Scattered Goddesses: Travels with the Yoginis

Beautiful and broken pieces of goddess sculptures that once shared a temple in northern Tamilnadu, India sit now in eleven different museums across North America and Western Europe. The Brahmani figure in the Asian Art Museum’s collection may have been one of them. She journeyed with the group to Paris in the 1920’s, and yet she is an older kind of goddess than most of them — a mother goddess rather than a yogini — embodying different concepts of divine female power. Dr. Padma Kaimal will talk about the group and explore whether they once shared a temple.

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  ABOUT THE SPEAKER

  Dr. Padma Kaimal is the Batza Family Chair in Art History at Colgate University. Her research questions common assumptions about art from the Tamil region. Did kings build the only architecture that matters? Did men? Are the boundaries of India’s modern states meaningful for understanding beautiful temples of the past? How do narrative sculptures tell their stories? Are fierce goddesses demonic? Are museums the problem, the solution, or both to contentions over cultural property? Her first book, Scattered Goddesses: Travels with the Yoginis (Ann Arbor: Association of Asian Studies, 2012) challenges categories of East and West, victim and thief, as it traces the worship, ruination, dispersal, and re-enshrinement of nineteen sculptures from a tenth-century goddess temple.

This program is part of the Asian Art Museum Re-History Series, which critically examines the history of the museum and its collections with consideration of race, colonialism, and power.  

Image: Brahmani, approx. 875–950. India; Kanchipuram or Kaveripakkam, Tamil Nadu state Granite, possibly hornfels. Courtesy of the Asian Art Museum, The Avery Brundage Collection, B60S47+.