Exhibitions
Voices of Bengal
Of the many exhibitions I curated at the British Museum, one of the most elaborate was in 2006. This was a sequence of exhibitions, public programming, education – and an installation in the heart of the Museum; this was the Voices of Bengal season.
At the centre of this project was a collaboration between the Crafts Council of West Bengal. Two master-craftsmen, under the direction of Ruby Palchoudhuri, came from Krishnanagar to construct a temporary image of the goddess Durga in the Great Court of the Museum. This image was of the type produced every year at the spectacular celebration of the goddess in Kolkata, Durga Puja.
With colleagues Sona Datta and Brian Durrans, I organised this foray into Bengali culture which saw a 20ft high image of the goddess constructed of clay on a bamboo structure, painted, dressed and jewelled. People came from all over the UK to see this manifestation, a small handful coming every day to witness the gradual appearance of the goddess. The construction took a month to complete.
As well as the installation, there were two gallery exhibitions. One was devoted to the paintings of Rabindranath Tagore, the great Bengali polymath. The second displayed paintings and sculptures, along with early popular prints, embroidered quilts, and work by living artists.
Stitching all this together was a public programme of seventy-five different events, from films by Satyajit Ray and others, music concerts, discussions (the one on Bengali food produced a full-house of more than 300 people) lectures, gallery talks, and much else.
More people of South Asian descent visited the Museum at this time than ever before.
Image of the goddess Durga in the Great Court of the British Museum. She is flanked by her sisters Lakshmi and Sarasvati and her children, elephant-headed Ganesha and Karttikeya.
Master-craftsman Nemai Chandra Pal bundles and ties straw to make the armature on which the clay sculpting of the image takes place.
The armature of the ten-armed goddess is complete. The clay – some brought from the banks of the Ganges – is about to be added.
Left: Ruby Palchoudhuri, Chair of the Crafts Council of West Bengal (centre), and the members of the London Durga Puja and Dussehra Committee.
All photographs © British Museum 2006
Drummers, dhakis from Murshidabad whose music-making is an integral part of the Durga Puja in Bengal, performed dramatically in the Great Court in front of the Durga image.
Above: Offerings to the goddess – lamp-light and fruit – on the day of Mahalaya, before the image departed to Camden Town Hall for the religious parts of the Puja. The image eventually moved to Putney Bridge to be immersed in the river Thames.
Krishna in the Garden of Assam
My final exhibition at the Museum, in 2016, brought together my interests in Bengal (2006 exhibitions) and northeast India (2008 exhibition) in an examination of the culture of Assam and its distinctive devotion to Krishna. This exhibition, Krishna in the Garden of Assam was based on the large Assamese textile in the BM, the so-called Vrindavani Vastra.
We examined firstly the worship of Krishna based on the teachings of the saint Shankaradeva (died 1568), and secondly the sophisticated technique of lampas weaving, a technique which allows two warps and two wefts to be woven at the same time, producing a foreground and a background for the textile; intriguingly, this technique has now died out in India.
The ‘Vrindavani Vastra’ textile is over 9m in length but is actually made up of twelve individual panels of silk lampas woven cloth. Each one was probably used originally to wrap a specific Krishna-related text when placed on the shrine altar. Each of these panels follows one of four different narratives, all concerned with Krishna’s life-story, or with Vishnu-related stories (Krishna is thought to be an avatara of Vishnu). The story of these cloths is intriguing as it appears that they were only joined together, making the huge cloth we know today, following the trading of the individual strips of cloth into Tibet. The BM example was found in the monastery at Gobshi (near Gyantse) during the 1903-04 Younghusband Expedition to Lhasa. They thus have a history in Assam, a history in Tibet where they were joined and used as a wall-hanging, and finally a life in London. They were given to the BM in 1905 by Perceval Landon, the correspondent of The Times attached to the Expedition.
Watch Krishna in the Garden of Assam >
