Letter to the Editor | 'Your review of a Mumbai show is written through a Kiplinguesque East meets West lens'

An installation view of Chhatrapati Ancient Sculptures at the Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya ImageL courtesy of CSMVS Mumbai
Ancient Sculptures, a co-production between Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), and the British, Berlin State, and J. Paul Getty Museums, features Indian sculptures in dialogue with loan works from ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, and Assyria. An analysis in The Art Newspaper of the exhibition from January 2024 states: "For the concept of a ‘museum, there is no word in any of the 780 Indian languages." Never mind that the sangrahalaya in CSMVS, which is hosting the exhibition, literally means "museum" in Hindi, and that it just is one of many words across India’s multitudinous languages (including Indian English) for institutions managing material heritage. This insouciant sleight-of-hand is in keeping with the overall othering tone of the analysis, which we feel operates under a Kiplinguesque East meets West lens that demands interrogation.
Your analysis stresses that Western gods, unlike their Indian counterparts, are "dead" artefacts from a past material culture. This explicit casting of a secular, enlightened West against a spiritual East brims with 19th-century colonialist thinking, and conveniently overlooks the masses of artwork depicting a "living" Christian god in Western museums. And while there might not be anywhere else in India you can currently see a "naked Aphrodite", it is assuredly not the only example of a nude deity in South Asia.
To suggest that the nudity of an ancient goddess has the potential to shock and befuddle in the place that has given humanity some of its most intensely erotic religious art is misguided. Similarly, the contrasting of Western gods and their closed eyes to sculptural examples of open-eyed Indian deities ignores millennia of Buddhist and Jain sculptural heritage featuring idols with their eyes firmly shut. The act of spiritual seeing in Indic religions, darshan, is a far more subtle and rich act than the simple locking of eyes between deity and devotee; indeed, famous examples of true darshan, such as the singer-saint Surdas, routinely feature a devotee who is blind.
Finally, your published analysis presents Ancient Sculptures as an attempt at introducing now secularised Western cultural heritage to benighted Indian masses. Visitors not used to museums, we are told, know no better than to take off their shoes before entering. What is left unsaid is that this is an everyday Indian practice on entering any institution of learning. Similarly, the piece’s emphasis on Indians’ "instinctive" sense of the divine is ill-informed at best, orientalist at worst. Is it simply inconceivable to the writer that Indians are capable of parsing the overlapping aesthetic sensibilities of art and religion differently from art historians trained on a diet of Western art alone?
We could continue presenting examples of orientalist and supremacist misrepresentations in your analysis. This would, however, like the original piece as a whole, be a distraction from the critical issue at hand: how will Western museums respond once calls for the restitution of Indian cultural heritage grow in scale? And will they interrogate how their self-avowed civilising mission is a continuation of that which enabled centuries of imperialist cultural destruction worldwide?
• Ishita Marwah is the Prejudice in Power Fellow at the UCL Research Institute for Collections; Adrian Plau is a 2022/2023 Headley Fellow with the Art Fund.
Response from the writer:
I am very sorry that my article on Ancient Sculptures: India Egypt Assyria Greece Rome at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) until 1 October 2024 caused you offence because I was so impressed, not only by the show itself, but also by the curators at the museum, with whom we discussed it and who did not seem to share your reservations at all but greeted it enthusiastically.
I also thought that the exhibition was exceptional because of the academic programme devised around it at Indian universities so that it would not just be a here-today-gone-tomorrow experience, as is so often the case. This deeper objective of the exhibition was singled out for praise by The Hindu newspaper in its review, which I quote in my article but you do not mention: “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 CVMVS with the British Museum]”.
I am aware that you are attributing ignorant, unconscious bias to me, which, if unconscious, is difficult for me to refute, but of one thing I can be consciously certain. You have misunderstood me when I compared the living Indian gods with the dead Western gods. There was nothing of “19th-century colonialist thinking”… “casting a secular, enlightened West against a spiritual East” when I made this the main theme of my article. Rather, it is with deep respect, almost envy, that I discovered from the curators how the gods and goddesses in the CSMVS museum have not lost their spiritual dimension and are treated with a reverence that is independent of, and superior to, whatever their art-historical merit might be.
This is absolutely not the case in the museums and art world of the West, where our supposedly living god, our depictions of Christ, the Madonna and saints, are automatically and instantly stripped of their higher, transcendent meaning. When I entered the Victoria & Albert Museum as a curator in 1973, I was very struck by this and I knew that the works of art were diminished by it.
Interestingly, there is a movement, led by the faculty of theology at King’s College, London University, that is gaining momentum, which is to bring the study of god and religious meaning closer to art again. At both the London National Gallery and the Berlin State museums the labels are being rewritten in the light of this approach.
In short, I certainly do not believe that progress as a whole is improved by jettisoning spirituality, which is happening faster and faster in the West; we have never been so prosperous and yet so miserable, self-destructive, and at sea as now. I sincerely hope that as India realises its economic potential it learns from our mistakes, keeps its gods and teaches us a better way to live in the world.

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