A date with Apollo

How an exhibition of sculptures at Mumbai’s CSMVS allows one to look at antique art not from the usual vantage point of Europe but of India.

At the entrance to the exhibition stands the lotus medallion from the railing crossbar of the Great Stupa of Amaravati, Guntur district, Andhra Pradesh. This 2nd century CE limestone sculpture is from the CSMVS’ collection. | Photo Credit: CSMVS, Mumbai

Restitution, Repatriation, Return—these words dominate contemporary news in the world of international art. Whether it is the return of Cambodian treasures looted from the Khmer temples now residing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the restitution of Benin bronzes taken from the kingdom of Benin in the modern nation of Nigeria now being returned from Germany, France and England, or the ongoing issue of the Parthenon marbles demanded by Greece from the British Museum—all of them are about wrongs committed by the “owner” countries to the source countries, some previous colonies and others caught in the ravages of war. All of them have become world news followed by millions around the world.

In this contested terrain of transnational art movements, it is refreshing to see a new development of multinational collaboration in the form of a long-term project that began with a small but remarkable exhibition at Mumbai’s famous museum, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), titled “Ancient Sculptures: India, Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Rome” (December 2, 2023, to October 1, 2024). The exhibition will culminate in the creation of a gallery of ancient worlds. A collaborative project of major institutions, involving the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the British Museum in London, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and the CSMVS museum—along with other major museums of India—the exhibition stands out for several reasons.

As the organisers point out, the exhibition was initiated by the curatorial team in India while the staff at the Euro-American museums responded to queries from their Indian colleagues in organising the exhibition. Neil McGregor, one of the organising curators and a former Director of the British Museum, writes in his introduction to the show: “Most histories of antiquity have been written by Europeans and North Americans, all in some measure the children of Greece and Rome. The current exhibition, on the other hand, is the ancient world seen and interrogated not from the Mediterranean, but from India: what were the connections? what were the similarities, what were the differences between the civilizations? which aspects of these other cultures were of particular interest and relevance to Indians then—and indeed now? and can the exploration of Mediterranean objects open new paths of enquiry for Indian cultural historians into their own past?” This is indeed exciting and laudable, considering how rare it is.

Educational goal

In the history of international exhibitions, especially involving European and American institutions, one can count on one hand exhibitions that have come from the West to a country in the Global South such as India. And when they do come, often they are not of the highest quality. The assumption has been that a country such as India would have neither the infrastructure to display the world-class and often fragile objects nor the ability to distinguish top-quality objects from the average ones. At the same time, however, most Western institutions demanded the best of Indian art from Indian collections whenever they organised exhibitions from India. The late Laxmi Sihare, Director of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi at the time of the Festival of India in the US (1985-86), gave voice to this power asymmetry when curators from major American museums descended on India to select objects for numerous exhibitions that were being planned.

Figurines at the entrance to the Indian Sculpture Gallery in the rotunda of the CSMVS. | Photo Credit: CSMVS, Mumbai

“Why is it that you demand the best from us, but when I ask to have an exhibition of the best of Western art from your collections, you always demur?” He animatedly demanded an answer but got none.

So, it is satisfying to note when MacGregor, who is also Senior Advisor to the Getty for the New Partnerships for the Ancient Past programme, makes a point of highlighting the leading role played by Indian curators that led to curators in Western museums having to address questions that may be relevant to Indian visitors, but which they had not even thought of before.

The educational goal of the project is also laudable in that it puts emphasis on young people who may have studied ancient civilisations in their classrooms but are unlikely to ever have a chance to see the actual works from such diverse civilisations as ancient Greece or ancient Rome, Egypt, and Assyria. This show gives them the opportunity to see great works from diverse regions in relation to India’s great achievements in the sculptural tradition. So far, so good.

Understanding interconnections

The real question comes when we look at the works and imagine how they would create a collective story of the ancient worlds. There are monumental sculptures from Egypt, Assyria, Greece, and Rome that date from 1500 BCE to 150 CE. For much of this time, we have little evidence of monumental sculptures from India. It will be important for the organisers to define what they mean by ancient worlds in terms of time and geography. One can always compare a 9th century Indian sculpture of Varaha with a 1st century Roman sculpture of Apollo in terms of figure types and notions of the divine. But it is equally important to highlight the chronological dissonance and very different trajectories of human sculpture in the two places.

Yajna Varaha, the boar incarnation of Vishnu, from Vidisha District Archaeological Museum, Madhya Pradesh. In the background, on the right is Hapy, god of the annual flooding of the Nile, and on the left is Sekhmet, the ancient Egyptian goddess of destruction, both from the British Museum.  | Photo Credit: CSMVS, Mumbai

Similarly, it is exciting to see great, ancient Egyptian sculptures from a time period when there was a total absence of monumental sculptures in the subcontinent. How will this be explained to visitors? It surely would not suggest any connections between these two great civilisations. However, the connection between Egypt and India is evident in the 6th and 7th centuries when Indian cottons show up in Fustat, the first Islamic capital of Egypt and the historical centre of modern Cairo. In other words, recognising that juxtaposition of sculptures from disparate geographies and chronologies may not tell the full story and provides only a cursory understanding of the interconnections between and among the different ancient worlds would have to be a necessary aspect of interpretation of the artworks in the exhibition.

Highlights

• The exhibition, “Ancient Sculptures: India, Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Rome” (December 2, 2023, to October 1, 2024), at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), Mumbai, marks a refreshing development in multinational collaboration in the terrain of art
• It entails a shift of perspective by allowing curators and visitors to look at antique art not from the usual vantage point of the West but of the Global South
• The exhibition helps Indian viewers reflect on the multiple lives that all artworks are capable of leading

Interpretive strategies

Since one of the primary aims of the exhibition is to educate young people as well as adult visitors who may not have encountered these sculptures from other ancient regions, it will be important to think about the interpretive strategies in the exhibition. Put in another way, what stories can the objects tell, collectively and individually, becomes important, especially since disparate objects from different time zones and geographies are assembled in one place.

There are different models for such exhibitions. One of the most illuminating exhibitions with a similar ambition of covering vast territory and historical time was the one that concluded recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) in New York titled “Africa & Byzantium”.

Myriad celestial figures are worked into the body of Yajna Varaha. In the background stands Dionysus, Greek god of intoxication and rebirth, found in Cyrene, Libya, and borrowed from the British Museum. | Photo Credit: CSMVS, Mumbai

It opened up a new vista in the study of Byzantine art by looking at the profound artistic contributions of North Africa, Nubia, Ethiopia, and other North African kingdoms to the art of Byzantium, with a lasting impact on the Mediterranean world. The presence and development of Byzantine art in ancient Africa and its continuing presence in modern-day Africa were fully developed over a millennium, and made clear to the visitor. It was exciting to learn about little known aspects of famous Byzantine artworks while getting a fresh understanding about the role of Africa, often assumed to be an ahistorical and “dark continent” in the early years of the Christian era.

Another memorable show at the Met was “The Year One: Art of the Ancient World, East and West”. In celebration of the new millennium, in 2000, the Met brought together 150 works from its permanent collections that were produced some 2,000 years ago, in the period just before or after Year One. Consisting of masterpieces ranging from Roman portraits and Egyptian sculptures to Chinese terracotta figures, Indian ivories, and Colima masks from Latin America, the exhibition revealed both the rich diversity of cultures and intriguing interconnections between and among them. The exhibition was produced more than two decades ago (from October 2000 to January 2001) and it made a strong impression on visitors, especially those of us who care about presenting new ways of thinking about the world through the physicality of art objects in an exhibition.

Winged figure: Panel from the Northwest Palace of Ashurnasirpal II. This gypsum alabaster Neo Assyrian panel (883–859 BCE) is from Kalhu (modern Nimrud) in Iraq. From the CSMVS’s collection. | Photo Credit: CSMVS, Mumbai

Both the exhibitions discussed here, one with works borrowed from all over the world and the other entirely from the permanent collections of a single museum, told new stories and opened our eyes to finding new relationships and connections among artworks in a way that only art exhibitions can accomplish.

Conceptual connections

The “Ancient Sculptures” show has the potential of being such an exhibition. A great deal of effort has been expended to bring the objects of many ancient civilisations together. The challenge is the scale of the exhibition. Given the expansive ambition of the organisers, it is rather small for the task. Located in the entrance rotunda of the vast museum, the exhibition consists of just 19 sculptures (of these, 13 are from museums outside India). The monumental sculpture of Varaha, an avatar of Vishnu, depicting the story of the rescue of the earth from cosmic floods, graces the centre. The sculptures from India and from the outside world are placed around the rotunda.

Aphrodite from the Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. | Photo Credit: CSMVS, Mumbai

It is clear that the only way to make sense of these sculptures from different regions and different time periods is by tracing some conceptual connection between and among specific sculptures. The focus on water, from the cosmic floods related to the Varaha sculpture and the god of flooding of the river Nile to the sculpture of Ganga, connects art pieces spanning in date from 900 BCE to 900 CE. It is conceptual resonance, more than connections in the ancient world, that brings some coherence to the exhibition. The chronological development or the visual references is not possible. It requires that a visitor spend time reading large texts to understand the underlying thesis of the exhibition.

The exhibition in the rotunda is followed by the newly renovated Indian sculpture galleries, supported by the scholar Devangana Desai. Thus, fortified by the views of sculpture traditions from different parts of the world, the visitor can hope for new ways of viewing Indian traditions. While the two projects seem to be unconnected either conceptually or chronologically, the curators should be commended for the effort to open up new interpretations that can help a general viewer understand the diverse styles and histories of regional sculptural traditions of ancient India.

Experiencing the universality of art

When I visited the exhibition, a large group of young academic-scholars from universities all over India were in residence, studying the works and discussing their educational values and pedagogical dimensions. The museum was buzzing with young people and adult visitors alike. It was clear that the educational potential of the project was fully realised.

Even as we celebrate the current efforts at restitution of works that privilege their origin story (the most important meaning of the work is who made it, where it was made, and how it was originally used), we must not forget that art—an object, a piece of music, or a novel—has the capacity to both be a product of a place and time and transcend them. It is this unique feature of art with multiple lives and infinite possibilities for interpretation that allows us to experience its universality.

An intricately carved child’s sarcophagus from the British Museum. | Photo Credit: CSMVS, Mumbai

So, while we may critique the presence of Egyptian, Roman, or Assyrian objects in the exhibition simply because they reside in big museums outside their countries of origin, we must also appreciate the power of these artworks to stand beside each other, to create new understanding in new contexts, and delight us in lands and locations far away from their original locations. At its best, the “Ancient Sculptures” exhibition will help Indian viewers reflect on the multiple lives that all artworks are capable of leading, inspiring and delighting people from places and living in times that may have been unimaginable at the time of their creation.

Dr Vishakha N. Desai has been Senior Advisor for Global Affairs to the president of Columbia University and President Emerita, Asia Society.