A year after the Italian Embassy Cultural Centre and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art exhibited a Caravaggio, Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy, in India, comes another exhibition showcasing Indo-Italian cultural diplomacy—One Mother, Many Mother Tongues, at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Bengaluru. Co-curated by academic Naman Ahuja and artist-designer Andrea Anastasio, director of the Italian Embassy Cultural Centre, New Delhi, the show draws connections between the worship of mother goddesses across the two cultures since millennia. With a Sandro Botticelli painting as the headline act, the exhibition has an expansive range in terms of time periods, materiality and stylistic approaches—all representing different forms of maternal veneration. There are Latin goddesses and Roman votive figures, Harappan, Maurya and Shunga period clay figures, and ancient stone and metal Matrika and yogini sculptures.
The highlights of the exhibition, however, might lie beyond the early renaissance master’s Madonna and Child (1490), which carries neither the ceremonial gravitas of his Madonna of the Magnificat (1483) nor the foreboding symbolism of the Madonna of the Pomegranate (1487), both of which are on display at the Uffizi gallery in Florence. The painting does reveal how the ancient Etruscan figures of Mater Matuta—a powerful goddess and protector of children in the pre-Christian era—were later relegated to a supporting role to the Virgin Mary by the church. The curators draw parallels with the matrikas in India, who also morphed into other goddesses over time. If one were to look beyond the Botticelli work, the show offers a nuanced way of looking at the way the idea of maternal reverence has been represented in art across histories and cultures.
It raises questions about why parenthood is seen only as a feminine role, and why the majority of the artworks across the world show little boys with the mother-goddess, and more. “The exhibition thus invites comparison in the growth and diversity of the Mother and Child cults of Europe with developments in India of the saptamatrikas, 64-yoginis and dasa-mahavidyas,” states the exhibition note. Through these images it communicates that the birth “is not merely of a physical child, but of ideas too. And like a child, symbolic of our future, mothers protect them, with compassion and, when required, with ferocious strength.”
At a time when attempts have been made—and failed—to cover up the iconic Dancing Girl of Mohenjodaro, the fact that the exhibition displays a bare-breasted, goat-headed mother goddess from Mathura (1st century BCE to 1st century CE) and the feline-headed Matrika in bronze from ancient Kaushambi (1st to 2nd century CE) is a hat-tip to India’s intrinsic pluralist and gynocentric past.
Figures of maternal veneration
A set that works cogently is of the Mater Matutas in limestone presented alongside the Hariti sculptures. Hariti, a prominent figure in Buddhist stories, was a demoness in Rajagriha who was notorious for kidnapping and eating children till Buddha reformed her by taking away one of her own. She became a protector deity thereafter like the Mater Matutas, who played the role of benevolent fertility goddesses and also symbolised birth as a signifier of dawn. Critically, the sculptures reveal their relative importance at a time when infertility was taboo, childbirth was risky and infant mortality was high.
Diametrically opposite to the Botticelli sits a black basalt Chamunda sculpture dating back to the 11th-12th century CE. Intensely terrifying at closer look, she is a potent counter proposition to the Botticelli Madonna. A Matrika goddess, who emerged in Hinduism and was gradually assimilated into Buddhist iconography, Chamunda was the most fearsome of the Saptamatrikas (seven mother goddesses). In this later work from the Sena period, she is seated imperially and wears the mundamala (garland of human heads). Above her is the tree of life with decapitated heads hanging from its branches. Below her, a pack of vultures, hyenas and jackals scavenge the rotting carcasses. The British colonialists only saw her imagery literally and were scandalised, missing the metaphor that underlines Indian religious iconography. Chamunda signifies purging of the ego and shunning of ignorance; and the graveyard setting in Tantric philosophy does not suggest a violent end but a space of radical spiritual transformation.
Another gem at the exhibition is a Harappan Mother and Child terracotta figurine from 2500 BCE, loaned from the National Museum, New Delhi, which is presented alongside six-seated votive female figures from the Roman period. Intimate and fragile, this tiny sculpture where the mother affectionately cradles her baby, encapsulates the idea of earlystage motherhood. The exhibition though has its blind spots.
For one, only a few of the saptamatrikas find representation—the other major one being an Indrani marble sculpture from Gujarat. Given that the saptamatrikas were created and displayed together in ancient temples, adhering to that norm would have been more substantive. What makes it inexplicable is that large patches of the gallery remain entirely empty. The outer walls are awash with long explanatory text. You can’t help but mull over the issue of repatriation of stolen artefacts from the West while at the show.
What makes this especially contextual is that one of the works in the exhibition—a grey-green Skanda mata schist from the Thaneshwar Mahadev temple near Udaipur—comes from a family of sculptures, many of which were illegally trafficked overseas and are dispersed across the British Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. The opportunity to see a Botticelli painting in-person might pull in audiences, but the deeper appeal of the exhibition lies in its presentation of Indian and Etruscan sculptures—at times assimilating syncretic motifs to stay relevant or diversifying to appeal across wider geographies and cultures.
At NGMA Bengaluru till 20 September.
Anindo Sen is an independent arts writer.