Transcultural Encounters and Material Metamorphosis: Unraveling the Social Lives of Indian Religious Objects in Transit

This paper proposes an extended framework for examining the trans-cultural conflicts of exchange that shape the long, tangled lives of a range of  Indian religious historical objects that traverse spatial and temporal borders through the agency of trade, diplomacy, colonialism, assimilation or resistance, thus accounting for their change and situatedness underneath a seemingly untampered surface.

I base the foundation of this paper on the interpretive responses of communities based on similar cultural assumptions situated in particular historical contexts, using the case-study of how a Western museum-viewer perceives the  medieval south Indian 11^th century CE bronze Vrisabhavahana-Shiva as an aesthetic icon (museum effect), vis-à-vis how it is experienced in the original Shvetaranyeshvara temple setting as origin-icon of divinity (temple effect), with later fabrications for liturgical usage.

Taking as its dissociation the museum effect on Indian historical artefacts, this paper sheds light on the ways of seeing, alteration in rank, and negotiations in social value of the 5'2” tall fly-whisk bearing Didarganj Yakshi sandstone figurine from  300BCE-200CE Patna(India). Serving as a roving art ambassador for India in various International festivals abroad since 1947, the Didarganj figurine becomes the subject of escalated controversy regarding ‘her’ valuation, colonial and postcolonial biases surrounding the issue of male gaze, and propriety of sending national treasures abroad vis-à-vis post-colonial pride, after suffering damage to ‘her’ organically articulated voluptuous feminine form in 1985 while transportation. Thus, tensions inherent in the transition between cult value and exhibition value, plus vexed legal questions regarding repatriation can be unearthed.