Thresholds

In his poem Museum, Louis MacNeice writes about visiting a museum to keep warm. I like the implied premise of this: sunny day head for the beach and ice cream, cold day head for a museum and nose up to skeletons!

As it’s January and snowing I’m more than happy to head for the MAA. I have been lucky to meet Mark Elliot who is an Asia specialist and he has been showing me old Asian weapons used against colonisers. I have put on my purple latex gloves and had a jolly good time feeling the maces, spears, axes and bows. In my research on the Indian epic, Ramayana, I have wondered about the decoration, weight and general feel of the weapons and this research has been really helpful.

Another of my current research interests is the other great Indian epic, Mahabharata. In this text a scene hinges on a game of dice. I assumed the dice would be the standard six-sided cubes but Mark thinks that this might not be the case. To prove his point, he takes me to a store room and pulls out from a box a four-sided stick dice, known as a log dice. This is an older form of dice and may have been used in the Indian epic. I am very excited that my concept of an object which seemed definitive should be so easily challenged by an old object that happens to be tucked in a box in a museum store room.

Now back, to thinking about my commission poem…perhaps something about dressing up as a native, playing a game of log dice then impaling a sahib before heading home for the warmth…

Daljit Nagra

(Image:Set of log dice from India. Collected by F.O. Lechmere-Oertel. Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, 1930.1509)