Project Overview
Gandhāran Relic rituals and Veneration Explored (2024 – 2026) or GRAVE’s objective is to collapse the traditional boundaries between disciplines such as archaeology, art history, and textual studies to examine the actions, individuals and objects associated with relic rituals.
By doing so, GRAVE gives primacy to images as the main source for studying Gandhāran ritual praxis while simultaneously addressing similar practices in medieval Chinese travelogues and Gāndhārī epigraphy. Simultaneously, it spearheads a historical inquiry into the nature of Buddhism in Gandhāra and the mode, intensity, and direction of Buddhist religious interactions between India and China.
Our Mission
GRAVE’s online exhibition is dedicated to showcasing key objects examined within the scope of this project. Our digital collection brings together statues and reliefs dating between 1st – 4th century CE from ancient Gandhāra (broadly present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan) currently in museum collections across the globe.
Through careful curation and documentation, the exhibition aims to shed light on relic rituals and veneration in Gandhāran Buddhism. Moreover, it connects the visual corpus from Gandhāra to contemporary inscriptions to provide further context and new understanding of the images.
Team Member
- Ashwini Lakshminarayanan (Project Lead, Cardiff University, UK)
- Max Deeg (Supervisor, Cardiff University, UK)
- Jessie Pons (Secondment, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany)
- Stefan Baums (Collaborator, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany).
GRAVE's core team members are:
Acknowledgements
We are continuously working to expand our collection and improve the features of this digital gallery. This is possible thanks in great part to the various museums and institutions that have generously encouraged GRAVE and its objectives. Amongst others, we are grateful to the following museums for their cooperation in this project:
- Indian Museum, Kolkata
- The National Museum, New Delhi
- Swat Museum, Mingora
- Lahore Museum, Lahore
- National Museum of Pakistan, Karachi
- Government Museum and Art Gallery, Chandigarh
- Musée national des arts asiatiques – Guimet, Paris
- Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto