PHILADELPHIA: The granite pillared Hindu temple Mandapa, dating back to 1550 is now part of Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania.
The Museum’s collections include many Hindu objects including Vishnu, Shiva as Nataraja, Rama, Durga, Dancing Ganesha, Karttikeya, Kali, Face of Bhairava, Indra, Kamadhenu, Nandi, Surya, etc.
The granite pillars, brackets, and slabs that form this temple hall (mandapa) come from the Madanagopalaswamy Temple, a sixteenth-century building complex in the south Indian city of Madurai. (The complex is dedicated to Krishna, an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu, and is still used for worship today.)
The architectural elements installed here were purchased in 1912 by Adeline Pepper Gibson of Philadelphia while on a visit to Madurai. They are believed to have come primarily from a freestanding hall that once stood in front of the main shrine and was probably dismantled in the mid-nineteenth century.
The eight stone slabs between the pillars’ lion brackets depict scenes from the Ramayana, the epic tale of the hero Rama, another avatar of Vishnu. The slabs were originally part of a larger relief series that ran around the inside of the hall and narrated the entire Ramayana. The life-sized figures projecting from the central-aisle pillars are deities and characters from both the Ramayana and another major Hindu text, the Mahabharata.
These include Garuda (the bird-man vehicle of Vishnu) and Hanuman (the monkey-general of the Ramayana). A variety of small relief images of divine and human figures also ornament the pillars, including Krishna as a baby, a couple making love, royal donors, and even the temple architect with his measuring stick.
Rajan Zed, president of Universal Society of Hinduism, said that art had a long and rich tradition in Hinduism and ancient Sanskrit literature talked about religious paintings of deities on wood or cloth.
Rajan urged major art museums of the world; including Musee du Louvre and Musee d’Orsay of Paris, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Los Angeles Getty Center, Uffizi Gallery of Florence (Italy), Art Institute of Chicago, Tate Modern of London, Prado Museum of Madrid, National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, etc.; to have exclusive Hindu galleries, thus sharing the rich Hindu art heritage with the rest of the world.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art, whose history goes back to 1876, is among the largest museums in the United States, with a collection of over 227,000 works of art and over 200 galleries presenting painting, sculpture, works on paper, photography, decorative arts, textiles, and architectural settings from Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Constance H. Williams is its Trustees Chair and Timothy Rub is the Director & CEO.
India Post News Service
