19-05-2025
Ancient India: Living Traditions review — gods and rituals come to life
Considering the sheer size of the country, you might expect an exhibition entitled Ancient India: Living Traditions to be a sprawling mess. However, it's surprisingly compact, perhaps because if they were to go big, we'd have to go home well before we got to the end.
The British Museum's atmospheric show — separated into four sections by curtains of sheer, shimmering silk and accompanied by a soundtrack of temple bells and birdsong — looks at the devotional art of the region's main religious traditions active between about 200BC to AD600, when sacred images shifted from the purely symbolic to take broadly human forms.
Starting with the worship of nature spirits, it leads into Jainism, then Buddhism, both of which appeared in northern India about 2,500
