This reached its pinnacle in the figure of the political and spiritual leader M.K. Gandhi, portrayed as an ascetic in ways that captured the imagination of Indians and Westerners alike. Beginning in the sixteenth century, the issue was introduced to European consciousness through graphic images. Sati remains a source of contention in India today, particularly in the wake of a highly publicized sati in 1987 by a young Rajput widow named Roop Kanwar. While sati seems to have been a relatively rare occurrence, the rite has long engendered debates about the conditions of Indian women. The image of sati , once emblematic of barbarous oriental otherness for Europeans, is now again at the center of Indian debates about modernity and tradition, secularism and civil rights.
Hindu divinity is an enduring theme in the history of images from India.
The earliest European travelers' accounts from the sixteenth through the mid-seventeenth century represented the Hindu pantheon as little more than devils. Prejudiced by Christian expectations of demons in heathen lands, these narrators found what they already expected. But in the seventeenth century, in the context of a growing scientific humanism, differences in cosmology and religious practice were recognized. The majority of drawings and engravings displayed here date from this seventeenth century period of reinvigorated European interest in Hindu iconography. Cartography and the history of the mapping of the Indian subcontinent is the final theme explored here.