Why God is Woman in Hinduism--the art of India

Faith rightly placed is a great saviour, but housed in perverted heads it brings about hatred, destruction and mayhem. When we hate others under the canopy of religion, race, gender, caste, creed, we walk a path to hell. I wonder if woman ever fought wholesale in the name of religion. Mostly they create and nurture life--Give birth, suckle and bring up the babies. This fact was well appreciated by our fore-fathers and fore-mothers  in prehistoric periods. The  Mother was God for the life could be created only by her. Hinduism being an ancient religion with direct and continuing link with human prehistory has elements from the ancient world and belief that God is feminine. .
As I travelled in search of the art and wisdom of India in its temples and customs strewn across the country, I found exquisite gems of a philosophy and art that can not be appreciated unless one surrenders the blinkers and regimented toxicity of thought and attitude towards the celebration the feminine in
Hinduism. I tried to work out the proportion of female figures on temple walls I found they outnumber male images in some cases by 80%!!
If one knows about the original Khasi inhabitants of Meghalaya, one would be familiar with the matriarchal society that flourishes there.
 A goddess in reclining birth giving posture  found on many temples is called Lajja Gauri. I saw a 5th century example of it in Badami in Karnataka. The Face is generally covered in a round flower shape and her legs drawn up in the birth giving posture. The caves of Badami are famous for excellent art of Badami Chalukyas and painted caves with images from Hinduism and Jainism from 4-5th  century. The dancing Shiva  in the first cave is a sublime example of the spiritual art of India. The graceful dance postures is what in all probability encouraged the development of Nataraja image of Shiva. Below the caves as you enter the precincts there is ASI Museum that has this beautiful Lajja Gauri sculpture. there are other very good examples of Indian art and its spiritual reach.
Women held in high esteem nurtured a religion with very little violence and hatred and war-mongering destruction. Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism are as such the religions of peace.



Ranakpur Jain temple  Rajasthan sculpture of  dancing goddess

In my book Mona Lisa does not smile anymore I have used the images of goddesses  that stood for God as a feminine Eternal.

The Art of India

Hinduism has one of the  longest continuing history of the faith of mankind. The practices of Hinduism so  freely demonized by the Colonists and the proselytizing Christian padre were drawn from the Nature. We know that the earliest religions of humanity were Nature based. The missionaries--the militant, business trading and property owning Jesuits included-- indulged in  marketing a much younger Christianity to the grand old man--Hinduism. They held the beautiful hybrid forms of gods and goddesses to be 'Monsters'. Partha Mitter in his Much Maligned Monsters discusses the roots of the perversion of European mind from the time of Pliny about India's culture, religion and people.

One of the dominant beliefs in Hinduism comes from the Mother worship practices common to all ancient faiths. Marija Gimbutas  did extensive research on Mother Goddess in Europe. In India Hinduism is replete with woman images of gods. Here I give you an image from the  8th century temples  of Ossian 75 km from Jodhpur in Rajasthan. She is the goddess of fertility.                      .

Mona Lisa does not smile anymore

Black Mona Lisa by Viktor Vijay

Contemporary Indian art has lost its rudders on account of the long period of Colonial subjugation. it is not a dilemma but indecisiveness that is the curse of contemporary Indian art.

Mona Lisa does not smile anymore

Excerpts from the book by Viktor Vijay Kumar (ISBN 9788184655124)

West judged its art and culture to be many notches higher than what India had been creating with a highly humane philosophy from the ocean of its many religions, namely Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism and a brand of Sufi Islam specific to India. The art India produced was higher in its sublimated humanity—all humanity into God whereas West treated other cultures as the refuse humanity. To understand Indian culture with Grecian glasses will never reveal the exquisite humanity that underlies Indian art, culture and religions. The context of Indian art over many millennia is the human ascending to spiritual and spiritual ascending to human; there is no descent either of human or of the spiritual.

Art and morality are linked as spiritual discourse of humanity and the creative vision. The melancholia, the nostalgia for the Greek and Latin past, the perfection and proportion, the perspective to imitate the apparent, the celebration of the carnal in place of the spiritual are the underlying currents of so called Renaissance; body as a machine not human as evolution of the spiritual. The regeneration of interest in Latin and Greek literature and philosophy froze the minds of people in the non-existent past. It was period of incongruity—search for glory in the celebration of the Human in Grecian ideal while enslaving humanity from other civilizations. How did the people reconcile the great position of a resurgent humanity in Europe with oppression of other races and civilizations? They reconciled this guilt by using the Church and the religion as a justification.