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
Click
here to view bronze reproductions from the Chola Period
