The next Thursday I went back down and hit the museum. One funny thing- for Indians, the museum costs 15 rps. For foreigners, it costs 300. Plus as 30 rp fee for bringing in your camera.

There were a lot of sculptures and small paintings. Lots of gods as subject matter. Not worth coming to Bombay for, but worth seeing if you are here.

The first thing up is a sculpture of a guy who was fighting his brother for the right to rule the kingdom, I think in somewhere south. (It doesn’t seem as though all of India has traditionally been one state. There have been lots of small kingdoms. John Keay wrote a very good history of India that I am reading right now, and it looks like for most of the past 2500 years, only 7 groups have, at some point, held dominion over more than half the subcontinent, and those groups variously held sway for well less than half of that time period.) So the brothers fought. They met in battle, and the bigger one caught up the other, and had him up in the air. He was going to throw his brother to the ground and kill him, but realized what he was doing, and that it was all for transitory power in this world, and that is wasn’t the right thing to do. He put his brother down, renounced power, went into the woods, and meditated. He was so devoted that vines grew up all over him, which is what is drawn all over his legs and arms.