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A strange thought occurred to me as I looked at the stone and bronze sculptures (or “idols,” as the English used to call them) in the temple. In the West, these are now found mostly in museums and galleries and are referred to as Indian art. Yet I grew up praying to these as a child and never thought of them as art. They are so well integrated into the fabric of life in India—the daily worship, music, and dance—that it’s hard to know where art ends and where ordinary life begins. Such sculptures are not separate strands of existence the way they are here in the West.

Until that particular visit to Chennai, I had a rather colonial view of Indian sculptures thanks to my Western education. I thought of them largely as religious iconography or mythology rather than fine art. Yet on this visit, these images had a profound impact on me as beautiful works of art, not as religious artifacts.

When the English arrived in India during Victorian times, they regarded the study of Indian art mainly as ethnography and anthropology. (This would be equivalent to putting Picasso in the anthropology section of the national museum in Delhi.) They were appalled by the nudity and often described the sculptures as primitive or not realistic. For example, the bronze sculpture of Parvati (Figure 7.2a), which dates back to the zenith of southern Indian art during the Chola period (A.D. twelfth century), is regarded in India as the very epitome of feminine sensuality, grace, poise, dignity, and charm—indeed, of all that is feminine. Yet when the Englishmen looked at this and other similar sculptures (Figure 7.2b), they complained that it wasn’t art because the sculptures didn’t resemble real women. The breasts and hips were too big, the waist too narrow. Similarly, they pointed out that the miniature paintings of the Mogul or Rajasthani school often lacked the perspective found in natural scenes.

In making these criticisms they were, of course, unconsciously comparing ancient Indian art with the ideals of Western art, especially classical Greek and Renaissance art in which realism is emphasized. But if art is about realism, why even create the images? Why not just walk around looking at things around you? Most people recognize that the purpose of art is not to create a realistic replica of something but the exact opposite: It is to deliberately distort, exaggerate—even transcend—realism in order to achieve certain pleasing (and sometimes disturbing) effects in the viewer. And the more effectively you do this, the bigger the aesthetic jolt.

FIGURE 7.2 (a) A bronze sculpture of the goddess Parvati created during the Chola period (tenth to thirteenth century) in southern India.

(b) Replica of a sandstone sculpture of a stone nymph standing below an arched bough, from Khajuraho, India, in the twelfth century, demonstrating “peak shift” of feminine form. The ripe mangos on the branch are a visual echo of her ripe, young breasts and (like the breasts) a metaphor of the fertility and fecundity of nature.

Picasso’s Cubist pictures were anything but realistic. His women—with two eyes on one side of the face, hunchbacks, misplaced limbs, and so on—were considerably more distorted than any Chola bronze or Mogul miniature. Yet the Western response to Picasso was that he was a genius who liberated us from the tyranny of realism by showing us that art doesn’t have to even try to be realistic. I do not mean to detract from Picasso’s brilliance, but he was doing what Indian artists had done a millennium earlier. Even his trick of depicting multiple views of an object in a single plane was used by Mogul artists. (I might add that I am not a great fan of Picasso’s art.)