Between 200BC and AD600, Indian religious traditions underwent a profound visual metamorphosis. Deities once represented abstractly — through thrones, footprints or trees — began to take anthropomorphic forms. Ancient India: Living Traditions, which opens at the British Museum this week, traces the evolution of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain art. It explores the deepening popular need to see, interact with and be reassured by sacred figures in tangible ways; and it reveals how religious imagery took hold not only in South Asia but beyond — along the Silk Roads into central Asia and China, and into south-east Asia too.
Ancient India shows that the visual culture of these three religions originates in the long-standing veneration of nature spirits: yakshas (male) and yakshis (female), nagas (serpent divinities), and sacred trees. These beings were believed to inhabit forests, groves, rivers and mountains.
The appeal of these spirits was widespread: small terracotta figures of yakshas and yakshis have been found in domestic contexts across the subcontinent, suggesting their everyday relevance. This sacred ecology endures today in the persistent association of specific trees — such as neem, banyan and fig — with deities such as Shiva and Vishnu or village goddesses like Mariamman and Shitala. Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism each provide a spiritual understanding of the natural world in which plants and trees are not just botanical lifeforms but living embodiments of divine presence.
These nature spirits held ambiguous powers. On the one hand, they were believed to control subterranean treasure and as such were often depicted with rich regalia, rotund stomachs and attributes such as bags of money. But yakshas were also volatile and potentially terrifying. A particularly evocative terracotta figure (c300-100BC) from Mathura in present-day Uttar Pradesh shows a grimacing yaksha clutching a goat, perhaps a reference to a sacrificial offering. Others devour animals or hold symbolic weapons, like the rock sculpture of Pancika (AD100-300) from Gandhara in what is now northern Pakistan, who appears as a divine general with children at his feet, his lance a symbol of his power and authority.
Snakes too played an important role. Revered as guardians of water sources, fertility and subterranean wealth, snakes were not only feared but venerated across Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions. Their presence in early Indian art reflects a worldview in which non-human beings were intrinsic to the spiritual and material order. A copper sculpture dating to the 11th century of Parsvanatha, one of the 24 enlightened teachers of Jainism, attended by the king and queen of snakes, provides one glorious example; a 6th-century stone depiction of a nagini (a female naga), with a human torso — snakes rising from her shoulders — provides another.
Snake worship evolved from household votives and tree-shrine offerings to monumental stone sculpture, with nagas later incorporated into the visual vocabulary of all three religions. In Buddhism, nagas are portrayed sheltering the Buddha during meditation, while in Hinduism they are linked to deities such as Shiva, who was often depicted with a cobra around his neck, while Jain cosmology also includes serpent figures as divine protectors.
Ancient India makes much of the parallels and similarities between the three belief systems; the theological, ritualistic and sociopolitical differences between Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism are passed over so silently that a visitor might read this exhibition as one that is emphasising the cultural unity of the Indian subcontinent rather than a discourse on how these faiths emerged, evolved, interacted and competed with each other. Here, the three religions are treated as coherent and timeless “living traditions” that closely resemble those of many millennia ago.
By emphasising the localised origins of these religions, the exhibition places them within a context of indigenous genesis 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.
That is mitigated by the exhibition’s timeframe, which notionally ends before the rise of Islam in the 7th century. Nevertheless, since many of the exhibits here are from later periods (and the fact that the exhibition gives a voice to members of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain communities in the UK today) there is an undertone that these three religions are from India, while others are not.
That dovetails with the show’s suggestion that the export of art, ideas and religions to other regions was part of a process of enlightenment that was benign, eirenic and inclusive. Whether the British Museum would host an exhibition that saw the expansion of Christian beliefs, teaching and ideals as part of the emerging Anglosphere in the modern period in Africa or elsewhere is doubtful. The curators rightly note that as ideas spread, they were often adapted for local audiences. It can be tempting, though, to marvel at how Buddhism and Hinduism in particular expanded in the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka, in central, south-east Asia and elsewhere, and to assume that sacred texts, directions about personal behaviour, and reception of images of wide-hipped “life-affirming” goddesses and more were thankfully embraced by local populations, eager to be civilised.
Religions bring with them institutional order. Fecund, buxom sculptures, such as the spectacular 8th-century gilded copper alloy statue of Tara, a goddess of compassion in the Buddhist tradition that was likely found on the east coast of Sri Lanka, were powerful projections of what was expected from women. Religious uniformity demanded discipline but also required funding: priests, monasteries and temples in all religions are voracious in their search for patronage, which is usually swapped for cosmological support for political power. Such uniformity has a price. It is not just about faith.
These pasts resonate today, as the authors of the handsome catalogue that accompanies the exhibition show. An Indian caretaker of a church in northern Malaysia was moved to tears, they write, by a 5th or 6th-century inscription in late southern Brahmī script found on the grounds. “This is our land”, he exclaimed. He felt entitled, noted the authors, to make such a claim “by virtue of the ancient Hindu-Buddhist presence in the region.” That strikes a dissonant chord in an age — and in a museum — where wrestling with the sins of the past has affirmed that history does not provide cultural, religious and political rights in the present day.
Ancient India is visually thrilling, with exquisite objects from the permanent collection as well as from major museums in Europe and India on display. But it steers away from thorny issues of caste, violence, the living traditions of other communities in India and South Asia (such as tribal peoples and other minorities), and the selective remembering of the past. This is a celebration of three religions and their rich traditions, a showcase of treasures that shows the expansion of the geographical footprint of belief systems in antiquity, rather than an investigation of the causes of dissemination, adoption and adaptation.
To October 19, britishmuseum.org
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