Wonders of civilisation: the art of India on display in Adelaide

THE many strands that make up the cultural history of India are the subject of a beautiful exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

INDIA and its abundant spiritual life have fascinated the West from the time of the earliest contacts; the Greeks even imagined that Dionysus, born the son of Zeus and the mortal Semele - and thus himself originally mortal - became a god during a visit to India. When Alexander conquered the western part of the subcontinent, he met and spoke with the gymnosophists - literally, naked wise men - whom we would know as sanyasis or yogis.

But Greek awareness of India goes back at least to Herodotus in the fifth century BC, when it would have been transmitted via the Persian Empire, and the exchange of ideas between the Hellenic and Indian worlds is a complex subject that has been much debated for more than a century. There are common elements that arise from a shared ethnic and linguistic heritage, as well as direct and indirect influences. Some scholars have sought to establish Indian origins for themes in Greek philosophy as early as the pre-Socratics, while in the other direction it was the anthropomorphic representation of Siddartha in the Greco-Indian kingdom of Gandhara that gave rise to the human images of Buddha as far east as China and Japan.

In modern times, serious interest in the West in Indian civilisation was a relatively late development and Arthur Schopenhauer, an admirer of Buddhism, was the first Western philosopher to take Indian philosophy seriously. But in the late 18th century William Jones had recognised that Sanskrit was related to Greek, Latin and other European languages, as well as Persian, and suggested they might all be descended from a now extinct ancestor. Subsequent linguistic research in the 19th century confirmed his hypothesis and reconstructed the family tree of the Indo-European language group, revealing unsuspected kinships between peoples as well as tongues.

In still more recent generations, the West has looked to India for spiritual alternatives to its own tradition, with mixed results. There have been a few gurus of dubious quality - money and power corrupt everywhere - but there have also been more successful imports, such as transcendental meditation and yoga, which in its various forms has become an international phenomenon transcending boundaries of culture and language.

Anything assimilated into a Western consumer society is likely to suffer some debasement in the process. But the ethos of yoga is highly adaptive and surprisingly robust, precisely because it is based on relatively difficult and demanding physical routines. Those who are not willing to make the effort drop out; for those who accept the discipline, it is a practice that aligns body and mind, grounding one in the world and the present in the most concrete, physical way, while opening awareness beyond the bounds of the self, and therefore beyond the narrow orbit of anxiety and neurosis.

Yoga is the subject of an important exhibition devoted to the history of the practice and its representation in art: Yoga: The Art of Transformation at the Freer and Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, which has opened recently and runs until January 26. Indeed the museum claims this is the first scholarly survey of yogic iconography; it even includes a compilation of postures or asanas made for a Mogul emperor in 1602 - testimony to the complex relationship between these Muslim conquerors and the mostly Hindu peoples they ruled.

The many strands that make up the cultural history of India are also the subject of a beautiful and sympathetically installed exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia. Drawing on the gallery's holdings but enriched by many fine works from private collections in Adelaide, particularly that of gallery chairman Michael Abbott QC, the exhibition is structured around the great religions of modern India: Hinduism - with Shaivite and Vaishnavite movements - Jainism and Islam.

The one system of belief conspicuous by its absence is Buddhism, which arose on the subcontinent 2 1/2 millennia ago, spreading throughout east Asia in subsequent centuries, before rather mysteriously almost disappearing in its original homeland: today Buddhists make up about 0.8 per cent of the population, compared even with Christians at 2.3 per cent, although still more than the tiny minority of Jains, at 0.4 per cent.

Why Buddhist belief declined so drastically is a difficult question, but it does certainly testify to the dynamic and constantly changing spiritual environment of India, as well as to the enormous power of Hinduism in all its multifarious forms - returning to triumph over the teaching originally designed as a solution to the old religion's nightmare of endless rebirth into a world of suffering.

It is with Hinduism that the exhibition begins, and with separate sections devoted to two of the gods of the Hindu trinity. The remaining one, Brahma, is relatively inconspicuous because as the creator he is called on to exercise his functions only when the cosmos comes to an end and has to be fashioned anew. Otherwise the dominant figures are those of Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer, the first responsible for the endurance of the world and the second for the processes of change that constitute the order of becoming.

Shiva is thus represented most famously in the dance that symbolises the endless cycle of life, holding in one hand the drum of creation, or more exactly coming into being, and in the other the fire of destruction. As a god of nature, of life and death, and of ecstatic states, he was the divinity that the ancients identified with Dionysus, and also the patron of the practice of yoga.

But while these great figures remain identifiably constant through the centuries, they are bound to be given dramatically different expressions at different times, and across the geographical extent of a vast civilisation; thus a Nepalese statue of Bhairava, a fearsome form of Shiva with multiple arms and adorned with a garland of decapitated heads, is juxtaposed with a serene figure of the god's consort Parvati from Chola, far away in south India and 500 years earlier.

Vishnu is more elusive, for it is by sleeping that he sustains the cosmos; so although he is sometimes shown awake with his consort Lakshmi, or standing and holding his symbolic attributes - as in a very beautiful ninth-century figure with downcast eyes - he cannot intervene in this world in his own person. Instead he manifests himself through his divine emanations or avatars, 10 in number and of which the most famous are Rama - protagonist of the Ramayana - and Krishna, who, with his blue skin, flute and characteristic pose, is one of the most familiar images of Hindu iconography.

Again, there is a glimpse of the complex religious fusion of the subcontinent in a remarkable bronze boar's head, patently more primitive in religious conception and representing what was originally an animistic boar-deity that later became assimilated with the boar-avatar of Vishnu.

If Hindu iconography is relatively familiar to anyone interested in Asian civilisations, the imagery of Jain belief is much stranger to most of us. Even the origins of the religion are obscure, although like those of Hinduism they seem to be extremely ancient, with roots perhaps in the Indus Valley civilisation, the first in the subcontinent. The Jains believe not only that their religion has been in existence for many thousands of years but that it is the oldest in the world. However that may be, it could well be the source of various elements in modern Hinduism, including the doctrine of non-violence and possibly the practices of meditation and yoga.

The system is attributed to a lineage of holy teachers, of whom the last, Mahavira, was roughly a contemporary of Buddha. These holy men, or Jina, are represented completely naked, as in one striking figure, carved almost a millennium ago, which represents a Jina standing in meditation with wide open eyes.

A beautiful black stone figure of the 19th Jina, Malli, similarly represents a figure meditating with conspicuously open eyes, quite unlike the half-closed ones more common in Buddhist images. Otherwise, though, the seated posture of padmasana (lotus pose) and the dhyana mudra placement of the hands - dhyana is the Sanskrit term, which becomes chan in Chinese and Zen in Japanese - could lead one to assume the figure was Buddhist.

The hair too appears to be imitating the distinctive stylised curls that derive from the Hellenistic origins of Buddhist iconography in Gandhara, so there was clearly considerable syncretistic exchange between the traditions.

What seems more distinctively Jain, in contrast, is the wealth of fascinating images and diagrams of the cosmos, including not only our own world but also the locations and subdivisions of heaven and hell.

Sometimes these images take the form of a human figure, perhaps for mnemonic reasons; while an offshoot of the same love of diagrams is the Game of Knowledge, adapted by the British in the 19th century as snakes and ladders.

The last of the religions of India was of course Islam, imposed by the 13th-century conquests that led to the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526), followed by the Mogul empire, founded in 1526; its power in turn declined in the 18th century, while British influence grew stronger, before the official establishment of the British Raj in 1857.

The Islamic conquerors of India were not Arabs but Turkic peoples who had been imbued with Persian civilisation. On the whole, until the reign of the bigoted and repressive Aurangzeb (1618-1707), who expanded the Mogul empire to its largest extent but also laid the foundations for its subsequent decline, the Islamic rulers did not attempt to oppress the native religions of India.

The Persians were the most open-minded and humanistic of the Muslims; they had a long history of civilisation when the Arabs were still a tribal people and they had absorbed Greek science and philosophy, thanks to the conquests of Alexander a millennium before the rise of Islam in the seventh century; it is thus not surprisingly Persian scholars who dominated the flowering of Islamic science in the Middle Ages.

The Arabic alphabet was adopted to write Persian, but the language itself was retained in preference to the Arabic that followed conquests elsewhere, and Persian was long employed in the Islamic courts of India too. The liberal and open-minded spirit of Persian culture has recently been the subject of an important study, The World of Persian Literary Humanism (Harvard, 2012) by Hamid Dabashi.

It was this highly refined civilisation, capable of reconciling both humanism and mystical theology, that fostered an exquisite tradition of the figurative painting theoretically prohibited by Islamic law, as well as some of the world's great poetry. Today, the works displayed here, such as the extraordinary manuscript of Rumi with its elaborate calligraphy, seem like the dream of a lost world; we can only hope that one day the tide of folly and fury that has overwhelmed the religion may finally recede.

Realms of Wonder: Jain, Hindu and Islamic Art of India,  Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, to January 27.