Some 1,500 years
ago, ancient thinkers formulated a theory of art and aesthetics
that centred around the viewer's role in the appreciation of art.
They postulated that the aesthetic experience rests not with the
work of art, nor with the artist who created it, but with the
viewer. By way of analogy, the ancient writers pointed out that the
taste of wine rests not in the jug that contains it, nor with the
vintner who produced it, but with the person who tastes it. This
viewer-response theory of art is known in Sanskrit as rasa, and
responsive viewers are called rasikas or connoisseurs. This
indigenous theory of aesthetics, which became predominant by the
ninth century, is clearly of relevance to an appreciation of
India's art, but before we explore rasa further it would be useful
to consider the role of art and artists in early
India.
The modern approach
to art that emphasizes the role of individual artists and applauds
their works as valid in their own right is a concept alien to pre-
modern India. As in medieval Europe, art in ancient India was
created largely to adorn sacred structures. Visual magnificence was
indeed a major objective in the creation of towers and spires,
relief panels and sculptures.
But in equal measure
was the artists' commission to instruct and edify, to evoke the
appropriate aesthetic response and thereby heighten religious
awareness. Art worked hand in hand with myth and religion. At the
Shiva cave temple at Elephanta,for example, viewers were intended
to feel the emotion of wonder and to receive feelings of peace upon
seeing the giant triple head of god Shiva. Such grand sculptures
thereby heighten religious experience.
However not all
religious art was intended to be viewed in the same way. The bronze
image of dancing Shiva, known as Nataraja or King of Dance –
and described by the nineteenth-century French sculptor, Auguste
Rodin, as the perfect embodiment of rhythmic movement - would have
been viewed draped with silk, adorned with jewels and decorated
with flower garlands, all but masking it. Seeing the image in
worship would have been very different from seeing it in a
museum.
In general, however,
craftsmen worked mainly as part of a guild team and largely as a
means of earning their livelihood. Irrespective of individual
religious affiliations, artists would work for any patron who
commissioned their services. It is possible, for instance, to
identify the hand of the same eighth-century Orissan guild on the
Sisireshvara Shiva temple at Bhubaneshvar and in the Ratnagiri
Buddhist monastery some 120 km (74 miles) to its north. A parallel
situation exists today in the environs of Jaipur, not far from
Delhi, where a group of Muslim craftsmen regularly makes carvings
for Hindu temples.
The names and lives
of the many artists, and indeed the master architects, responsible
for the Khajuraho temples, or the Great Temple at Tanjavur in South
India, remain unknown. It is only in the past fifteen years that
the identity of the Taj Mahal's architect has come to light,
enabling firm closure to a seventeenth- century report that the
monument was the creation of a Venetian jeweller named Vereneo
Geronimo. A vastly different situation exists with regard to
fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Renaissance Italy: ground plans,
elevations and even wooden models exist for cathedrals built in
Rome and Florence by designing architects such as Leon Battista
Alberti, Donato Bramante and Filippo Brunelleschi; we also have
biographical details of their lives.
One reason for a
degree of anonymity in the artistic history of India was that much
work was of a joint nature, with architecture and sculpture being
inseparable companions. When large ambitious temples were built,
not only architects and sculptors but also guilds of stone masons,
plasterers, painters and woodworkers moved to the site for a decade
or more. In a manner paralleled by the building of a medieval
European cathedral, the monument arose as the combined product of
several experts; in such circumstances, names and personalities
faded into insignificance.
Another reason
underlying this anonymity may rest in artists' low status in the
hierarchical caste system of India. The brahmins or priestly class
held pride of place, followed by the ksha-triyas or ruling
community, the vaishyas or traders, and lastly the shudras or
manual labourers. It is to this last category that artists were
assigned; all who laboured with their hands, whether they built a
mud embankment or carved a fine statue, belonged to the lowest
caste.
Paradoxically, these
same artists often had privileged access to wealthy and influential
patrons including the royal family, so that the best among them
received acknowledgement.
However, the
anonymity of artists was not so much self-imposed as a by-product
of the exalted status of the patron. Inscriptions at Khajuraho and
Tanjavur elaborate upon the Chandella monarch Yashovarman and the
Chola king Rajaraja, and seventeenth-century documents glorify the
Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. Artists were treated as paid workers;
the accolades went to the patron who initiated the project and paid
for its realization. This is not as extreme a situation as it might
seem at first sight; after all, most contemporary museum galleries
and concert halls are named after their patrons.
Nonetheless, in
certain geographic areas, such as the southern state
of Karnataka (formerly Mysore), the names of artists
emerge vividly in the inscribed records of specific periods. Each
of forty-two female bracket figures in an exquisitely carved
twelfth-century temple at Belur seems to have been created by a different
artist, and most of the brackets carry inscriptions giving the
sculptor's name, guild and home town, and also applauding his
individual achievements. One is 'like a pair of scissors to the
necks of titled sculptors'; another is 'champion among rival
sculptors'. An inscription in an eleventh-century temple at nearby
Gadag uses parallel phraseology to proclaim the glory of its
architect:
Triumphant in the
world is Udega, the disciple of Sri Kriyasakti Pandit, who is equal
to god Brahma in expounding the various arts and sciences;... who
could overcome the opponent architects just as a lion would
overpower a rutting elephant; who would break the pride of jealous
architects as an expert paramour would do to a harlot.
Despite the lack of
historical or personal information, we are left in no doubt about
Udega's high repute. Further research may explain the curious
scenario in eleventh- and twelfth-century Karnataka whereby
architects and sculptors could broadcast their skills.
The patronage of art
was inspired by a variety of aspirations, one of which was the
concept of spiritual merit. Also of significance in the medieval
Christian world, this is accompanied in India by the deep-seated
belief in karma, which states that deeds performed in the present
life determine a future birth. Indian belief systems (Buddhist,
Jain, Hindu and Sikh) hold that human beings are too impure to
achieve closeness to the divine in a single birth. Instead, they
are born repeatedly, each time with the chance to better their
position, so that ultimately they are pure enough to achieve
freedom from the cycle of rebirth. The Bhagavad Gita, an
influential Hindu sacred text, enunciates this belief (ch 2, v
20):
Karma, or the sum of
one's own deeds, determines the nature of a future birth; one
certain way of achieving good karma was to support the construction
of religious monuments. The generous sponsorship of the innumerable
sacred monuments of the Buddhist, Hindu and Jain faiths was in
large measure the result of this deep conviction.
Despite the sacred
nature of ancient art in stone, sculptures of a sensuous and
apparently 'profane' nature often decorate sacred monuments.
Curvacious women and provocatively poised couples appear frequently
and were clearly not considered problematic by either artist,
patron or priestly monastic authorities. How did temples and
monasteries incorporate such imagery?
Kramrisch made the
memorable remark that the ancient art of India was neither
religious nor secular, 'for the consistent fabric of Indian life
was never rent by the Western dichotomy between religious belief
and worldly practice'. Her pithy comment may best be understood in
the context of the holistic attitude of ancient Hindu India, in
which the goals of life were fourfold. Dharma implies the pursuit
of virtue and duty; artha refers to wealth acquired through the
ethical pursuit of one's profession; kama or love encompasses
familial and sexual/marital love; while moksha envisages
liberation. These goals were extended also to art so that images
pertaining to all four goals had a place on the walls of both
sacred and secular structures. Sculptors working on a sacred
structure created images intended to turn the thoughts towards the
divine; but it was equally right and proper that their imagery
pertain to wealth and love. In turn, the secular palaces and
mansions of the rich gave prominent place to sacred mythology in
their murals and sculpted decoration. However, as we shall see, no
simple explanation accounts for the profusion of sensuous imagery
on sacred structures.
An example of the
harmonious coexistence of the sacred and 'profane' in art is seen
in an extraordinary sandstone structure built in the eleventh
century at Patan in western India. This colossal underground
monument, in seven elaborately carved subterranean levels,
resembling both a palace and a temple, is known as the Queen's
step-well. Each level housed a pillared pavilion that led down a
wide flight of steps to the next level, resulting in a total of 300
ornamented pillars. The well served a practical purpose, even
incorporating an overflow tank for surplus water; it was also used,
as are the myriads of step-wells across India, as a cool, overnight
halting place for travellers.
But there is much
more to the Queen's step-well. It is covered with sculpted images,
both sacred and secular, of which some 400 survive. The terrace on
the third level, for instance, portrays images of Hindu god Vishnu,
each flanked by slender, vivacious women (10). The circular well-
shaft is totally covered with figures of gods, though pride of
place is given to an image of Vishnu reclining upon his serpent
couch, which is repeated on the central recess of the three lower
levels of the well. According to a Hindu creation myth, Vishnu
slumbers on his serpent that rests upon the waters of the cosmic
ocean prior to the creation of the world. The artists and the queen
responsible for this 'well' decided to recreate this imagery by
repeating it on three different levels, thereby ensuring that the
serpent couch would always rest upon water, regardless of the level
of the water table. This monument effectively and imaginatively
combined a functional element like water, of enormous importance in
the arid regions of India, with appropriate sacred mythology to
produce a structure that defies any neat classification in the
seamless weave that is the fabric of Indian life.
To relate to Indian
art in the manner proposed by indigenous theoreticians, we must
grasp the ancient theory of rasa. Literally, rasa means the juice
or extract of a fruit or vegetable; it implies the best or finest
part of a thing. In the aesthetic context, rasa refers to a state
of heightened awareness evoked by the contemplation of a work of
art, drama, poetry, music or dance. A performance is criticized as
ni-rasa (without rasa) or praised as rasavat (imbued with
rasa). Nine rasas have been classified defined mainly
according to the emotions they were designed to generate in the
viewer. Custom decreed that public sculptures should exhibit all
nine rasas, but that only the erotic, comic and quiescent should be
evident in paintings and sculptures that decorate
homes.
Rasas were also
assigned colours, although such categories are extremely porous.
The erotic rasa was blue-black; the comic, white; the pathetic,
dove- coloured (grey-white); the furious, red; the heroic, yellow;
the terrible, black; the odious, blue; the wondrous, gold; and the
quiescent the colour of jasmine and the moon (silvery). Some of the
colours are specific to India whose archetypal lover and hero, the
god Krishna, has a blue-black complexion and yellow
robes.
Regarding the
spectator or rasika and the work of art that invokes rasa,
theorists maintained that to be attuned and receptive to the
artistic experience is as much a sine qua non in the spectator as
to be skilful and eloquent is a necessity in the work of art. The
cultivation of rasa seems to have been an intellectual and
emotional experience that was completely available to only the
sophisticated segment of the population.
