Shiva's Shapely Saints

Art historian Vidya Dehejia is curator of "The Sensuous and the Sacred: Chola Bronzes From South India," an exhibition devoted to temple statuary of Hindu saints at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. She spoke with Beliefnet about the saints' connection to the gods Shiva and Vishnu, and how the saints' legacy inspires devotion today.

Which Hindu saints are represented in the exhibit?

There's a set of saints that lived between the sixth and the tenth centuries in South India. It's codified into a group of 63 saints for God Shiva and 12 for God Vishnu. The saints composed poetry in Tamil, and these poems are the sacred canon of South India. People know their verses and chant them. They were semi-deified, but elevated images of the saints are made and kept in temples. You go into a Shiva temple and see 63 stone images or painted images.

Part of the exhibit's title is "The Sensuous and the Sacred." Most people don't think of saints as being sensuous.

Yes, that might seem to some people like a contradiction in terms. The forms are extremely beautiful, slender, and sensuous, and at the same time they're sacred.

But the way the artists, devotees, and priests thought of it was that inner spiritual beauty had to be accompanied by beauty of form. Or, looking at it another way, outer form had to reflect inner beauty. The two are inextricably combined. Part of bhakti-devotion-is contemplating the beauty of the Lord.

The Lord in this exhibit is more often the god Shiva, not Vishnu, right?

For the worshipper, Shiva is everything. There's a sort of outdated idea of a creator, preserver, and destroyer-dividing up the functions. But for a believer, Shiva does all of that.

Shiva is a paradoxical figure. He wears eccentric clothes. Sometimes he has serpents wrapped around him like a scarf or a belt, and wears a skull in his hair. The saints seem to have played with that eccentricity instead of hiding it. They played it up, almost as if they felt people listening to their poems would ask about it.

With Westerners, there's a stereotype that Shiva represents pure destruction.

There is. The form of dancing Shiva dances the world into extinction, but that same dance continues to bring it back into creation. It's the cyclical concept of time that India has. If you're looking for logic, you say, "How can it be?"

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