The Thief Who Stole My Heart: Sacred Bronzes from Chola India

Vidya Dehijia

Barbara Stoler Miller Professor Emerita of Indian Art at Columbia University

Tuesday, September 29, 6:00 pm  List 110

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This talk commences by introducing the audience to the sacred bronzes created by a master sculptor around the year 1000, and suggests that his inspiration may have been child-saint Sambandar’s first hymn that hails god Shiva as “the thief who stole my heart.” Vidya Dehejia explores this sensuous imagery before moving to ask questions of this material that have not been asked before. Where did the Cholas acquire the copper required to cast the many temple bronzes that are solid heavy pieces of metal? Why were the Cholas obsessed with island Sri Lanka? What were the circumstances that permitted the creation of hundreds of temples and vast numbers of sacred bronzes despite the constant warfare that the Chola monarchs were engaged in? What was the source of the extraordinarily vast number of pearls that, together with coral, rubies and diamonds, were embedded in gold jewelry gifted to adorn temple bronzes? Why did the Cholas cover the walls of their temple walls with inscriptions– some 13,000 in total – using temple walls as if they were the public records office?

About Vidya Dehijia 

Vidya Dehejia is Barbara Stoler Miller Professor Emerita of Indian Art at Columbia University in New York, and author of a range of books on the history of Indian art that connect the literary and visual arts in meaningful ways. Her recent publications include The Thief who Stole My Heart: The Material Life of Sacred Bronzes from Chola India, 855-1280 (2021), India: A Story through 100 Objects (2021), The Unfinished. Indian Stone Carvers at Work (2016), The Body Adorned (2012, Discourse in Early Buddhist Art (1997). Between 1994-2002, Vidya Dehejia served as Chief Curator & Deputy Director of the Freer & Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian in Washington
DC, and as Acting Director in 2001-2002. In 2016, she presented the 65th annual A.W. Mellon lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery in Washington DC, a series in which the art of India was featured for the very first time in the 65-year history of the Mellon lectures. In 2012, the President of India awarded her a Padma Bhushan for “Outstanding Contribution to Art & Education.”

This lecture has been generously funded by the Anita F. Glass Memorial Fund