ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how pagan gods figure in the poetry and art criticism of John Ruskin, the novel Idolatry by Alice Perrin, the short story ‘The Life to Come’ and the novel A Passage to India by E.M. Forster. Apart from examining how literature and art criticism draw on tropes from Indological scholarship, the chapter analyses how the treatment of Indian idolatry in these texts reflects in fact on the sensory/erotic image in relation to art and religion, an issue which elicits deep-seated ambivalence on the part of these writers all of whom are aesthetic practitioners.
