Ancient India, Living traditions
From India... from Scotland... to the British Museum; October, 2025
‘Ancient India, Living Traditions’ was a major exhibition at the British Museum this year, running from May to October. It was based around images created from 200 BCE to 600 CE in India, focussing on Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism; systems of belief and practice which originated in the Indian subcontinent but which now span the entire world.
There are more than 2 million people of Indian heritage in the UK, the majority of whom are likely to be in some way involved in cultural practices relating to the kinds of things which could be seen in the exhibition. It must have been a huge undertaking, which I know included consultation with members of the different communities represented there (which is why, for example, there were no postcards of images for sale in the Museum shop).
I seem to have been circling around my visit to this exhibition like a plane unsure about whether or not it has permission to land. I knew before I went that I would probably have seen many of the works on show already in reproduction; I wasn’t expecting to be surprised. I was curious to see how the curators were going to present the three religions represented in the exhibition, given how dense, varied and complicated I knew these religions to be.
Somewhere at the back of my mind I was vaguely aware that I wasn’t looking forward to seeing all these bits of stone torn from their original contexts; the temple walls, the shrines, the stupa surrounds. I couldn’t imagine how it all would be, so disconnected from all that I can still feel and see so clearly in my mind. The thick scented air of a hot day, burning my feet on temple flagstones; entering into the cool darkened space of a pillared hall, gradually approaching a stone carved being with wide eyes staring into mine; glistening with oil, smeared with red paste, dressed in yellow silk shot through with golden threads. How was I going to relate to the disembedded ‘pieces of art’ that I was about to see?
The entrance to the exhibition was veiled; coloured gauze from floor to ceiling, filtering the first thing that they wanted you to see.
Three statues, one from each of the religions in the exhibition.
I thought that perhaps I would try to give a sense of the range of different works in the exhibition; to show you as much as possible of what was there. But now I’m looking at all the photographs and thinking, well, no. You can’t possibly.
Let’s just look at these three images a little bit more.
I stood and looked at these three pieces for a long time, people milling around me, standing before the images, talking in quiet voices about what they were seeing.
The veils hanging from the ceiling snaked around the space, guiding how you entered, partly screening the different sections.
As I came round the first bend, everything was pink. The colour conjured the brightness of flowers presented as offerings, silk and gold garments wrapped around living deities, coloured powders heaped in piles or smeared onto devotees’ foreheads.
Video images of burning incense and flickering candles were projected behind and above all the images on display, there was a soundtrack in the room of faint temple bells and birdsong.
The sculpture below, raised on a lotus plinth, formed one of the centre pieces, with smaller cases and stone carvings circling around it.
This is Varaha, an incarnation of Vishnu, from the Gupta period (approximately 320 CE to 520 CE), widely regarded as a high point in Indian sculpture. As well as being raised on a lotus plinth, he also had golden threads coming down from the sky to his head.
If you looked at this from a Christian point of view, you might assume that these golden threads represented God connecting from a heaven above to his or her ‘representative’ here on earth. I saw the strands as representing the image and temple consecration ceremonies which ritually transform a stone image into a living embodiment of God, who is then felt to be physically present in the temple. I’m not sure there was any explanation anywhere about the difference.
Gupta carving really is beautiful.
Seeing this sculpture here though, like this, made me feel sad. One of the things I most like about this version of Varaha is that he’s often lifting the goddess Bhumi, Earth, out of the primeval ocean, sometimes hooked onto his tusk.
The exhibition sculpture is Varaha lifting Bhumi from the ocean, but most of her is missing. You probably wouldn’t even notice her legs if you didn’t know she was there.
It was strange to see this image so devoid of the kind of context I imagined it would probably have originally been in. Though the Harle image of Varaha above (the black and white photo) does show a statue standing on its own, this too is likely to have been removed from its original location. Generally speaking, central figures of gods in temple sculptures and reliefs are usually embedded in a teeming fecundity of animals, natural forms, smaller figures, dancers, musicians, ornate pillars and frames.
Placing this figure in isolation against a pink wall stripped it of everything that I’ve experienced of the way these images work in their original contexts.
What the stripping does, of course, is make the image into ‘a piece of art’. And, as a human-worked piece of stone, it was beautiful. It was breathtaking to see an image like this in real life; to experience the effect of the carved stone, to see the details, the fine working of his jewellery, the angle of his hand.
It was the same with the carvings from the Amaravati stupa. To take in the texture of the original stone, inches away from my face; the way the sharp museum lighting cast deep shadows around the forms, the weathering of once-crisp forms into now soft shapes and outlines. All kinds of details that I had never noticed before.
I was delighted to find some originals of a little terracotta Yakshi1 image which I’d seen over and over again in books; including one that I had previously studied with my own wandering pen…
…complete with the mould that made her:
The description beside the image reminded me that these Yakshis were sometimes portrayed with weapons in their hair, which had caught my imagination during a sketchbook project in 2024:
But the highlight of the exhibition for me was the Jain manuscripts. It felt like there was no context to be lost here because, as illustrations within manuscripts, we were seeing them exactly as they were originally designed to be; complete little worlds unto themselves.
The gold was more gold than I could have imagined. The blue more blue, the red more red. Even under glass, they glowed, with their elegant calligraphic lines.
I’m still trying to work out what I feel about this exhibition as a whole.
I was thrilled to see so many much-studied images in their original forms. I loved the atmosphere, the feel of the whole thing. And yet somehow my overwhelming sense was that I was looking a collection of (stolen) things, arranged in a room; far, far away from either the sacred soil of India, or the interior of a London temple. How could it be otherwise?
To be fair to the curator, there were many different attempts to bring in information about the living contexts that the images were connected to.
There were videos of people talking about their practices, large hanging friezes presenting information about various aspects of history and activity. It was colourful, it was multi-sensory, and all of the pieces being displayed were beautifully presented and described.
She definitely succeeded in creating an atmosphere. The soft light diffusing through the veils; the lighting, the colour, the soundscapes, the way the objects were arranged. People talked in hushed tones, as the sound of bells and birds washed over them.
I can’t really see how it could have been done better. Now I just feel incredibly privileged to have been able to see the living, breathing reality of so many similar things in the land that gave birth to all of this wonder.
I frankly don’t know how there could have been a more Tamsin Haggis flavored color and lighting effect in curated existence! It is as if the current museum curator laid out the colors and flow knowing you were coming.
Your point about the extraction of the pieces making them into art objects is on point. While we can see how their value in caves and in facades is of utmost significance in their interplay and flow of movement (your own specialty through line and relationship in your art) they become immobilized. Magnified.
It’s what we can imagine an archaeologist passing off to a curator when it was culled from its nest of rocks and ruins over a century ago. “Lookie here ol’chap! An ‘objet d’art’ certainly worth a good penny on display.” Cringeworthy. To your point—the colonialism is never far from the extracted cultural object. In this way, these have another layer added to their original meaning in a native setting. They speak of greed and plunder.
Thank you for sharing this incredible experience! As a curator I am still puzzling the tie-dye light effects, colored cells and must-be hand fashioned filters as scrims to shine lights through. I probably would have spent more time photographing the light configurations than the pieces on display! Such is the distraction of a curator…