Gallery of the Gods

LONDON—Let me start my review of an exquisite exhibition with a small gripe: "Ancient India: living traditions" is saddled with a terrible name. The oh-so-obvious juxtaposition of opposites—of "ancient" with "living"—comes straight out of Headline Writing 101. Couldn’t the British Museum, the greatest repository of cultural artifacts in the world, have come up with something a little less clunky, a little more stylish, for a display that seeks to highlight how religious traditions born before the birth of Christ still persist (often unchanged) in present-day India? (That said, let us give thanks that the museum didn’t opt for "Eternal India," or some such glib orientalist verbiage that would really have hit rock-bottom.)