Today’s political discourse, both in India and beyond, increasingly leans on divisions, neatly boxing people into cultural and historical silos. It is ‘your history versus mine’. Against this backdrop, a new exhibition at Delhi’s Humayun’s Tomb Museum unsettles this idea. Spanning artefacts from the 2nd century BC through the 19th century, it traces shared threads across civilizations -- from Italy to Southeast Asia -- showing how ideas, art and religious traditions flowed freely across borders for millennia.
Titled 'Shared Stories: An Art Journey Across Civilizations Beyond Boundaries', the exhibition brings together 120 artefacts originally from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Iran and Italy. It is a collaboration between the Humayun’s Tomb Museum, Italian Institute of Culture, and Museo delle Civiltà, and runs until May 30.
Durga of Afghanistan
“A focal point of the exhibition is Afghanistan — a historic crossroads shaped by Greek foundations, Kushana cosmopolitanism, Shahi and Hindu-Shahi patronage, and later the Ghaznavid court,” reads the exhibition note.
While Afghanistan of today is marred by conflict and persecution, the exhibition rightfully treats it as the starting point. So when you enter, you see a fragment of Durga as Mahishasuramardini (slayer of buffalo-demon Mahishasur). Though broken, the sculpture vividly shows the goddess gripping the bull’s horn while seated on the animal. Dating to the Shahi period (9th–11th century AD), it was discovered in a Buddhist sanctuary.
Intertwined birds & grape vines
One recurring motif across artefacts from Italy to Afghanistan is that of birds intertwined at the neck. The image appears on an 11th-century water basin from Ghazni (Afghanistan), a 1st-century marble funerary urn from Italy, and a 10th-century bowl from Iran.
“Across cultures, birds have been seen as messengers between heaven and earth, between the human and the divine,” says Andrea Anastasio, director of the Italian Cultural Centre, during the walkthrough. It is why this motif surfaces again and again, across centuries, regions and media.
Rather than asking where the motif ‘originated’, Anastasio adds, the exhibition focuses on how widely and persistently it resonated across civilizations.
Grape vines -- a key motif in Mediterranean visual culture -- recur far beyond their place of origin, appearing in Buddhist stucco from Gandhara, a striking 17th-century Chinese porcelain, and vessels from Iran. A similar iconographic continuity can be traced in the west-to-east spread of winged horses.
Stories travel too. The romance of Layla–Majnun moves across geographies, taking the form of a miniature painting in India and a flowing scroll in Iran, which are a part of the exhibit.
Islamic iconography
While Islamic art is often associated with aniconism, the exhibition presents artefacts from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran that depict birds and animals. In India, similar imagery is frequently interpreted as evidence of earlier Hindu or Buddhist structures; these works offer a more complex counterpoint, and argue for a far more layered artistic history.
Ancient globalisation
“We were very keen on doing this exhibition because we live at a time when there are such narratives of closed civilisations – either enemies or friendly with each other,” says Anastasio.
It also presents assertively that ancient and medieval civilizations were way more connected than commonly understood. Long before globalization entered the modern vocabulary, ideas, forms, motifs and beliefs travelled freely across regions -- from East to West and back -- carried by artists, traders, pilgrims and empires.