Artist Shaurya Kumar explores divinity in stolen and damaged idols

When an object of worship is damaged or dislocated, it loses its original meaning. Artist Shaurya Kumar interprets the shift in sacredness in his exhibition There Is No God in the Temple, on at Delhi’s Threshold Gallery

What happens when the walls of the sanctum crumble or the tombs are emptied, columns of temples and idols are carted off to mantles of private collectors or cultural artefacts vanish without a trace and temples are left in ruins?

“The devotee’s faith in divinity is shaken and the memory of the object gets fragmented,” says artist Shaurya Kumar whose ongoing exhibition at the Threshold Gallery puts out a stark and meaningful representation of long-vanished slices of history.

The exhibition is an eclectic collection of miniature paintings, 3-D sculptures and gold leaf imprints on paper drawings that attempt to fathom what objects tell us about history, society, nature or culture when they are destroyed or distorted and how it shakes up people when their deities are looted. 

The title is drawn from Tagore’s poem echoing the sentiments of the people who found their shrines and altars desecrated. It forms the central piece with a porcelain installation on a gold wall that carries the Bengali title Oi mondire kono debota nei, (There Is No God in the Temple) as a 3D black sculpture of Nandi looks on.  

The first work he made for this collec­tion,  It’s Mine, No It’s Mine, Now It’s Yours, No It’s Ours, Now It’s Missing!  has a dozen 3-D printed sculptures of vary­ing sizes arranged on a handwoven tapestry with wool and dye made to look like a  chausar board. Shaurya explains that the person who holds the dice is the one who decides the fate of the sculpture. If you throw the dice, it keeps changing ownership from ‘mine’ to ‘ours’, poignantly underlying the sentiments behind stolen artefacts.  

It was the 2003 CAG report highlighting the disappearance of 92 monuments from India that intrigued Shaurya Kumar, then a 24-year-old graduate of Delhi College of Art. A recent UNESCO study estimating that 50,000 idols and artifacts were smuggled out of India between 1947 and 1989 and 2,208 sculptures and idols looted from temples where they were still being worshipped, between 2008 and 2012, further piqued his curiosity.

“The plunder in India happened during peace time, when the country was not in religious or political turmoil, unlike events in the Middle and near East where ancient religious sites and artefacts were destroyed by the extremist forces,” says Shaurya, now a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.