July 25, 1999
She's Ur-Mother, Warrior, Lover: Isn't She Devine?
By HOLLAND COTTER
WASHINGTON -- MAJOR exhibitions of the art of India are rare in this part of the world. They always have been. Why? Nobody knows. This art has everything: epic drama and swoony sob stories, gods, gremlins and glamour queens, the human at its most human, the spiritual at its most ineffable.
Formally, it is pure seduction.
Intellectually and emotionally, it looks you in the eye and says, over and over again in a thousand different ways: wake up, change your life, look again, things are not what they seem. Which are the fundamental messages of great art, sacred or secular, anywhere.
All these elements play a role in "Devi: The Great Goddess," a gathering of 120 sculptures and paintings at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution through Sept. 6. Organized by Vidya Dehejia, associate director and chief curator at the Sackler and the Freer Gallery, it is just about as visually entrancing as a museum show can be, and full of ideas that have every bit as much meaning in the present as they did in the past.
Devi is the generic name for the divine female principle in her guises of mother, lover, warrior, creator and destroyer. She was pre-eminent in India before Aryan invaders arrived with their patriarchal religion around 1500 B.C. After that, she was often assigned the supporting role of girlfriend or spouse to male gods like Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu. But her power, though submerged, never waned.
Emblems of that power are what this exhibition is all about. Ancient or modern, spectacular or discreet, they derive both from religions native to India and from cultures beyond the subcontinent itself.
The opening work is, in fact, an abstract sculpture by the contemporary British artist Anish Kapoor. Titled "At the Hub of Things," it is a large, hollow half sphere of cast fiberglass coated with velvety midnight-blue pigment. In India, the color is associated with the goddess Kali, her skin as dark as a starless night. And standing in front of Mr. Kapoor's light-absorbing sculpture, one has a sense of staring into bottomless depths.
Next come two classic stone temple figures. One, carved of milky alabaster, is a 12th-century Jain image of the goddess Sarasvati, patron of learning and music. Posed like a dancer at rest, imperturbable but vibrant, she holds a lotus stem up in one hand as if she were about to speak.
Beside her is a South Indian Durga, another incarnation of the goddess. A taut column of energy, she stands on the flattened head of the buffalo-demon named Mahisha, a monster so ferocious that the gods fled from him in panic, handing Durga their weapons in the hope she would finish him off.
She did, and her victory -- a triumph over fear and self-doubt and disbelief -- is often portrayed in South Asian art. In a wonderful 19th-century Rajput miniature, Mahisha puts up a decent fight. But even with his gold-tipped corkscrew horns, he's no match for a pint-size, 16-armed goddess. Chic in her gold sari, combat hardware in every hand, she delivers the coup de grace as the gods, safely perched on distant clouds, cheer her on.
Devi isn't always a beauty. She can take on outlandish forms; the blood-drinking Chamunda with her necklace of human heads is one. Such images belong to the world of Tantra and are meant to shock the psychic system into perception of the divine. The more repellent a deity, the greater her potential to effect change may be.
This dynamic is illustrated in one of the show's most sensational entries, a set of miniatures from the book known as the "Tantric Devi." Of an original series of 70 or so paintings, made in Western India around 1660, 32 survive, and 16 have been brought together here. In each the goddess reigns supreme.
In her presence, the gods tiptoe around like nervous courtiers. She uses a nude male corpse, fresh from the cemetery, as her throne. In one amazing picture she stands at the center of an auralike sun, her skin a luminous coal black, the jewels in her crown fashioned from iridescent beetle wings glued to the paper surface.
OTHER goddess images that follow are more benign. Her maternal identity is made much of in a sixth-century Madonna-like Rajasthan stone sculpture, and in the wooden figure of a so-called bhuta from Karnataka. As tall and stern as a school mistress, she is a commanding example of religious art from rural India in which the exhibition is usually rich.
Devi is repeatedly identified with forces of nature. A svelte young maharani in a silvery Rajput miniature (it looks as if it were seen through a summer haze) is actually a personification of the river Ganges, kneeling on a giant fish.
And sometimes she embodies a theological concept. Such is the case with a wooden Nepalese Buddhist icon of divine wisdom, her skin painted a hot vermilion, as if flushed with intellectual passion and spiritual ardor.
Passion can be overwhelming, even devastating, when divine and human intersect, as they do in the female Hindu saints of South India, who once wandered from temple to temple singing erotically charged hymns. They sacrificed everything to devotion, but their reward was bliss. In a bronze image, the body of the saint known as Karaikkal Ammaiyar is bone thin, but the smile on her face is beatific.
Then there are the heroine-lovers of the epics. Radha and Krishna (an incarnation of the god Vishnu) are the paradigm for all besotted couples, meeting by moonlight, mumbling poetry, making love. Their match -- often interpreted as the marriage of the soul to god -- is made in heaven. And there are few more charming images of them than a little painting from the Punjab hills in which the sweethearts, infatuated beyond embarrassment, wear daffy, look-alike costumes of white and pink lotus blossoms.
The story of Sita in the "Ramayana" is different, though, and disturbing. Unjustly rejected by her husband, Rama (Vishnu again), she responds with nonaccusatory grief. Patient, faithful, she has traditionally been held up as an ideal to Hindu women, not only in literature and art, but also in contemporary religious tracts, children's books, popular comics and films.
Last year, Columbia University organized a conference to examine the meaning of Sita in modern life, both as an oppressive stereotype and as a positive role model. And in India itself, artists are similarly re-examining the Great Goddess in her many forms.
A 1993 painting titled "Durga," by the Bengali-born artist Arpita Singh, for example, presents the demon-slayer as a new kind of avenger, wielding a pistol and trampling a man underfoot. (The painting was widely criticized in India, where the male figure was taken to represent Rajiv Gandhi, who had recently been assassinated.)
It says much for the many-faceted character of Devi that, although Ms. Singh's painting isn't included here, it would have fit right into the expansive context Ms. Dehejia has created. The scope of the exhibition is further extended by a superb catalogue (fine contributions by the art historians Debra Diamond and Mary Slusser, among others) and by two other Sackler shows. One, just closed, was a bouquet of miniatures, among them scenes from the Radha-Krishna story, attributed to the legendary 18th-century artist Nainsukh and lent by the Rietberg Museum in Zurich.
The other is the Sackler's own superb long-term installation "Puja: Expressions of Hindu Devotion," an atmospheric, multimedia look at ritual worship in India.
But "Devi" itself has the last word, and sends us back out into the world with a sight of the Great Goddess in one of her most captivating forms.
Alone in the show's last gallery is a splendid bronze South Indian sculpture of the goddess Parvati from the 11th century, a period often called the golden age of Indian metal casting. Parvati is the wife of the god Shiva, and in a temple setting she would be accompanied by his larger figure. Here, however, she is self-sufficient, a lithe, youthful queen with a glow-in-the-dark radiance. Anyone encountering her, or her many counterparts at the Sackler, will surely come away enthralled and wondering why the glorious alternative universe of Indian art is so seldom invited to touch down in our midst.
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