In the Collection

IN THE COLLECTION

Spotlighting the holdings of Quaker & Special Collections

The Victor and Herta Grove Collection comprises 43 small figures and ritual implements such as bases for handheld bells, incense stick holders, and oil lamps. Crafted from bronze, stone, and wood, most were made in India from the 12th to the 19th century, and range in size from 3 ½ inches to 9 inches tall. The figures in the collection mainly represent Hindu deities such as Krishna, Vishnu, Hanuman, and Ganesha, but also included are statues of the Buddha.

Pictured above are some of the bronze figures from the collection used by Visiting Associate Professor of Religion Pika Ghosh in her course “Religion, Literature and Representation: Images of Krishna,” which looks at the Hindu god Krishna through his varied representations in architecture, sculpture, paintings, textiles, landscape design, poetry, music, dance, and drama. Students in the class, says Ghosh, examine how these artistic modes “were employed to visualize the divine, to nurture faith and passion, and to gain proximity to the transcendent deity.”

When Ghosh taught the course in fall 2017, her students used the figures to create several displays interpreting their meanings and contexts for ritual use for a pop-up exhibit in the library that was a collaboration between Quaker & Special Collections and the Religion Department.

During the fall semester, Ghosh taught the course again, though this time remotely. Her students were still able to familiarize themselves with the Grove Collection via a Zoom presentation by Head of Quaker & Special Collection Sarah Horowitz. As a final project, Ghosh asked students to select one of the figures (images of which can be accessed on the library’s site) and create a digital exhibit “imagining aspects of the existence of the deity in our worlds and the web.”

As for the Grove Collection, it was bequeathed to the College in 2011 by Herta Grove, whose late husband Victor began acquiring the objects in England before World War II. He was a scholar of the history of languages, a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author, very late in life, of the posthumously published Philadelphia; A Hiker’s Paradise, about the Wissahickon. Herta Grove grew up in Germany, where she was expelled from school for refusing to salute Hitler in the classroom. She fled to England in 1939 after the Nazis came to power and barred her father, a Jewish lawyer, from the law. Herta Grove died in 2014. —E. L.