Window on temple sculptures
KESAVAN VELUTHAT
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A lavishly illustrated book attempting to innovatively showcase Indian temple art as instrument of worship
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INDIAN ICONOGRAPHY — Indian Temple Sculpture: John Guy; V&A Publications, Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington, London SW7 2RL. £ 35.
As London’s Victoria and Albert Museum is a veritable treasure house of Indian antiquities, this book produced sumptuously by this museum, and written by one of its distinguished former curators, is a rich compendium to understanding the religious sculpture of India in all its complexities. John Guy has shown that museums do not just handle the exhibits there; those who handle them have to study them thoroughly, going into the purpose and functions that the artefacts had served before they ended up as so many exhibits in museums.
This empathetic understanding informs the book, which was enabled by the in-depth study that Guy has made about not only the iconographic and other details of the artefacts but also about the principles involved in them, including the assumptions and patterns of worship of the idols. That marks this book out.
Art history tradition
Orientalist writings represented Indian society as one which was characterised by spirituality and otherworldliness, the extreme religiosity exhibited by the people being one of the reasons for it. Art historians, such as E.B.Havell who studied the religious sculpture of India, were under this spell. This assumption influenced their writings, which even reached obscurantist levels. The scene changed little in the hands of stalwarts like Ananda Coomaraswami and Sivaramamurthy, who used the same assumptions of their forerunners to support nationalism in India. Images of gods were explained in terms of their cosmological meanings and were endowed with an aura which perhaps did not exist when they were originally conceived and worshipped. Later generations of scholars such as Heinrich Zimmer, Paul Mus, Stella Kramrisch and Kapila Vatsyayan contributed to the field further, taking their inspiration from Sanskritic Indology. The literature on iconography, such as the shilpashastras, was studied academically for the first time as texts and not as so many manuals for the sculptors and architects.
Down-to-earth study
Guy combines in this book this rich tradition, without losing sight of the functional and without getting lost in metaphysical and spiritual aspects of image worship. In the context of esoteric things masquerading as explanations of the ‘hidden meaning’ of things religious in India, which more obfuscates than clarifies things, such a down-to-earth study of temple sculpture is most welcome.
He treats the subject under six separate chapters. The first chapter deals with how religion evolved in India in such a way as to require icons. A religion based on ritual does not require idols; one based on devotion does. Thus, the need for images grew from Vedic religion, which is aniconic, to Puranic Hinduism which is centred on the worship of images. Myths around the deities found expression in the plastic arts. A consequence of it all was the creation of elaborate rule-books for the crafting of these icons. Whether the Shilpashastras came first or the sculptures came first does not seem to be a valid question any more — theory, rather than leading practice, followed it. The third chapter on the temple setting is important, as it also goes to the secular functions of the temple. Guy appreciates how the projects of temple building undertaken by kings in medieval India were also political projects. The fillip they gave to urbanisation is also fleetingly appreciated.
Devotion
The next chapter is concerned with devotion in temple worship. When devotion becomes a public ostentation as distinct from the expression of a private sentiment, icons acquire a special significance. Temples and their festivals have images as key figures in them.
The chapter on iconography and emotion deals with the expressiveness of the sculptures. He takes up the elaborate literature on dance, the Natyasastra, to show that the expressions represented by the sculptures are based systematically on the textbooks of dance. The chapter on manifestations and appearances traces the way in which sculpture represented different deities in the pantheons, in the process of which he has also traced the manifestations of different pantheons of the Saiva, Vaishnava and Shakta kinds. It is a masterly study. The interrelations between different forms of worship and beliefs are brought out with great clarity.
The glossary and bibliography at the end are extremely useful. The superb pictures, excellently presented, make the volume stand out as a class in itself. That most of them are in the collection of this museum is laudable. Unfortunately, however, there are many misspellings, particularly of Indian words. So also, there are a few errors in the definition of Sanskrit words, which have crept into the glossary as well. They do not exactly do credit to the otherwise good book.
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