One Mother, Many Mother Tongues: The Politics of Multiculturalism and Ancient Buddhist Art

Description

Naman P. Ahuja, a professor of art history at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India, will give a talk titled "One Mother, Many Mother Tongues: The Politics of Multiculturalism and Ancient Buddhist Art" for the Initiative in Global South Humanities. Ahuja is also general editor of Marg, India's oldest serving publishing house dedicated to art and culture. He specializes in the historic foundations of the aesthetic milieu of South Asia as it came to be formed between 300 BC and AD 600. His work—both scholarly as well as for the wider public—has been variously translated into Hindi, Marathi, French, Spanish, and Dutch and has deepened our understanding of South Asia's art from the perspectives of iconography and trans culturalism, archaeology, and religion, the historiography of visual culture and aesthetics.

Abstract:

The iconography of the statue of a Buddhist mother goddess called Hariti in the British Museum's collection forms the central subject of research in this paper. Made in the region of Peshawar in the second century, the sculpture quotes from the imagery of other ancient societies: Ptolemaic Egypt, Hellenistic, and Roman Lebanon and the Near East, Indian Hindu, and Buddhist iconography and figures that seem to probably reflect a Zoroastrian origin.

In an age of diasporas, we often think about how a single image can be made to communicate to diverse people. The iconography of this sculpture similarly invites us to read into the social context of ancient Gandhara: Were there anxieties around multiculturalism in ancient Gandhara?

Gandhara is usually thought of as a mishmash of artistic styles, however by carefully peeling away the different sources for creating these images, it will be seen that they can be polyvalent, allowing for and accommodating of difference.