Arts of the Indian Subcontinent and the Himalayas

Summer 2020

For the Introduction to Museums Course at Arizona State University

This online exhibition at the Freer/Sackler Gallery (also known the National Museum of Asian Art) through Google Art & Culture, provides a look of one of their more permanent exhibitions of the Indian Subcontinent and the Himalayas. This exhibition is part of the museums Asian Art at Home series that was heavily boosted after the shutdowns of COVID-19, though this particular exhibition has been available since July 2015.

Done before COVID-19, Arts of the Indian Subcontinent and the Himalayas is one of the exhibits that provides an almost interactive quality to this online experience with not-too-long and not-too-short descriptive labels. The visitor to this online exhibition can also see things that would not normally be within a physical exhibition alongside objects from the museum’s collection. These include maps (both static and somewhat interactive), interactive Google 360-degree views of sites/places (i.e., the Sanchi Stupa, Deer Park in Sarnath), close-ups of some of the museum objects, images of places and events (i.e., Temple at Chidambaram, a Hindu procession in Tiruvannamalai), and a video of Hindu Sculptures being made.

Arts of the Indian Subcontinent and the Himalayas takes a look into three different religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam, through sculptures, jewelry, and books of art. The first couple of ‘pages’ provides an introduction into the Indian Subcontinent and a simple description of the forms of religions and art within this region. The next section of the exhibition takes a look at Buddhism through sculptures, reliefs, and locations of Buddhism and Buddha’s life, including a somewhat interactive map highlighting the locations of “The Four Great Life Events of the Buddha”.

The next section of the exhibition goes into Hinduism and Chola Bronzes with sculptures seen both in-the-round and close-up. There are also images of the “Temple at Chidambaram”, “Temple Chariot for Processional Bronze Images, Kapalishvara Temple, Mylapur, Chennai”, and the “Chidambaram Milk Ritual Bath”, which would not have been seen in the onsite exhibition. The Hindu section of this exhibit also includes a six-and-a-half minutes video done by the National Museum of Asian Art, that documents the process of creating Chola bronzes. This section of the exhibition is the only section to include jewelry of gold, jewels, and seeds.

The final section of this online exhibition shows “Books of Art of the Mughal Emperors”. These beautifully rendered scans/photographs of pages from books of art make up the majority of this entire section of the exhibit. There is also a close-up view of an important figure, Shaykh Husain, a religious scholar, seen in the piece “Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Shaykh to Kings” signed by Bichitr, and a Google 360-degree view of “Ajmer Sharif, the Sufi shrine overseen by Shaykh Husain”.

This exhibit, though online instead of just being onsite, goes further than the boundaries of the four walls that make up a traditional exhibition with interactive elements and images not normally seen in an onsite exhibition. The exhibition, Arts of the Indian Subcontinent and the Himalayas, uses new technologies combined with objects from the museum’s collection to tell the history and story of this region and it’s religions through sculptures, jewelry, and books or art.