Art and aesthetics

There is a miniature painting belonging to the Pahari region, dated circa 1775-80, that depicts Rama, Sita and Lakshmana crossing the Ganga after being exiled from Ayodhya. The painting measures about 25 x 35cm and is dominated by the forceful, swirling waters of the Ganga. The protagonists of the Ramayana and the boat carrying them are specks in this landscape. In most Indian miniature painting, even though nature is rendered delicately and passionately, it is human action that is generally foregrounded. Hence, this work has always been considered unusual by art historians and scholars. In his latest book, The Spirit of Indian Painting , art historian BN Goswamy provides delightful speculation about the artist’s intent. He believes that this folio would have been followed by another, which would have depicted Rama in conversation with the boatman, reminding the viewer of the verse in the Ramayana in which Rama offers to pay the boatman for his service and the boatman says to him — ‘What I have done is very little, just taken you across these waters; but you are the one who is going to eventually take us across the bhavasagara: the ocean of sorrow that is this world.’

Goswamy, a distinguished art historian and Professor Emeritus of Art History at Panjab University, Chandigarh, has written extensively on Indian miniature painting. In this book, he goes beyond the academic encumbrances of chronology and citations to give us a lyrical account of the story of, and behind the miniature paintings. Like the example mentioned above, Goswamy weaves his academic expertise with poetic insights that come through a devoted immersion in the paintings.

Through his extensive but breezy essay titled ‘A Layered World’, he sets up the world of the courtly painter and his patron: their relationship with each other, the artist’s thematic and stylistic concerns, his training, the patron’s connoisseurship and the legacy of the few named masters — such as Nainsukh, Miskin and Basawan. Goswamy does not define the spirit of Indian painting but expresses it; much like the artist expresses the idea of the bhavasagara by emphasising the vastness of the river and the littleness of the characters. Goswamy draws from a wide range of miniatures — Mughal, Pahari, Rajput, Jain, Deccani — and writings such as Akbarnama (Abu’l Fazl, 16th century) and Padshahnama (several authors, 17th century), to give us an impression of the aesthetic concerns of painting in India. “I have tried to express the spirit of Indian painting through the artists’ considerations; their approach towards the principles of portraiture, their treatment of space and time, and what they took from tradition and what they gave to it,” Goswamy says in an interview.

The role of the patron/viewer in allowing a work to have an impact on him/her is an important concept in Indian poetics and aesthetics, and Goswamy discusses this at some length and seems to espouse it as well. He begins with a quotation from a reading of Kavyartha (a theory on poetry spanning several centuries):

“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.”

And leads to the idea that ‘we can take from works of art only according to our own energies, or capacities’, to finally land on the idea that when a work has spoken to an engaged viewer ‘the flame leaps from object to viewer.’ Indian painting is as much about artistic concerns as it is about the viewer’s engagement.

“The works that I have selected for this book have affected me in the way described in Kavyartha . It is not an art-historically sacred or sanctioned selection but a personal one,” Goswamy says. The 101 works selected include most of the usual suspects and many more that you don’t see commonly reproduced. One such beautiful work is ‘The Speaking Tree’, an early 17th-century work that is now in the collection of the Islamische Museum, Berlin. Like with all the works in the book, Goswamy provides us with the legend from which the work springs. In this case, it is the legend of the Speaking Tree that bore human fruit and was found on the island of Waq Waq. He also mentions important texts where the legend is referenced — the Shahnama (10th-century text) and ‘Iskandarnamah’ (a 12th-century poem) in relation to the prophecy of Alexander the Great’s death — and discusses the characteristics that distinguish the work. For this self-evidently bizarre but exquisite work, he uses a poem by Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) to talk about the effect of the work.

“The intention behind the book for me and the publishers was to engage the audience without using much jargon. My aim was to bring the reader and object together,” Goswamy says. The book achieves this and also provides a comprehensive reading list for the interested researcher. His writings and insights seem to have the aesthetics that are valued in Indian painting — simplicity, delicacy and the need to tell a story.

(Blessy Augustine is an art critic based in New York)

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