A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [138]
It’s very rare for a statue as big as this to survive and escape being melted down; indeed we know of no other example of this size from medieval Sri Lanka. At that date most large bronze statues would be cast by pouring the metal around a clay core to make a hollow figure. Tara, by contrast, is bronze through and through. Whoever made her must have had a great deal of bronze, rare skill and a lot of experience of this very challenging kind of work. Tara is not just a beautiful object; she is a remarkable technical achievement, and must have been very expensive.
We don’t know who paid for Tara to be made – it could have been the ruler of any one of several kingdoms which squabbled and fought over territory in Sri Lanka around AD 800. Whoever it was clearly wanted her help on the path to salvation. In Sri Lanka, as anywhere else, gifts to religious institutions were also an important part of the political strategies of rulers, a means of asserting publicly their privileged links to the divine.
One of the fascinating things about this sculpture is that at the time it was made Tara was a relatively recent convert to Buddhism. She had originally been a Hindu mother goddess and was only later adopted by Buddhists – a typical but particularly beautiful example of the constant dialogue and exchange between Buddhism and Hinduism that went on for centuries and which can be seen today in statues and buildings all over south-east Asia. Tara shows that Buddhism and Hinduism are not tightly defined codes of belief, but ways of being and acting that can, in different contexts, absorb each other’s insights. Tara is, in modern parlance, a strikingly inclusive image: made for a Buddhist, Sinhala-speaking court in Sri Lanka but stylistically part of the wider world that embraced the Tamil-speaking, Hindu courts of southern India. Indeed Sri Lanka was shared, then as now, between Sinhala and Tamil, Hindu and Buddhist, and there were close links and many exchanges through diplomacy, marriage and, frequently, war.
Nira Wickramasinghe, Professor of History and International Relations at Leiden University, in the Netherlands, describes for us what this long-established pattern means for the region today.
In many ways you can speak of a south Indian/Sri Lankan region with many points in common, culturally and politically as well. There has also been a two-way flow of influences in art, religion and technology. Of course, it has not always been a peaceful relationship; there have also been invasions and wars between southern states of India and chiefdoms in Sri Lanka.
It’s really trade that brought people from India to Sri Lanka. You have certain communities which are fairly recent migrants from south India, in the ninth to the thirteenth centuries. They merged their south Indian identity with a more Sri Lankan identity, and what is curious now is that many of these are the most ardent Sinhala nationalists.
The complex working-out of the relationships that we see embodied in Tara, between Sinhalese and Tamil, between Sri Lanka and southern India, between Buddhists and Hindus, still goes on 1,200 years later – relationships that in Sri Lanka have tragically included the recent long and bloody civil war.
But Tara may actually have survived thanks to war. Marks on the surface of the sculpture suggest that she was buried at some point, perhaps to avoid her being looted by invaders and then melted down. Unfortunately, nothing is known about how or when the statue was found, nor how it came, around 1820, to be in the possession of the then Governor of Ceylon (as the island was known at the time), the soldier Sir Robert Brownrigg. Ceylon had been taken over by the British from its Dutch rulers during the Napoleonic Wars, and in 1815 Robert Brownrigg had conquered the last remaining independent Sri Lankan kingdom on the island; he brought Tara to Britain in 1822.
Many centuries before that the island had abandoned the particular strand of Buddhism in which