US museum hosts special exhibition portraying over 100 prints of Hindu Gods
New York, March 7: Over 100 images of Hindu Gods, curated from collections dating 1860 to 1930, are being displayed at a special exhibition at the prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) here.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is presenting the exhibition ‘Household Gods: Hindu Devotional Prints, 1860-1930’ on view in four rotations beginning January this year through June 27, 2027, the museum said in a statement.
The exhibition presents over 100 works drawn from The Met collection, focusing on acquisitions from the past decade, presented in dialogue with select works of earlier painting traditions.
‘Household Gods: Hindu Devotional Prints, 1860-1930’ presents the “first encyclopedic exhibition of these chromolithographic prints from the pioneering studio presses of Calcutta (Kolkata), Poona (Pune), and Bombay (Mumbai).
These mass-produced prints became a powerful means of expressing Indian religious identity at a time when the country was experiencing the first stirrings of the Independence movement,” the museum said.
Featuring approximately 120 works, shown in four rotations, from The Met’s collection of chromolithographic prints, along with paintings and portable triptych shrines, Household Gods provides a “unique window on the vibrant tradition of Indian devotional imagery on the cusp of modernity”.
“Celebrating the gods through imagery is central to all religions, and nowhere more so than in Hinduism, where the communion between deity and devotee takes on a heightened immediacy and reality through the concept of darshan, “seeing God”,” the statement said.
“The necessity of displaying an image of the divine in the home, located in the household shrine, was traditionally fulfilled by icons made of clay or metal,” it said.
However, the invention of photography in the mid-19th century and its rapid introduction in India “fatally disrupted” traditional painting and the production of painted religious images that were used by Indian elites, the statement added.
The Met said that the exhibition introduces the “little-known” last chapter of traditional Indian painting and its “role in the popular worship of the Hindu gods”. (AP)
