Between 200BC and AD600, Indian religious traditions underwent a profound visual metamorphosis. Deities once represented abstractly — through thrones, footprints or trees — began to take anthropomorphic forms. Ancient India: Living Traditions, which opens at the British Museum this week, traces the evolution of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain art. It explores the deepening popular need to see, interact with and be reassured by sacred figures in tangible ways; and it reveals how religious imagery took hold not only in South Asia but beyond — along the Silk Roads into central Asia and China, and into south-east Asia too.
Ancient India shows that the visual culture of these three religions originates in the long-standing veneration of nature spirits: yakshas (male) and yakshis (female), nagas (serpent divinities), and sacred trees. These beings were believed to inhabit forests, groves, rivers and mountains.
The appeal of these spirits was widespread: small terracotta figures of yakshas and yakshis have been found in domestic contexts across the subcontinent, suggesting their everyday relevance. This sacred ecology endures today in the persistent association of specific trees — such as neem, banyan and fig — with deities such as Shiva and Vishnu or village goddesses like Mariamman and Shitala. Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism each provide a spiritual understanding of the natural world in which plants and trees are not just botanical lifeforms but living embodiments of divine presence.