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From the Kaveri river to the West, back and forth: a museum born out of a translocated Hindu deity of origins

Virginie Olivier, Charlotte Schmid, Edmond de Taillac

I felt the time had come to collect all such mutilated and neglected pieces of art in stone and bronze and house them in a safe place in a palace at Tanjore [Thanjavur] in order to protect and preserve the remnants of our artistic inheritance from the ravages of time and the hands alike of the irreverent vandal and the unscrupulous pedlar in art-ware

T. K. Palaniappan 1982 (1953)

In 1951, a Chola dynasty museum, the “Thanjavur Art Gallery and Museum,” was born in the heart of the Tamil country, out of a striking statue spotted in a suburb of the city (Fig. 1). The size and refinement of this four-faced, four-armed god statue suggested a glorious past that was romanticized in the story of its discovery. The statue, which stopped being worshipped under unknown circumstances, was rescued from a canal in which the Kaveri river flowed; the valley of the latter defined the territory of the most famous dynasty of the Tamil country, the Cholas, in whose honor the museum was created. This representation of a rather peculiar deity was thus spared exile and became a catalyst for a museum offering neglected or stolen works of art the chance of a new life, as suggested by R. Davis (2018).

When the statue’s rediscovery sparked the interest of the North Indian Calcutta museum, local resistance prompted the then District Collector, T. K. Palaniappan, to propose a Thanjavur museum for housing high-quality, abandoned works of such type. Both the account of the discovery and local advocacy played a key role in instigating the creation of a museum around a statue that remains enigmatic even today and retains its unique aura.

The statue stands today at the centre of the Thanjavur Art Gallery and Museum’s central hall (Fig. 1), and is surrounded by 9th-13th century Chola sculptures. The label of the museum identifies it as “Brahma (the creator with four faces);” its faces turned in the four cardinal directions are actually apt to mark the birth of a place, and to symbolise the splendour of Chola art. However the scattering, since 1926, of pieces with the same iconography and workmanship, all from Thanjavur’s vicinity, have imbued this statue with emblematic significance far beyond its physical attributes (Figs. 2-5). The history of those pieces reveals complex dynamics, which combine colonial and post-colonial ties with the West, regional tensions within the young Indian nation, and the role of a French “comptoir,” namely Pondicherry, in amplifying the statue’s value. The latter clearly derived from the financial and symbolic prestige that translocation, as defined by Bénédicte Savoy (2024, p. 11-12), has conferred on the members of the group to which it belongs, a set of ten statues identified so far.

Fig. 1. The Brahmā-Śiva at the Thanjavur Art Gallery (no. 16), photo by Babu (N. Ramaswamy).

This group of ten from Thanjavur, carved from the same granite, exhibits a unique 9th-10th century style and iconography (Figs. 1–5). The four-headed, four-armed god sits on a lotus-throne, holding a lotus and rosary, with one hand in a fearlessness gesture and the other resting on his thigh. While the attributes suggest Brahmā, a third eye on the multiple foreheads of the statue is characteristic of Śiva (Fig. 2). Its presence raises identification questions, leading us to refer to these statues as Brahmā-Śiva.

Fig. 2. Detail of two of the heads of the Brahmā-Śiva of Kaṇṭiyūr, today exhibited in front of the old building of the District Collector Office, photo by V. Olivier.

This iconographic ambiguity has captivated Western audiences, reinforcing stereotypes of Eastern mysticism. Today, only five of the original group remain in India. Two are in Thanjavur: one in the Thanjavur Art Gallery and Museum (Fig. 1) and another in front of the District Collector’s colonial building (Fig. 2), originating from nearby Kaṇṭiyūr. A third Brahmā-Śiva is worshipped in Kaṇṭiyūr (Fig. 3), while a fourth stands in Centalai’s temple courtyard, one more settlement close to Thanjavur. The fifth, acquired by the National Museum in New Delhi in 1969, has an unclear provenance, but curator C. Sivaramamurti likely played a role in its transfer, given his earlier attempt to claim a similar statue for Calcutta’s museum.

Fig. 3. The Brahmā-Śiva of the temple of Kaṇṭiyūr, photo by C. Schmid.

The New Delhi Brahmā-Śiva reflects C. Sivaramamurti’s ongoing fascination with these statues, likely stimulated by Western interest. As curator of India’s pioneering museums in Madras and Calcutta, which were opened during the colonial period, and as director of the National Museum in New Delhi established after independence, Sivaramamurti would have known that five similar statues had been acquired by Western museums starting as early as 1926.

That very year, two sculptures were exported from India through a partnership between Gabriel Jouveau-Dubreuil (1885–1945), a French archaeologist living in Pondicherry and relying on a local Indian network based on his former students at the Colonial College in Pondicherry, as recently demonstrated by Edmond de Taillac, and Ching Tsai Loo (1880–1957), a Chinese art dealer based in Paris and New York. They collaborated with Joseph Hackin (1886–1941), a curator at the Musée Guimet, in a venture that blurred the lines between scientific research, colonial plunder, and exotic art trade – ensuing transactions were neither fully licit, nor completely illicit. This trio played a significant role in cultivating Western interest in Indian art, with Jouveau-Dubreuil becoming Loo’s acquisition agent for “des pièces (…) tout à fait exceptionnelles” (absolutely exceptional pieces) in 1924 (Letter from C. T. Loo to G. Jouveau-Dubreuil, dated July 9, 1924).

In the following years, the collaboration between Jouveau-Dubreuil, Hackin, and Loo led to a significant buildup of Indian art collections at the Musée Guimet and in the West, particularly in the United States, where the Chinese dealer operated a branch since 1915. Jouveau-Dubreuil would regularly ship sculptures from India to Paris, where Hackin would select pieces for the Musée Guimet or receive commissions of approximately one-third of revenues. C. T. Loo sold the other pieces to collectors and museums in the West.

In the second half of 1926, a batch including two Brahmā-Śiva reached Paris. “Nous avons eu successivement une épidémie de mères – puis une épidémie de Sivas à 4 têtes,” (we successively got an epidemic of mothers, followed by one of four-headed Sivas) writes G. Jouveau-Dubreuil to J. Hackin and C. T. Loo, on January 4, 1928.

None of the four-headed statues was selected for Guimet; and the pair of Brahmā-Śiva continued their journey to the United States, where the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York (Fig. 5), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired them in 1927. The Detroit Institute of Arts bought a third Brahmā-Śiva in 1928. Mrs John D. Rockfeller donated a fourth one to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1942 (Fig. 4) ; the Worcester Art Museum bought a fifth from a New York Asian art dealer in 1964. The Brahmā-Śiva that can be admired today at the Cleveland Museum of Art (Fig. 5) illustrates how these sculptures’ westward journey from the Chola capital had dramatically increased their value—if only in financial terms. This is the statue initially acquired by the Buffalo Museum. It was auctioned in 2007 for $4 million-plus dollars, a price rarely attained by any Indian sculpture.

Fig. 4. The Brahmā-Śiva in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (42.120), photo by C. Schmid.
Fig. 5. Brahmā-Śiva, 9th-10th c., Tamil Nadu. Cleveland Museum of Art, 2007.155. Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund, this work was accepted in honor of Stanislaw Czuma in recognition of his long service to the CMA. © Cleveland Museum of Art.

The Brahmā-Śiva who welcomes the visitor in the Thanjavur Art Gallery showcases the Chola dynasty’s global reach far beyond its native land. In the 1930s, the great historian K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, writing a history of the Cholas, emphasised the colonisation of South-East Asia, which the dynasty claimed to have instigated. Faced with a British colonising power, he highlighted the Indian colonial impact on the area. Thanks to him, but also thanks to the translocation of Chola statues, facilitated by more or less conscious or willing agents like Gabriel Jouveau-Dubreuil, “corsaire archéologique pour la France,” (archaeological raider for France) as the man characterised himself in a letter to Joseph Hackin dated May 28, 1931, and with the help of a well-organised Indian network, the art dealer C. T. Loo, museum curators and private collectors, galleries and auction houses, Chola art’s reputation spread worldwide. The translocation of the Brahmā-Śiva has, in turn, heightened awareness and appreciation of a unique heritage.

Sources

Archives du musée national des arts asiatiques-Guimet:

Gabriel Jouveau-Dubreuil, Correspondance 1926, 1927, 1928, file Gabriel Jouveau-Dubreuil.

Photographic archives, box titled: “Inde du Sud,”” Inde du Centre,” “Sculptures isolées.”

Références

Richard H. Davis, “New lives for Returned Images: The Family of Icons from Sripuranthan,” Marg 69, 2018, no. 3, p. 64–77.

Virginie Olivier, « Les Brahmā-Śiva de la région de Tanjore : un syncrétisme singulier aux origines inexpliquées », Arts Asiatiques 75, 2020, p. 5–26.

T. K. Palaniappan,  “A Year of Progress,” in The Divine Bronzes. The Thanjavur Art Gallery Bronze Sculptures, S. Rathnasabapathy (ed.), Thanjavur: Thanjavur Art Gallery Administration, 1982.

Bénédicte Savoy, À qui appartient la beauté, Paris : La Découverte, 2024..

The Journey of a Hanukkah Lamp

Odette Varon-Vassard

The research on this Hanukkah Lamp began in 2024 for a presentation at a commemorative day at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du judaïsme in Paris, dedicated to “Shmonzes: Objects of Memory”. It was part of an effort to reconstruct family history during the dark years of the Shoah. Initially, no recollection existed that an object in the Rousso family had truly played the role of shmonzes, a yiddish word for an often trivial but memory-laden object. However, a silver Hanukkah lamp (a menorah with eight branches) unexpectantly came to light (Fig. 1). It had long held a place on the top shelf of the living room cabinet in the family house where the author of this note grew up in Athens, and it kept that same place when the piece of furniture was passed down to the next generation.

A Hanukkah lamp on top of a cabinet in a family house in Athens.

Fig. 1. A Hannukah lamp on top of a cabinet in a family house in Athens (author’s photograph).

At first glance, this Hanukkah lamp may not qualify as a shmonzes. It didn’t play a role in the transmission of memory; nothing was ever shared about it with its inheritors. Moreover, it was far from “a trivial object”; rather it was a precious item. To light the Hanukkah candles, one had to use another lamp, simple, modern, metal one, brought from Israel in the 1960s. This lamp was practical and easy to clean after the candles had melted – since tradition requires the candles to burn completely.

But another reason prevented its use. Upon close inspection, it becomes clear that the lamp is severely damaged on the left side, with the shamash (the servant lamp) detached from the main body. As a result, it had to be hung to the side. During the eight nights of Hanukkah, an additional candle is lit each night –always beginning with the shamash, without which the ritual would be incomplete. No longer functional, the lamp became a decorative object. But unlike the rest of the silverware, it stood as the only visible sign of the family’s Jewish origins. It was a bearer of identity and memory at the same time, an object from another place and time that had shared the family’s history inscribed in its body.

One might wonder if it is becoming a shmonzes simply through the act of research and writing on it. For the first time, it is being reflected upon and connected to a deeper layer of another part of the family’s pre-war history, to old Salonika. It may have been originated from Spain, given the Sephardic origins of the Rousso family which possessed it. The elder generation of the Roussos spoke Judeo-Spanish, but did not have the legendary iron key to a house in Spain, an emblem many families carried with them on the road to exile. The large key was the quintessential shmonzes of Sephardic memory, to which Jorge Luis Borges dedicated a beautiful poem (Una llave en Salónica).

By chance, in a showcase at the Jewish Museum of Greece (Εβραϊκό Μουσείο της Ελλάδος, thereafter JMG), there is a very similar Hanukkah. It was a surprise to learn from curator Anastassia Loudarou that this lamp originates from Vienna, a type very common in Mitteleuropa! The description of the lamp at the JMG (Battinou, 2013, p. 88-89), reads :

Silver repoussé lamp, common Austro-Hungarian type in a Rococo revival style, characteristically decorated with motif of two rampant lions and the crowned Tablets of the Covenant, edged by rocaille pattern, provided with jug-form oil containers, probably from Vienna, late 19th – early 20th century. Used by a Corfiote family in Corfu, 1930s.

The lamp’s refillable reservoirs are shaped like oil containers, echoing the legend of the Maccabees. According to tradition, when searching through the ruins of the Old Temple, they found only one container of oil, barely enough to light the wick for one night. Yet a miracle occurred: the oil lasted for eight nights. This miracle is celebrated during Hanukkah by lighting one more wick each night for eight nights, or a candle in modern Hanukkah lamps.

It thus turned out that the Hanukkah lamp did not connect the Rousso family to its Spanish roots but to the Ashkenazim world, an unknown world for such a family. In a long interview with an elder member of the family, Louisa Rousso, frequent trips to Vienna were often recalled and everything became clearer.

Isac and Louisa Rousso, both natives of Bitola (Monastiri in Greek), a city in Serbia at the time and now in North Macedonia, married in 1925 and settled in Salonika, where they lived until 1940 (there was a wave of emigration of Jews from Monastir – the Monastirlis – to Salonika at that time). The railway connecting Salonika to Vienna since the late 19th century played a crucial role in opening the city to Central Europe. In the 1930s, Isac Rousso frequently traveled to import fabrics from Central Europe while his mother (or mother in law?) systematically went to Vienna for medical treatments, often accompanied by her children. It was likely during one of these trips that the Hanukkah lamp was brought back to Salonika. An identical model, originating from Berlin, and dated around 1890, can be found online (Fig. 2). This is what the lamp must have looked like when it proudly stood, unbroken, in the Rousso family’s salon in Salonika, an elegant marker of both cultural connection and personal history.

A German WMF silver plated Hanukkah Lamp Menorah circa 1890 the backplate embossed with two lions

Fig. 2. A German silver plated Hanukkah Lamp Menorah circa 1890, the backplate embossed with two lions (Dawsons Auctioneers).

When Italy declared war on Greece on October 28, 1940, the Rousso family fled in haste to Athens taking the first available train. They settled there with their two children, and after the occupation, they lived in Athens with false papers until Italy’s capitulation on September 8, 1943. It is supposedly during one of his later trips, that Isac must have brought more items. Perhaps in December 1940, as Hanukkah approached, he brought the Hanukkah lamp. Isac’s decision to leave Salonika was the reason for the family’s survival, as they avoided the deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau that 96% of Salonika’s Jews (47,000 people) suffered. However, when the Germans became the sole occupying forces in Athens after Italy’s surrender, they decided to leave again. From September 1943 to October 1944, the Rousso family survived an incredible odyssey across the Peloponnese, thanks to the solidarity of many. It is unlikely they took the Hanukkah lamp with them on this perilous journey. More plausibly, they entrusted it, along with other valuables, to neighbors for safekeeping. In 1945, after the war’s end, the family settled permanently in Athens and recovered the items entrusted to these honest neighbors, as recounted by Louisa Rousso in her oral testimony. Another era, another life began in Athens—the city that had saved them—leaving behind what historian Mark Mazower has called “the city of ghosts.” The Hanukkah lamp, therefore, bears the scars of the traumatic period, a time when it had to be hidden, like the family itself, packed away among other items, in neighbors’ storage (Fig. 3).

The surviving Hanukkah lamp in a lving room in Athens.

Fig. 3.  A closer look at the surviving Hanukkah lamp in an Athens’ living room (author’s photo).

Mutilated, it is not just a damaged object but a relic of an era from which neither people nor possessions emerged unscathed. It testifies to an entire past, being in a way a survivor of the Holocaust.

Bibliography

Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts. Christians, Muslims and Jews 1439-1950, London, New York, Toronto, and Sydney: Harper Perennial, 2005.

Catherine Pinguet, Salonique 1870-1920, Photographies de la Collection Pierre de Gigord, préface by Paul Salmona, Paris : CNRS Éditions, 2023.

Odette Varon-Vassard, Des Sépharades aux Juifs grecs. Histoire, mémoire et identité, new augmented edition, Paris : éditions Le Manuscrit, 2021.

Zanet Battinou et al., Guide book of the Jewish Museum of Greece, Athens: The Jewish Museum of Greece, 2013.