William P. Wood Gallery 227, Second Floor
Main Building
The Deccan, India’s vast central plateau region, has been a cultural crossroads for millennia. Here, cultural legacies—from northern and southern India and beyond—have always met and blended, resulting in a remarkable array of artistic traditions. India’s Middle Ground: Art of the Deccan gathers together works from the museum’s collection to showcase the region's artistic, cultural, and religious diversity.
From puppets and painted storyboards used to narrate the great Hindu epics, to woodcarvings and gold-highlighted iconic paintings of deities and devotees, to refined manuscripts and metalwork from the area’s Islamic kingdoms, to glass portraits influenced by the colonial European presence, this installation is a sampling of the Deccan’s unique artistic fare: Indian fusion.
The installation includes twenty-seven works of various media dating from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries.