exhibitions for many years. But this project breaks new ground. Unlike most exhibitions, which are devised and organised by one institution, this has been conceived and curated by the four partners together. It has been planned exclusively from the point of view of Indian visitors, taking as its starting point the knowledge and experience, the expectations and questions that they will bring to the encounter. Most histories of antiquity have been written by Europeans and North Americans, all in some measure the children of Greece and Rome. The current display, on the other hand, is the ancient world seen and interrogated not from the Mediterranean but from India: the sculptures in the Rotunda confront the quizzical gaze of the Buddha, a Jain spiritual teacher and a three-faced head of Shiva, all looking on from the adjoining gallery.
This exhibition takes its place in a series of ever more ambitious shows that the CSMVS has organised over the past 10 years aimed at widening the ways in which India can understand itself. In an often shrill political debate, it has been a quiet but authoritative voice, insisting on the complexity of the national narrative, and its steady articulation of India’s proper place in the world has been widely applauded. The current exhibition was hailed by the Times of India as a significant step in dismantling the western narrative of world history.
Some aspects of the visiting statues are immediately familiar. Used to the worship of Ganga, goddess of the Ganges, most Indian people grasp at once the role of a god of the annual flooding of the Nile. The toned torso of Apollo and the teasing figure of Aphrodite are the bodies that advertisements urge all young Indians to emulate through the gym and the beauty salon. But much is strange, and curators in Los Angeles, London and Berlin have found themselves puzzling over questions that their own visitors rarely or never ask.
Did the waters of the Nile, for example, like those of the Ganges, provide spiritual renewal for ancient Egyptians, as well as food? Why are Egyptian gods so static, so unenergetic compared with Indian deities? Why do Greek gods need to wear sandals? Why do they so often look away from their devotees, refusing the eye-contact that Indians expect to establish with their gods? How would anybody know that the statue of a naked man or woman, with no extra limbs or royal jewellery, must represent a god? In the frieze from the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, why are naked Greeks fighting — and brutally defeating — the Amazon women? Is the perfect Greek body achieved in order to fight the outsider?
Obvious questions for any Indian, used to living among statues of the gods; energising considerations for the partner curatorial teams. In my role as an adviser on this project, I can vouch that for all involved, this shift of focus, asking new questions of familiar objects, has been stimulating and enriching. In this project, more than any I have known, we have begun to measure and exploit the full potential of global co-curation — the understanding that objects in different places take on new meanings, provoke unexpected conversations and require fresh scholarship and new narratives. Everybody involved now hopes to build further on this beginning. Can this partnership be a model for others between the museums of Europe and North America and those in the rest of the world?
In the centre of the deities of Egypt and the gods of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds stands, appropriately, the monumental sandstone image sculpted around 1,000 years ago of Varaha, the boar incarnation of the god Vishnu rescuing the world from the mire of its own shortcomings. On his snout is carved an image of Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of knowledge and learning: the saving of the Earth is inseparable from the wisdom she embodies. And unlike her ancient sisters, Athena or Minerva, she is not armed for combat.
It is a totally different, entirely Indian, way of imagining the divine and the relationship between gods and humans, a powerful evocation of that hopeful moment when the whole Earth is given the chance of a new beginning. And a good image with which to start the new year.
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