Once upon a time in Peru

You could walk into a museum in Delhi right now and see how the ancient inhabitants of Peru’s Pacific Coast felt about the lobster. From the look of one water vessel they produced, I’d guess: with great affection.

The exhibition Peru’s Fabulous Treasures, on at the National Museum, New Delhi, till November 30, showcases well-preserved artefacts from different periods and cultures in the country’s rich pre-Columbian history. The lobster-shaped pot — from the Nazca region — is among a host of ceramic works, alongside an array of metal ornaments and textiles, and a display on the landmark excavation of the so-called ‘Lord of Sipán’ — the mummified remains of the highest-ranking member of the Moche civilisation, which thrived along Peru’s northern coast for most of the first millennium CE.

There was something terribly moving for me to see these objects here, across the world from their place of origin — so delicate, yet sturdy enough to survive the passage of centuries. Especially since I’d been in Nazca only months earlier.

Textile bordered by doll heads on display at the Museo Arqueológico Antonini in Nazca, Peru

This Peruvian region is famous mainly for those otherworldly engravings in the earth (geoglyphs) known as Nazca lines. Believed to be irrigation channels, astronomical maps, alien landing strips and everything in between, they date back to a civilisation that inhabited Peru’s southern coast between 1 and 700 AD. The immense lattice of lines and figures is carved into the desert stretching from the foothills of the Andes to the Pacific.

I spent the better part of three days contemplating these lines from a plane, hill, watchtower, bus and bed, but the sheer ingenuity of the people who lived in this hostile landscape for nearly a millennia came home to me only at the Museo Arqueológico Antonini. A sleepy, provincial museum, next to a municipal swimming pool, it houses a bounty of excavated Nazca antiquities: ceramic pots painted with gorgeous graphic patterns, Lego-sized jade figurines, fragments of dyed wool fabric with doll heads for tassels, terracotta pan flutes (one still miraculously intact), and a small comb made out of cactus spines.

Despite the terrain, the Nazca people have fished, cultivated cotton, potatoes, squash and maize; they created a system of aqueducts in one of the driest places on earth; they turned the desert into a canvas. The museum has specimens of recovered seed pods, petrified potatoes, carved squash gourds, and cotton — white and fluffy, as though just plucked.

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Peru is brimming over with the remnants of lost civilisations, yet one rarely hears of anything beyond the Inca — perhaps because that was what the European ‘explorers’ stumbled upon in the early 16th century, during their conquest of ‘the New World’. I hadn’t a clue, for instance, of a civilisation in Peru that was contemporaneous with Harappa and Egypt, until I read about the ancient city of Caral in 1491: New reverations of the Americas Before Columbus , Charles C Mann’s excellent narrative history of the Americas.

The artefacts on display at Delhi’s National Museum help fill in that big blank. They allow a peek into the richness that preceded the Inca by nearly five millennia, the layers of history that lie beyond marquee names like Machu Picchu.

The breadth of this history was brought alive to me in Peru at Lima’s Museo Larco, a swish private museum with impeccably preserved textiles, intricate gold and silver jewellery inlaid with turquoise and bone, an array of very graphic erotic pottery, and samples of quipu — a fascinating system of record-keeping using strings and knots, which some archaeologists now believe may have been a kind of language.

Larco’s open archive holds more than 30,000 ancient pottery samples, catalogued and arranged on shelves. It’s astonishing to see them all together: these humble everyday objects, not built for history, but nevertheless bursting with a tenacity, outlasting their purpose, their makers, their time. It’s impossible not to feel affection for them.

To see all those pots is to see all the hands that made them, decorated them, used them. To look at them is to imagine the person who saw the whale as a cheerful dinosaur, or the person who moulded, on a household water vessel, the scene of a couple having anal sex.

Just imagine there were people, millennia ago, putting erotica on their pots and animals on their jars. Even stranger to see their personal effects in India, so far away from their home. We’re all like this, we’ve always been this way.

(‘Peru’s Fabulous Treasures’ is on view at National Museum - New Delhi till December 31)

Devika Bakshi is a Delhi-based writer

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