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The layered world of Indian painting

With the remarkably wide sweep that is theirs, Indian paintings have been variously described: as layered objects in which one thing, or thought, is gently laid upon another; like schist rocks, foliated and iridescent, that glisten even from a distance; terse but meaningful, as a couplet in Persian, as a doha in Hindi; like a great floral carpet that lies rolled but can be spread out endlessly, revealing new things – ‘flowers under feet’ – with each mellow movement.

The layered world of Indian painting

To set out with eagerness | The Abhisarika heroine | Folio from a Rasamanjari series Opaque watercolour and gold on paper Pahari, attributed to Kripal of Nurpur; c. 1660-70. Dogra Art Gallery, Jammu



There are things, some of them passing strange, that happen when you confront a work of art: (i) unfolding of the heart; (ii) its expansion; (iii) its agitation; and, finally, (iv) vibration.

— From a reading of Kavyartha

With the remarkably wide sweep that is theirs, Indian paintings have been variously described: as layered objects in which one thing, or thought, is gently laid upon another; like schist rocks, foliated and iridescent, that glisten even from a distance; terse but meaningful, as a couplet in Persian, as a doha in Hindi; like a great floral carpet that lies rolled but can be spread out endlessly, revealing new things – ‘flowers under feet’ – with each mellow movement.

Each description is seductive, and contains a large measure of truth. In essence, however, – this needs to be emphasized – for getting from works of art all that resides in them, some effort has to be made. What has to be summoned up is, as described in the classical tradition of India, utsaha: energy, enthusiasm, the excitement of anticipation. And one has to be prepared to make what can only be described as visual entry into a work. When that is done, much can be expected: the joy of discovery, stimulus to reflection, visual excitement, in the final analysis, heightened delight. The entire experience can sometimes result in samvega, as Ananda Coomaraswamy wrote at one time: ‘aesthetic shock’.

..............

Abu’l Hasan, that great painter at the Mughal court — Nadir-al Zaman is the title that the emperor Jahangir conferred upon him, meaning ‘Wonder of the Age’ — moved away from the glitter of power and opulence to paint an old, fragile man whom we see in a work of his. The tone of the work is hushed and one almost falls silent looking at the lone, hesitantly moving figure that occupies the page. The man – an old pilgrim perhaps or, possibly, a mendicant who had seen better days – stands bare-foot, leaning on a thin long staff as he struggles to move forward. The body bears marks of the ravages of time: the bent back, the stooped shoulder, the snow-white beard, the lean desiccated frame. But one can see, from the look in the eyes, that the mind is still keen and the bent of mind religious, considering that he holds prominently a rosary of beads in his bony right hand and wears one round his neck. There are signs of indigence everywhere: the lower part of the body is bare, the feet are unshod, and the coarse apparel he wears consists mostly of a rough cloak used as a wrap, a folded shawl-like sheet thrown over the left shoulder, and an unadorned tightly bound turban. Technically, the work is brilliant: one notices the roughness of the skin at the knees, the thinness of the fingers of the hands, the rendering of the beads in the rosary, each shrivelled and varying in size, above all, the virtuoso treatment of the face with its sage lines of age and experience. But, technique apart, one is moved by the painting, and driven towards the thoughts that must have coursed through Abu’l Hasan’s mind as he chose his subject. The man remains un-named for us but, did the painter know him? It is most unlikely that the painting was done for the man, but then — used as he must have been to royal commissions and grandiose themes — why did Abu’l Hasan pick him? Was it simply a portrait that he was painting, or was he addressing a theme? Whatever the case, he seems here to embed into this isolated figure of an unknown man a universality of feeling. Across centuries, and everywhere, poets have spoken of old age: the time when the meaning of things begins dimly to unfold, when the hollowness of it all makes itself manifest. For the man of God, it has been said over and over again, there comes a time when one has to sit out and wait with patience and dignity, with submission and resignation rather than regret or defiance, for one knew it all along that this edifice of life is built on walls that are but sand and rests on pillars fickle as the wind. Is this Abu’l Hasan’s statement on the same theme, a painter’s reference to intimations of mortality? At the same time, as far as we are concerned — you and I — does the work resonate within us, give rise to thoughts in our own minds, perhaps even remind us of parallels, of something we had read at some point of time and were moved by? Ali Sardar Jafri’s long poem, Mera Safar, — the ‘Journey of Life’ — perhaps? For in it he speaks first of the day which will surely come: ‘when the lotuses of my hand will begin to wilt/ and the lamps of my eyes grow dim/ and from the branch that my tongue is/ all butterflies of speech and articulation will fly away/ one by one”? But then he turns to speak of returning to this earth, to another life, when he will be there to see “seeds sprout in the soil/ and little shoots begin to caress the surface of the earth/ with their tiny fingers”, and shall then open his eyes to “a world afresh/ through each leaf, each bud that blossoms”? Is there something like this in Abu’l Hasan’s painting: in the midst of the encircling gloom that the dark moss-green background represents, is that lone flowering plant close to the feet of the old pilgrim the promise of return, when he will begin to see “seeds sprout in the soil/ and little shoots begin to caress the surface of the earth/ with their tiny fingers”?

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The way time figures – subtly, almost unnoticed — in mythological stories that everyone knows or hears is of deep interest in the context of how it enters the domain of the artist. For it is at that level initially that ideas become embedded, for stories have texture. One can take examples. In an episode in the Vishnu Purana, for instance, one reads of the great god, Vishnu, accompanied by the divine sage, Narada, stopping at one point in the course of his wanderings, and asking Narada to fetch some water from a nearby village. While he waits at the edge of the forest, Narada goes to the village, knocks at a door, falls in love with the young woman who answers, marries her, founds a family, and lives happily with his wife and children for long years until a flood comes and inundates the village, sweeping everything before it. Narada, too, is washed away by the current and is thrown perchance at exactly the spot where he had parted company from Vishnu. As he lands, and opens his eyes, he is greeted by Vishnu who asks him, simply: “Son, have you brought me the water that I asked you to get?” 

The pace at which time had moved for Vishnu, and for Narada, is drastically different.

In the Balagopalastuti, that widely known devotional text by Lilashuka, there is a famous verse in which Yashoda, Krishna’s foster-mother, recites the story of the Ramayana to baby Krishna while putting him to bed. The narrative reaches the point where the demon Maricha, in the guise of a golden deer, lures Rama away from his forest hut in the hermitage, leaving Sita exposed to danger. As Yashoda speaks animatedly of the scheming Ravana’s arrival on the scene to abduct Sita, suddenly baby Krishna, half-asleep by now, jerks into action and shouts out aloud: “Lakshmana! Where, oh where, is my bow?” It is as if the memory of an earlier incarnation of himself as Rama, the seventh, overtakes Krishna in his present life, as the eighth incarnation of Vishnu.

Suddenly, time has moved in a loop.

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Clearly, the painters or, earlier, the sculptors, kept forging, over a period of some two thousand years, different strategies for coming to terms with time. In working these strategies out, they kept taking something from the tradition and, in turn, giving something back to it, as mentioned before.

— Excerpted with permission from the publisher  

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