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 This selection of works drawn from the Museum's collection of South Asian painting is focused on the Hindu god Shiva-one of the most compelling and contradictory figures in Indian thought. Shiva is an evolution of more than five thousand years of religious belief, and he remains a potent and living god today. The many layers of his rich, sometimes dark, and complex nature interpenetrate without neat consistency or historical clarity. Themes, nonetheless, repeat and resonate. The paintings on view here, made in various kingdoms on the sub-continent between the 17th and late 19th centuries, are arranged to reflect some of these themes:
As one of the Trinity of Hindu gods, Shiva is the Destroyer, while Brahma is the Creator and Vishnu the Sustainer of existence. To his followers, however, Shiva creates, sustains, and extinguishes the world in the wild and graceful movements of his body both disciplined and liberated by yoga. He is Lord of Yogis. Through his meditation he kindles the heat of his physical body including its sexual energy and, without releasing it, cycles the energy to points within his "subtle body". Every aspect of Shiva has its contradiction, and no single aspect conveys the whole. He is an ascetic who practices austerities and a lover who enflames and is enflamed by women; he is a wandering beggar who smears his body with ashes and a family man and solicitous husband. He is both male and female. Sometimes he inhabits cremation grounds, imbibing hallucinogens and associating with everything foul, but as Lord of the Dance he points with a delicate hand to his raised foot, granting release of the soul. The most distinctive characteristic of Shiva is the energy of contradictions, moving between extremes like a pendulum, generating cycles of existence in all their variety and detail. Each extreme of this movement engenders its opposite-in this way life engenders death, and death the opportunity for rebirth. This defining outline of the god is given simple shape as his male procreative organ, the linga, carved in stone and worshipped with offerings and rituals. The linga is shown erect as though filled with seed, and yet fixed pillar-like, its seed unspent, through the discipline of yoga. Before creation there was only undifferentiated wholeness. With creation came time and its cycles of creation, existence, and destruction. Shiva's linga, disciplined by yoga to preserve its seed, is creation without the intervention of time, creation before time. It is a pillar of timelessness. Shiva: Destroyer of Time Navigation For more information on our South Asian Collection, please visit our online catalogue.
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