A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [172]
This smiling sensuous image doesn’t just show us a model couple that any husband and wife might emulate: the sculpture of Shiva and Parvati is a meditation on the very nature of God, for they are as the same person manifest in two different forms. Shaunaka Rishi Das explains:
God is male and female. The thinking behind that is that God cannot be something less than we are. God cannot be not-female, because there are females here, so God has to have a female aspect.
Parvati is a very good wife who doesn’t like people making fun of her husband. So worshippers have to be careful always to give respect to Parvati first and then approach Shiva. That’s considered to be the respectable thing to do and the safe thing to do. But both of them are very munificent. You don’t have to do much to please them, and they give to you very liberally.
It is the presence of Parvati, the female aspect of God, which is perhaps most disconcerting to a non-Hindu viewer, especially to one raised in monotheism. This is a very particular view of the divine. A monotheistic god is, by definition, alone – cannot engage with other gods, cannot be part of a dynamic sexual relationship – and in Judaism, Christianity and Islam that monotheistic god is not just single but has, by long tradition, been male. In the Hindu tradition, by contrast, Shiva needs Parvati. Karen Armstrong, historian of religion, explains:
In the monotheisms, particularly in Christianity, we’ve found questions of sex and gender difficult. Some of the faiths that start out with a positive view of women, like Christianity and also Islam, get hijacked a few generations after the foundation and dragged back to the old patriarchy. I think there’s a big difference, however, in the way people view sexuality. When you see sexuality as a divine attribute, as a way in which one can apprehend the divine, that must have an effect – you see it in the Hindu marriage service, where this is a divine act. Questions of gender and sexuality have always been the Achilles heel of Christianity, and that shows that there’s a sort of failure of integration here, a failure to integrate a basic fact of life.
It was Hinduism’s generous capacity to embrace all aspects of life, not least sexuality, that beguiled the man who collected our sculpture – Charles Stuart, an officer in the East India Company, who so vigorously embraced the values and virtues of Hinduism that he was nicknamed ‘Hindoo Stuart’ by his shocked compatriots. Stuart admired almost every aspect of Indian life. He studied Indian languages and religions and he even urged English women to wear ‘sensible and sensual’ Indian saris. The memsahibs declined.
As part of his study of Indian cultures, Stuart put together a huge collection of sculpture – our relief was part of it – designed to include examples of each deity as a visual encyclopedia of religions and customs. His collection was displayed to the public at his home in Calcutta. It was one of the first serious attempts to present Indian culture in a systematic way to a European audience. Far from finding Hinduism disconcerting, Stuart saw in it an admirable framework for living that was at least the moral equal of Christianity, and in 1808 he published his views in a pamphlet, Vindication of the Hindoos:
Wherever I look around me, in the vast ocean of Hindu mythology, I discover Piety … Morality … and as far as I can rely on my judgement, it appears the most complete and ample system of Moral Allegory the world has ever produced.
Stuart spoke out strongly against missionary attempts to convert Hindus to Christianity. He thought it simply impertinent, and his intention always was that his collection should be seen in England to persuade the British to honour this great world religion.