Only connect: far-reaching show in Mumbai embodies culture, aesthetics, religion and politics

The gods are meeting in Mumbai as part of the 75th anniversary of India’s independence, and as befits such illustrious participants this encounter has a serious agenda. It interweaves culture, politics (both national and international), aesthetics and religion. It has taken four years to put together and is at the heart of a pioneering exchange of knowledge and sensibilities between India and the West.

The exhibition, Ancient Sculptures: India Egypt Assyria Greece Rome, is a joint enterprise of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the British Museum, the Berlin State museums and Mumbai’s principal museum, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (generally known as the CSMVS), and lasts until 1 October. This unusually long duration is to allow its universities scheme, developed bespoke with Cambridge University’s Global Humanities programme, to reach other centres of this vast country and for students to be able to come to Mumbai and see the gods in person.

For, as in the West, university teaching of art and culture tends to be divorced from direct contact with the objects themselves, and the museum’s director, Sabyasachi Mukherjee, says: “Seeing is believing.” There is nowhere else on the subcontinent where you can experience a naked Aphrodite (although there are beauty parlours called after her and gyms called Apollo), an Egyptian god or a divine Assyrian figure. The museum’s interaction with academe may even lead to changes in the teaching at Mumbai university, where Mukherjee has been invited to join the syllabus committee so that the study of the actual works will count as a credit in the degree course.

This direct contact will be consolidated from 2025 when the museum opens its Ancient World Gallery, which will house more than 100 works from the participating Western museums on rotating three-year loans. It will fulfil the dream of James Cuno, the former president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, who believes firmly that this is the way forward for the collection-rich museums of the West, rather than their dismantlement, with everything getting sent back to its country of origin. Certainly, the collaborative approach enables East and West to learn from each other.

Neil MacGregor, the former director of the British Museum, has been a key person behind this exhibition and he says: “Now I pose myself new questions about these sculptures that we have seen hundreds of times before,” for when he asked the CSMVS curators what struck them most about the exhibits, they said: “Where would I put my offering to the god? How do I know that the Aphrodite is a goddess when she is naked and has no jewels? And why is the god not looking at me?” For the exchange of glances, darshan, between the faithful and the god is an essential part of prayer in the Indian religions, so the oblique gaze of the Western gods seems not just cold but the negation of the relationship between the divine and earthly.

Here lies the essential difference between the gods who have arrived from the West and the gods in the museum: Western gods are dead gods; the Indian gods are still living. The West looks at sculptures from its ancient past as art or material culture; in India, Hindu, Buddhist and Jain sculptures, no matter how ancient or valuable, all belong to religions that are still flourishing and their religious nature trumps mere cultural criteria every time. The sense of the divine is instinctive and it is not uncommon for visitors who are unfamiliar with the concept of a museum, for which there is no word in any of the 780 Indian languages, to take their shoes off as a sign of respect when they enter the galleries.

The aim of this exhibition is to compare and contrast the 16 sculptures of gods sent from the West with the Indian gods, but, out of respect for the latter, this is done by means of banners with photographs rather than physically juxtaposing them. There is one particular exception: a magnificent sandstone boar of around 1000AD dominates the centre of the rotunda housing the exhibition. He is the Hindu god Vishnu in his third incarnation as Varaha, protector of the earth, and he points with his snout towards the adjacent gallery where the actual sculptures of Indian gods have been redisplayed and re-explained.

The opening of the exhibition took place in the garden in front of the museum, which is an extravagant early 20th-century building in the Indo-Saracenic style. With kites circling overhead and crows chattering in the dense undergrowth, Mukherjee said that the exhibition had received the approval of central government, an important statement now that nationalist and pro-Hindu politics dominate the discourse. The inclusive choice of music was also significant. Proceedings opened with the chanting of texts from the Vedas, which inform Hinduism, and ended with Sufi songs, from the mystical strand of Islam.

Mukherjee made it clear that he is thinking to the spiritual wellbeing of the future; because 65% of the population is under the age of 35. “How do we start a new communication between the ancient and modern age that we will find relevant?” he asks.

Joan Weinstein, the director of the Getty Foundation, which is financing this collaboration, said that it is an example of how institutions could work together, crossing borders and boundaries, a message restated by Carl Heron, the acting deputy director of the British Museum, who added that he hoped the CSMVS curators would advise them with their future show of ancient Indian sculpture; and by Hermann Parzinger, the president of the Prussian cultural heritage foundation, the umbrella body for the Berlin state museums, who said: “This is a programme that we should expand worldwide”.

Constructive collaboration

Reviews in the Indian media have been positive, with national pride emerging yet also emphasising the collaborative aspects of the project. “For art education and for reinterpreting ancient art history through an Indian lens, this is one of the most important shows ever to have been mounted in an Indian museum... this exhibition takes the collaborative and global credo of the museum forward from its first big-scale show, India and the World: A History in Nine Stories [a highly successful exhibition organised in 2017 by the CSMVS with the British Museum],” stated The Hindu, while the Times of India described the show as shedding “a fresh light on India’s role not just as a participant but a significant contributor in ancient civilisations”.

There are exhibitions that with hindsight are seen to be turning points. Magiciens de la Terre, held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1989, which for the first time showed artists from beyond the West as participants in the western contemporary phenomenon, was one of them. This exhibition, reversing the direction of travel, may turn out to be another in its model of constructive collaboration that aims at a meeting of intelligent minds across the globe.