'India' is a
geographical unity of colossal size, with many diverse regions and
climates. Yet for five eventful millennia this country, ranging
from the snow- capped mountains of the Himalayas, through densely
forested slopes and plateaux, tree-scattered river plains and arid
desert, to the lagoons and palm trees of the south, has formed a
complex cultural and artistic unity. As well as the works known and
repeatedly published from dozens of museums, hundreds of thousands
of other works of art in many styles still lie scattered in
countryside hallows, or unpublished in many other museums and
private collections. We know now that the conventional history of
Indian art, the main lines of which were laid down almost a century
ago, needs to be vastly extended, diversified and
re-conceived.
The Indian model of
art is important because it illustrates how, over countless
generations, there has been a consistent link between art, notions
about nature and the place of people in the cosmos. In
particular, Indian sculpture is a distinct art in its own right
with its own sensuous language of forms, its own fascinating
technical methods and its own special insights to our place in
nature, which begins in the life of the village.
The villages of
India are anything from half a mile to over two miles apart. But so
huge are the distances involved that even today roads are few and
far between. The major highways between the cities are still fewer
and follow the routes they have followed for thousands of years.
The ordinary Indian has always travelled on foot or by bullock
cart—a few by camel. Before the era of motor transport the
fortunate only could travel by horse. So that distances, which even
now seem long must in the past, have seemed longer still in time,
punctuated with monotonous regularity by the ageless pattern of the
villages. . The dramatic vagaries of the Indian climate are
well known. In one year the peasant can suffer a June of blazing
heat and choking dust, followed by an August of monsoon floods,
when the land as far as the eye can see is covered with raging
water; then in December he must be raising his crops, if he is to
survive the succeeding months of drought. For most of the year, in
desperation if the monsoon fails, his life revolves around the
water supply. He catches it in little dams; he carries it from his
village pond; he leads it laboriously along miles of irrigation
ditches; he dredges it from deep wells. Cobras and cholera,
smallpox and scorpions are his intimate companions. He has the most
direct possible experience of the forces governing growth and
decay, life and death.
Among the fields or
along the roadside there are natural hallows, or numens, all marked
with dabs or stripes of red paint. A small village hallows may be :
the stump of an ancient tree, with two contorted branching arms,
cased in earth and painted with bands of red and white; an anthill
from which a mysterious sound was once heard emanating, daubed with
red dots; a raised plinth under a tree upon which are piled
fragmentary stone statues of an earlier age, ploughed up from their
fields by the peasants; a huge boulder cased closely in a wall on
three sides, its fourth face wholly painted vermilion; five small
stones on the bare earth at a hedge corner, crudely splashed with
the same colour
Before such simple
hallows, on the bare earth or a stone shelf, will be placed daily
offerings of rice, milk and flowers. At certain places the
tradition grew up of offering pottery figurines—animals, or
little human figures, indicative of the desires of the donor. These
are sometimes surrogates for sacrificial animals. For at many of
the greater shrines of India, especially those of the terrible
goddesses Kali and Durga, the custom still survives of sacrificing
goats or buffaloes. Once, especially in the south, deeply inspired
heroes sacrificed themselves. Even in the last century the custom
was still occasionally observed. But in the peasant environment
continual animal sacrifice was an economic impossibility. Therefore
pottery horses or buffaloes were offered to the deity. The clay
human figurines—for example, of Maimensingh in
Bengal—which represent a woman with two children on her arms,
is an offering that refers unequivocally to the consuming desire of
the Indian family for offspring.
In larger villages
or towns the hallows will be enveloped in a cell; a temple might
grow up around a hallows which showed notable prowess in the
answering of prayers, as richer men paid for architectural and
sculptural embellishment in gratitude for requests fulfilled. Still
today, in some of India's largest and most sacred old temples, the
central image shares the innermost shrine with a ruined anthill or
the stump of an ancient tree—the original nameless hallows
around which the whole temple grew. And still the outside walls of
quite elaborate architectural shrines may be painted with the
villager's red stripes—the index of numen. The fabric of the
temple itself expresses in outward forms and sculptural ornament
the potency of the ancient hallows. To the Indian mind, always
profoundly in touch with peasant realities, all sculptures, in
fact, perform this same function—they are vessels full of
immanent divine nature; not only the icons of a deity himself but
all other images to some degree or other.
One of the commonest
methods of giving form even a face—to the divinity is by the
use of a pot. Sometimes the pot is the right way up. Often it is
inverted and painted with the features of a man of heroic type. In
India today these are often mustachioed in Edwardian style—a
memory of the heyday of the British Raj. The food-pot is perhaps
India's most basic artifact. Stone tools may be older in human
history. But to the Indian peasant, pots and pot forms are a daily
constant of domestic life, however implements may vary. There is a
strong argument that the emphasis placed upon rounded concavities,
particularly with respect to representing the humanoid figures, is
derived from the development of these basic ceramic
shapes.
