A Brief History of Visual Contextualization in India Part 4: Saint Thomas Christians

For this installment in my series "A Brief History of Visual Contextualization in India," I'll be discussing India's first Christian community, the Saint Thomas Christians (or "Nasrani").  Saint Thomas Christians traditionally live in the southwestern coastal state of Kerala and descend from a union of the local Indian population with a Jewish diaspora community, who had become Christians in the earliest days of the faith.  The Saint Thomas denominations use a Syriac liturgy in their church services and trace their spiritual heritage back to the assumed arrival of the Apostle Thomas ("Doubting Thomas") in southern India in 52 A.D.  In the third century, Nestorian Christian missionaries from the Church of the East in Persia began to settle in Kerala and organize the churches there according to their beliefs and liturgy.  Later in 1665, due to religious pressure from Portugese Catholics, the Saint Thomas Christians began to split into various factions along Catholic/Nestorian lines.  Today, this schism has resulted in several different Saint Thomas denominations, including Nestorian, Catholic, Orthodox, and even (since 1961) Evangelical!

A Brief History of Visual Contextualization in India: Hindu Art

Krishna Flirting with the Gopis, c. 1780–1820

As I stated in my last post in this series, both Hindu and Buddhist art in India grew indirectly out the Indus Valley/Harrapan civilization (3300–1300 BC), with each religion developing its own styles and subject matter.  Buddhist art came to prominence first, around the first century BC, and continued to be prominent in India through the 16th century AD.

A Brief History of Visual Contextualization in India: Part 1

In today's post I am beginning a brief series on contextualized visual art in India.  You might call it a collection of "highlights."  A major source of information for the series is the new book Christian Themes in Indian Art from Mughal Times to the Present (I own a copy that I am practically drooling over).

However, we should begin at the beginning, with the Indus Valley Civilization.  This was the first "great" civilization of India that built cities and left some form of material culture and art, though tantalizingly little.  Its religious beliefs, though still largely unknown, appear to have had at least some influence on one of India's subsequent major religions, Hinduism.

Patheos.com writes that

relatively little is in fact known about the details of the religious world of the Indus Valley civilization. Based on archaeological remains, however, it seems that this was a religious world that was particularly focused on ritual bathing and animal sacrifice, elements that may be the source of later Hinduism's attention to the purifying qualities of water and the centrality of sacrifice. Furthermore, a great many female figurines have been discovered in the ruins of the cities that date to this period. These seem to have been goddesses, and may have been particularly associated with fertility rituals.

Scholars have speculated that these figures are origins of the many goddesses who populate the vast Hindu pantheon. Male figures have also been found on stone seals. Some of these seals depict a seated figure surrounded by a variety of animals, including bulls. These images lead some scholars to label these "proto-Shiva" figures, since the great god Shiva is generally associated with animals (he is sometimes called "Pashupati," the Lord of the animals) and more particularly linked with the bull, which later becomes his special "vehicle."