Hindu Statues, Bronze Beauties By Paul Richard

At the Sackler, South India's Chola Statues Cast the Gods in an Earthy, Enticing Light

People who respond to nakedness in art, and that's a lot of people, will discover much to ogle -- and to wonder at -- in "The Sensuous and the Sacred: Chola Bronzes from South India" at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, a serene and sexy show whose 1,000-year-old statues remind you that the highest human beauty can pierce you like a ray.

That's why we call movie stars "goddesses."

The goddesses at the Sackler (and the men aren't half bad, either) are full-breasted and slim-waisted. Their garments are transparent, and they don't just stand there sticklike; their pliant bodies sway.

People who confuse piety with prudery may have to stretch their minds to see what every Hindu knows, that a perfect body dancing in abandon can radiate a splendor that goes beyond the human and partakes of the divine.

Almost all these graceful deities, even those with male names, have something feminine about them. The Shiva from the Cleveland Museum of Art appears upon a trident and is half man and half woman. And when that great god dances the world into creation, a mermaid Mother Ganges is seen swimming in his hair. Almost all these gods have goddesses beside them: Krishna has his Rukmini, Rama has his Sita, and great Vishnu is accompanied by ripely female figures -- the goddess of the earth, the goddess of good fortune -- who are aspects of himself.

Click here to view bronze reproductions from the Chola Period

All the statues in the Sackler show are of the gods. No, that's not quite right. Those objects are receptacles, vehicles devised for divinity to enter -- which divinity would do when the right prayers were recited and the proper gifts bestowed.

Towering stone buildings were constructed to contain these sacred metal figures. The great temple at Tanjavur, completed in 1010, is 20 stories tall. The portable bronzes at the Sackler are only two or three feet high, and tiny in comparison, but like that immense palace they are abodes for the gods.

Hinduism's deities enjoy big shifts in scale. The monotheists' God is an abstract one-and-only who tends to be envisioned, when glimpsed at all, as invisible, unknowable and beyond comprehension. India's gods are that, too, but they are not that only. Most of them are shape-shifters, constantly in flux. Shiva, while infinite, is also Somaskanda, the family man, and Tripuravijaya, the warrior, and, of course, they are also their own wives, and Nataraja, the great dancer, and a beggar smeared with ash.

India's greatest gods are tiny, too. Vishnu, though a deity transcendent and supreme, is small enough to rest upon a banyan leaf. Mother Ganges in this show is usually a miniature. Ganesha rides a mouse.

No one form is sufficient for deities so changeable. Nor will a single statue do. India's Chola bronzes almost always come in sets.

There are well-attended temples every six or seven miles throughout the Tamil-speaking regions of southeastern India, and nearly all possess complex suites of bronzes -- 20, 60, maybe more -- much like those on view.

They wouldn't be displayed this way in India. We see more than we're supposed to in the Sackler's exhibition, more nipples and navels and flesh. India's gods, superb though their bodies are, do not go out naked. When taken to the sea to bathe, or carried on their morning rounds, the bronzes at the Sackler would always appear clothed.

Long ago, in Chola times, in the 9th through the 12th centuries, seeing them was wonderful. Richard H. Davis, writing in the catalogue, imagines the experience:

"Viewers would have heard, first of all, the exciting clamor of drums and the resounding tones of conch shells heralding the arrival of the images. As the crowd approached they would have seen the leader of the parade on an ornamented, caparisoned elephant holding a banner aloft. Men chanting hymns and woman dancers from the temple would pass by. Then, in the crush of people pushing to get closer, they would have seen the bronze figures nearly hidden beneath silk garments, gold ornaments, and garlands of flowers, shaded by parasols, parading forth from their temple palaces into the torch-lit streets."

"Barely an inch of bronze," writes Vidya Dehejia, the exhibition's curator, would have been "visible to the eyes of devotees." The Cholas were a dynasty of great wealth. They grew rice, and they fought, and they made sure that their gods were as lavishly provisioned as they were attired. Chola temple bronzes were regularly anointed with milk, curds, holy water, sugar, sandalwood paste and melted butter. The worn smoothness of these bronzes shows how often they were rubbed.

Chola temple bronzes were regally bedecked. One crown for just one statue (a crown described in detail on a Chola temple wall) contained four pounds of gold. It also had set into it 859 diamonds, 309 "large and small rubies" and 669 pearls.

In offering such lavish gifts -- a number are on view -- the Cholas were displaying their own wealth.

The empire they ruled from 850 to 1279 was one of India's richest. The ambitious Rajaraja who assumed the Chola throne in 985 (his name means "King of Kings") conquered the Maldive Islands and all of Sri Lanka, and sent missions to Indonesia. His son Rajenda campaigned as far north as the Ganges, that holiest of rivers, and after bringing back its water in a set of golden pots assumed the title Gangai-kinda, which means "Capturer of the Ganges."

Before the Chola heyday the temples of the region had been largely built of brick. Now most were made of stone. The statues they contained had once been made of wood. Now the best were cast, as these were, in long-lasting bronze.

The Chola empire didn't last. Empires seldom do. Muslims from the north eventually saw to its demise. But the graceful Chola style -- sort of like the Gothic of medieval France -- never went out of vogue. Bronze-casters in South India are still obeying its conventions -- as American universities still boast Gothic dorms.

A seated Brahma at the Sackler has four faces on one head. Dancing Shiva has four separate arms. Many Western viewers may find these statues alien, but the longer you look the more familiar they become.

Among the easiest to "get" is a 13th-century bronze (from the Metropolitan Museum of Art) that shows Yashoda nursing baby Krishna.

Though Krishna is a god, of course, and an incarnation of Vishnu, he was as humbly raised as Jesus, and grew up among cowherds. Yashoda was his foster mother. The sacredness of mother-love, so often the theme of Renaissance Madonnas, is as movingly depicted in this gentle and maternal Indian sculpture.

Another European image somehow echoed at the Sackler is that of the femme fatale, who combines love with death. In Homer she's a siren who, singing irresistibly, lures sailors to destruction. In the prints of Norway's Edvard Munch, she's a long-haired vampire with fangs. At the Sackler she's a saint.

Her name was Karaikkal, and her beauty was renowned, but Karaikkal so loved immortal Shiva that she relinquished her good looks to adore the god beyond physical distractions. In fact, she turned into a ghoul. Here is how one sacred Chola text describes her:

She has shriveled breasts

and bulging veins,

in place of white teeth

empty cavities gape . . .

the demon-woman wails at the desolate cremation ground

where our lord . . .

dances among the flames . . .

In an 11th-century bronze from the Nelson-Atkins Museum, she is scrawny, green and fanged. Her dirty hair is matted. Her ribs show through her flaccid skin. Only her surprising breasts retain the nymphlike beauty that she abandoned for her god.

Throughout southern India bronze statues like those in "The Sensuous and the Sacred" are still anointed daily, and regularly worshiped. But the objects at the Sackler -- there are some 70 on view -- were not sent here by temples. The finest are on loan, instead, from establishment museums in Switzerland and Holland, England, Germany and France -- which means it has been years, and in many cases decades, since the gods chose to inhabit them. The holy vehicles at the Sackler are now just works of art.

Source: The Washington Post