As India prepares to celebrate 60 years of independence from British rule next year, the Royal Academy is putting on a series of small, culturally specific exhibitions designed to display something of the extraordinary variety and wealth of the country’s history and art of. The first of these, which opens on Saturday, features 30 cast bronze sculptures from the region in the far south known as Tamil Nadu. They date from 850 to 1250, when the region was ruled by the imperial Chola dynasty.

These sculptures, commissioned by temples, were portable pieces revered as physical manifestations of the Hindu gods. They were ritually bathed, dressed and decorated with jewels and garlands for worship inside the temples, and on special occasions they were taken on to the streets to be seen and worshipped by ordinary Indians.

Happily, none of the pieces on display at the RA is garlanded or dressed in any way, as this would obscure the extraordinary beauty of the figures. To the Western eye, these gods and goddesses are, given their sacred function, almost shockingly beautiful. Divinity and sensuous, sexual beauty seem to be inextricably mixed. But the appreciation of a god’s physical beauty was one of India’s customary approaches to the divine. Perfection of the body was considered a prerequisite for the flow of inner beauty and supremacy of spirit.

If we look at the goddess Uma, for example, she is portrayed as a slender, seductive and exquisitely beautiful woman. She has a statuesque and graceful figure, her full breasts are softly sculpted and her skirt is slung so low as to reveal the curve of her stomach.

Other deities, too, such as the superb Shiva, Lord of Dance, are exquisitely elegant with their perfectly proportioned thighs and legs, plump and supple and decorated with folds of tightly drawn cloth, and their long curved feet and fingers.

These figures are nearly 1,200 years old, yet their details are still remarkably crisply defined. The lost wax method of modelling was done to such high standards, both technically and aesthetically, that it is still used today unchanged.

No wonder Rodin, one of our masters of bronze modelling, whose work can be seen downstairs at the Royal Academy, was overwhelmed when he saw them in 1913. “There are things that other people do not see: unknown depths, the wellsprings of life,” he said.

“There is grace in elegance; above grace, there is modelling; everything is exaggerated; we call it soft but it is most powerfully soft! Words fail me then.”

Until February 26, 020-7300 8000 www.royalacademy.org.uk