29

Exhibition Reviews
PUJA, EXPRESSIONS OF HINDU DEVOTION. The Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, May 12, 1996 ongoing

SUSAN S. BEAN

Peabody Essex Museum Puja is a startling exhibition. Not so much because of what it is, as because of where it is. Puja displays images of Hindu deities that are the focus of worship together with objects used to perform ritual expressions of devotion. Two goals are clearly evident in the exhibition: one is to introduce Hinduism to the non-Hindu public; the other is to relate the works shown in Western galleries of Indian art, like the Sackler, to the purposes for which they were created. Both of these aims are admirably met. Sarah Ridley, Assistant Head of Education at the Sackler Gallery, and Stephen Huyler, anthropologist and photographer, conceived Puja to present Hinduism as it is practiced, through the religious images and ritual utensils central to worship. The exhibition is drawn largely from the collection of Paul F. Walter, with supplements from Georgana Foster, David Nalin, and others. Ridley and Huyler also relied on the Hindu community in the Washington area to install shrines, adorn images, and participate in accompanying videos as well as ongoing programs in connection with the exhibition. When the exhibition was being developed, news of it provoked some discussion among South Asianists. Some thought it was high time an art museum acknowledged that the sculptures in their galleries were made for religious observances. Others anticipated the installation as a betrayal of the art museum mission to display exemplary works, their original purposes and contexts notwithstanding. In the art museum setting, Hindu religious images are shown as unadorned forms; in real life such images are treated as living beingsbathed, fed, dressed, bejeweled, and garlanded, so much so that their

forms are hardly visible. As an anthropological reviewer of this exhibition, I was predictably biased toward a presentation which strives to convey cultural significance, especially when the objects displayed are little understood by most of the people who view them. Puja, when I saw it, was the only exhibition at the Sackler Gallery which attempted to show religious images as they are intended to be seen. The exhibition depends for its impact on the contrast between its presentation of religious images and the traditional museum installation of images elsewhere in the museum. Puja is emphatically not an art exhibition; it does not direct the viewer to focus primarily on the visual qualities of the objects displayed; it invites visitors to consider how these objects are used in the practice of Hinduism. Despite its considerable merits, the exhibition would have made a more modest impression were it installed in an anthropology museum where the norm is for objects to be contextually situated. The exhibition is organized around three principal deities worshipped by HindusShiva, Vishnu, and Devi (including their various manifestations and families)and three principal settings for worship temple, home, and outdoor shrine. Roomsized spaces have been created for Shiva as worshipped in a temple, Vishnu in a domestic shrine, and Devi in an outdoor shrine, each accompanied by related images and objects. The sizes and shapes of the rooms, the color scheme, and installation make the exhibition contents readily accessible for viewing in digestible segments. The presentation style of the exhibition, which was designed by John Zelen, is consistent with what I have come to expect from the Sacklernotably elegant, yet distinctly subordinate to and supportive of the objects on display. Two wall texts at the entrance to the exhibition aim to engage and orient visitors (fig. 1). One lures with compelling factsfor example, that Hinduism is the third largest religion in the world and, by implication, important for non-Hindus to learn about. The second label introduces visitors to puja, acts of

30

MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY

VOLUME 21 NUMBER 3

1. Entrance to the Puja exhibition.

devotion, in which reverence is expressed to god or to aspects of the divine through invocations, prayers, songs, and rituals using images and other objects which can also be seen as works of art. The gods, visitors are told, are personifications of cosmic force and the art objects on display are links between worshippers and the divine. The first gallery is organized around a Shiva linga (abstract phallic image) and Shiva's vehicle, the bull Nandi. The linga is shown as it would appear during worship with offerings of fruits and flowers, oil lamp, containers and ladle for holy water, burners for incense and camphor, and a bell. At one side are the elaborately dressed and ornamented images of the medieval saint Sundara and his wife, Paravai, who are also shown in an adjacent photograph in their unadorned state as they would

'normally'be seen in an art museum (fig. 2). In the installation the images look as they would in a templenearly concealed by cloth and garlands. The Shiva gallery sets a format of expectation that is fufilled almost consistently throughout the exhibition. The images used in doingpw/as are contextualized through their decoration, accompanying ritual utensils, photography, video footage of worship, and label texts elucidating iconography and conveying use in worship. Adjacent to the Shiva galleries is a separate area accommodating about twenty people where a video about puja plays continuously. The video explicates and illustrates pujas in temples, homes, and outdoor shrines. Produced by Cherchez La Femme Productions in collaboration with the Sackler, the video combines footage of pujas in

31

2. Sundara and Paravai dressed iorpuja with adjacent photo as they normally would appear in an art exhibit.

Washington-area homes and commentaries by local Hindus with segments shot in temples and outdoor shrines in India, very effectively placing puja, the act of worship, at the center of the exhibition. In the next gallery, Vishnu is presented as he is worshipped at home. A fully equipped shrine is displayed accompanied by a video of home worship. Also included in the area are images and objects arranged to present the iconography of Vishnu, his weapons for destroying evil, his incarnations (avatars) and consorts. Adjacent to this area is a space provided with chairs and reading matter for all ages. With its invitation to sit and take a break, this resource room is a welcome respite in an exhibition that invites intense viewing. During my visit I found it used also as a place to sit and talktwo visitors were there, fittingly, discussing religion. The final area is dominated by photos, video, and models of rural outdoor shrines to Devi, the Goddess. In the Devi area proper there is a video of a puja in Puri district in which the goddess Chandi is invited to enter a sacred tree that is viewed as the

spirit of the community. A facsimile of an outdoor shrine has been created with a photomural backdrop before which shrine objects and votive terracotta elephants have been placed. The goddess area is separated from the Vishnu area by a small corridor-gallery with two large cases. As one walks through the gallery, on one side are padukas (sandals) for saints and ascetics from Maharashtra, on the other side are bhuta masks from Karnataka worn in performances during which the wearer becomes the deity. Many viewers will be confused by this section because it is not subsumed by either tripartite organizing framework: Vishnu-Shiva-Devi and temple-household-outdoor shrine. (One cannot help thinking that the sandals and masks are displayed because the curators found the collections irresistible.) Visitors' confusion is likely to linger and interfere with their understanding of the last gallery devoted to worship of the Goddess. This slippage between the organizing principles of the exhibition and the actual presentation

32

MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY

VOLUME 21 NUMBER 3

draws attention to the limitations of the framework: the complexities of Hindu practice cannot be encompassed by the dual trinitiesof deities and places of worship. In presenting Hinduism this way, the exhibit's creators have simplified the historical, regional, and sectarian manifestations of the divine. One might argue that because their presentation at times overflows its constructed framework, something truer to the nature of Hindu practice results. However, the chosen framework has considerable merit. It does encompass much of Hindu practice and it does so in a way that Hindu consultants and visitors to the exhibition (judging from their written comments) found suitable and adequate. The inclusiveness and didactic clarity of the framework for an intended audience of novices to Hinduism is a real pedagogical accomplishment and it would have been better to maintain the two organizing trinities, despite their limitations, throughout the exhibition. Despite this lapse, and despite the limitations of exhibitions as didactic media allowing only brief explanations of concepts and practices, and the constraints on museums as settings for conveying religious concepts and feelings, Puja is very successful in making Hinduism accessible to a Judeo-Christian public. The exhibition succeeds because the dual trinities of deities and places of worship work so well in organizing Hindu practice expressed through objects and spatial organization. Hinduism lends itself to museum presentation, be-

cause its religious practices, like exhibitions, privilege the visual (images and containers for offerings) and spatial (places for worship). The installation performs a function for which museum exhibitions are a prime medium: bringing into a public venue cultural practices which, while not considered private, are normally restricted to group members. The Hindu Washingtonians who advised the curators, helped install the shrines, and participated in the video took the opportunity to move their religious practices more squarely onto the American scene. Indeed it was at first surprising to learn that many visitors to the exhibition are Hindus; their comments reveal not only comfort with the installation, but appreciation for the opportunity to make their religious practices better known to non-Hindu Americans. The majority of visitors, however, are those who come to the Freer and Sackler to see Asian art. Puja will enrich their appreciation by focusing on the religious lives of objects displayed elsewhere in the museum as art. For those unacquainted with Hindu practice, it is safe to say that they will never look at Hindu religious art in quite the same way again. Ironically for this anthropologist-reviewer, seeing these religious images installed contextually in an art museum underscored the importance of also showing these works decontextualizedas artfor the sheer magnificence of their forms as technical and expressive achievements of the sculptors who created them.