Saints and sensibility: An exhibition in London traces the evolution of our idols

In the beginning, Ganesha was many, many nature spirits called Vinayakas or Ganeshavaras, from which the modern elephant-headed deity evolved. What boggles the mind is that in all these years, his defining features – the snout, sweetmeats and of course, the round potbelly – have stayed the same. And yet if you see all around, he has changed and how.

Among all the 180 exhibits on display, a 2,000-year-old object is perhaps the most ancient specimen of the yakshas, a prototype of sorts of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist deities.

What are they though? These are nature spirits, often considered embodiments of mountains, rivers, trees, groves, forests and even subterranean treasure.

It was quite common for male yakshas and female yakshis to be created as domestic terracotta figures to establish an intimate relationship with the devotee. From epidemics to infertility and poverty, these capricious spirits were often entreated to either bless one with abundance or avoid a curse of poverty and disease.

These heavily ornamented potbellied figures indicate the moneyed economies of the times. A kind of prosperity that even in more ancient times was as simple as praying to a brimming water and vegetation-filled pot (hence, the potbellied Ganesh).

Trunk call

It all comes back to a good monsoon, a fate that farmers still pray for. Monsoon is time and again affirmed as a life-giving force in the sacred imagery. Sushma Jansari, the exhibition’s curator and a historian, says, “Early India presents a sumptuous sensory experience with not-so-hidden olfactory, tactile and aural realms. Life-affirming figures, wide-hipped goddesses whose fertile touch sends trees into bloom, amorous couples locked in embrace, and children both divine and human on knee and hip.”

Around the first century CE, a big shift happened, she adds. Artists and craftspeople started to use beautiful pre-existing images of yakshas and yakshis, male and female snakes, to inspire the creation of say, the Buddha or Hindu deities like Shiva, Vishnu, Shakti, although we don’t know why.

From the fifth century onwards, the idea of Ganesha, the remover of obstacles and keeper of boundaries, solidified. The animal heads of Yakshas were replaced with the head of an Asian elephant for Shiva’s son. Like many other endemic creatures, such as crocodiles, monkeys, and snakes, the elephant has been a source of fascination since the Indus Valley Civilization, following discoveries such as an elephant figurine with red and white bands found in Harappa.

“When you go back to the artistic origins, you realise that there are a lot of commonalities between Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism,” she says.

Lakshmi, for example, is obviously venerated by Hindus, but few Buddhists and some Jains also worship her. One can also find the stunning images of Ganesh in the caves of Western China, dating back to the sixth or seventh centuries. “He’s found with most of his traditional attributes like his broken tooth, sweetmeats in one hand, in some cases, his father’s tiger skin, but often with the Buddha,” she explains.

It is equally true of Kubera, king of all the yakshas, who is venerated in all three religions.

This unexpected exchange of pantheons and religious traditions has a lot to do with a fluid understanding of geographical boundaries and movements of traders, craftspeople, diplomats, proselytisers, pilgrims and others. This is especially true of monsoon. Maybe it is because of similar flora, fauna, agricultural practices and foodways that intertwined cultural ties between South Asia and Southeast Asia, writes Jansari in a book about the exhibition.

Fascinated by the endurance of these artistic legacies, she adds, “When you think about the ideas that Ganesh embodies, as the god of new beginnings, it’s an attractive idea for anyone.” The same goes for Gaja Lakshmi, an exhibit loaned from the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) Museum, Mumbai. “It’s astounding because it’s the earliest depiction that survives of Gaja Lakshmi in the Buddhist context, from a 2,200-year-old Buddhist cave site. She’s sitting on a lotus flower, holding more lotuses, with two elephants on either side lustrating her with water. I could literally go to any local Indian shop and buy a similar image that is identical to it, in all these years.”

It’s because artists not only captured her key attributes but also the imagery that perfectly embodied these ideas of abundance and plenty. “How on earth would you improve on that? If someone had, then it would be different, but it isn’t,” she says.

Later, as these sacred images traversed the Silk Roads to Central Asia and East Asia and further to Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, the iconography of these gods adapted to different places.

In modern times, though, the very same deities are the same-same but different. With Ganesha, as time went by, not only did he and the Jain tirthankaras become more ornate, but they started getting featured in many narrative scenes.

In a figure of Parshvanath, borrowed from the Victoria and Albert Museum, the tirthankara is seated in meditation. Yet he is flanked by attendants and surrounded by celestial figures in contrast to earlier, solitary depictions.

A more recent picture of a meditating tirthankara in a Pune museum, Jansari points out, depicts him with a more muscular build.“That’s very interesting. It is like the AI images of Hindu deities, who are often depicted as buffed up.”

To update divinity, artists and craftsmen have even handed mobile phones and guitars to small Ganesha figures, and that is not where the buck stops. “One of my favourite such images can be found in a Saint Young Men book, a manga graphic novel, where there is the Buddha and Jesus, wearing jeans and t-shirt and kind of living their life together.”

But they remain immediately recognisable as the imagery retains key features. “You can always tell it’s the Buddha from the get go simply because of his cranial protuberance — for the meaning these deities serve in our lives, it doesn’t change at all,” says Jansari.