When I went to India for the first time, not quite six months ago, I had in my hand the schedule of the Festival of India, which opened in Washington June 13. It is a remarkable, nationwide roll call of events, in which seasoned professions will do all that can be done to import the importable India.
In any other country, I should have knocked myself out getting ready for it. I should have gone to as many museums, as many churches and as many houses and gardens, great and small, as could be fitted into the day. I should have gone to the theater, to the opera, to the ballet. I should have pestered eminent writers for their opinion on this question or that.
I did none of these things. Three days into the journey, something showed me that in India art and life are one. Sometimes Indian art is in a museum, as it is elsewhere. Sometimes it is a great monument that has been preserved and guarded and to which admittance may be procured for pennies. But most often it is just there, in the air, on the ground, all over the place, for the taking, and no name is attached to it.
That is what I learned: that art is everywhere in India, if we know how to look, and not only in famous places. It is in the costume of a woman working on the road. It is in the fragments of lapis-lazuli mosaic that lie on the ground beside a temple long left for dead. It is in the bracelets that we see on the horns of white oxen by the roadside. It is in the ferocious color of the spices in every small-town bazaar, and it is in the celestial spacing of one building after another in the abandoned city of Fatehpur Sikri, near Agra.
The epiphany that I have in mind occurred a midday, somewhere on one of the long straight roads that were built by the engineers of the Indian Civil Service in the 19th Century. We had pulled off the road. Sitting on finespun blankets in the shade of a king-size acacia tree, we counted the 23 green parakeets that had flown out of its branches to take a look at us. From a whole battery of cardboard boxes there appeared Indian vegetarian dishes, each more delicious than the last. With them came long draughts of fresh lime and soda.
There were fields of mustard to give us a new notion of yellow, and in the distance the pink hills of Rajasthan. Indian talk went on all around us, and as the locals walked past us on their way home to lunch, they moved like gods, but unself-consciously. From the other side of the hedge, a solitary flutist blew a cool spiral of sound into the clear pale air. The road was lightly trafficked, and we could not fail to notice that every truck that passed had been painted–front, sides and back–in ways that were fanciful, euphoric and wildly superstitious.
When we were all through with lunch, two dancing bears got down from a passing truck and began to limber up for the evening`s performances. A 12-year-old shepherdess came by with her sheep and said, ”Good morning! How do you do?” in limpid, unaccented English. And as the late December sun warmed our Western bones, we agreed that from the moment we had stepped off the plane at 3 o`clock in the morning at New Delhi airport, everything had gone right, but right in a specifically Indian way that was not like the way of anywhere else.
We remembered, for instance, the ways of Indian luggage. If I speak of
”Indian luggage,” it is because everything in India is peculiar to itself. Boredom in India is Indian boredom, and unlike boredom elsewhere. Tantrums in India are Indian tantrums, and unique. Conversation in India is Indian conversation, carried on face to face, sitting or half-lying down, open-endedly and untouched by the tyranny of the wristwatch.
So it is with Indian luggage. When it comes down the carrousel, it is unlike any other. Whereas American luggage lies flat and minds its own business, Indian luggage comes roped and bundled, with stenciled messages
(”Good Luck! or ”Safe Journey!”) in big letters on its sides. Not only that, but it rocks itself continually, frantically, forward and backward, as if a living creature were trussed up inside it and calling for help.
And right there, in what seems a quiet provincial airport, within sight of the first charcoal fires in the street, the visitor gets an immediate lesson in the interpenetration of Indian art and Indian life. For in the unwieldy animation of Indian luggage there is mirrored the unwieldy animation of Ganesa, the elephant-headed and hugely fat Indian deity, fundamental to Hindu belief, who functions as destroyer of obstacles and dispenser of wealth and wisdom. We shall remember that animation, that convulsive rocking and rolling, long after we have forgotten much else that happens to us.
But we shall also remember it when we see the sculptures of Ganesa that are among the prime pleasures of Indian art. It is Ganesa`s role to make things run smoothly, and with his Falstaffian gait, his irrepressible craving for candy, his colossal belly and his wide, flapping, cabbage-leaf ears, he is an unmistakable figure, everywhere recognized and (unlike some other divinities) everywhere welcome.
Indians do not view their divinities, any more than they view the art in their museums, with the kind of detachment that is regarded as good form in the West. Nor do Indian museums see themselves as a department of show business. In this, they are closer to the village churches of France and Italy, where until lately it was taken for granted that anyone who wanted to come to see their treasures would come, and that everyone else (thieves and vandals included) would stay away.
Nor do Indian museums foster, or envy, the frenetic social activity that Americans expect of their museums. The work is there. The museum is open from time to time. What more can anyone want? If catalogues, reproductions and postcards are defective by Western standards, nobody grieves.
As against that, Indian visitors identify with Indian works of art with an intensity that is almost unknown in the West. To them, they are not works of art at all, in our sense, but objects of worship that happen to be in a museum and not in a temple.
In India, the art of the past is always relevant. It will tell you how to distinguish the good people from the bad people among the divinities with whom you will become more familiar every day. It will tell you what goes on in those tiny, many-storied townhouses where everyone knows everyone else`s business. It will tell you about gardening, and about hunting, and about how to deal with people great and small.
It will tell you about the untroubled sexuality that is an immemorial feature of Indian life. Above all, it will give you a whole new set of references by which to judge human motives, human character, human beauty and the interaction between human beings and nature. It will do all this with economy, with subtlety and with wit. You will be lucky to have Indian art as your guide, and its guidance will not fail you when you come home, no matter where ”home” may be.
”Art” in this sense can include the printed word. If you want to know India and Indians, look out for the memoirs of the Emperor Babur (1483-1530)
and note the freshness and the modernity with which he sets down every quirk of character that amused him. Of one great warrior, he wrote: ”His courage was unimpeached, but he was rather deficient in understanding. . . . He was madly fond of chess. If someone else played chess with one hand, he played it with two hands. He played without art, just as his fancy suggested.”
Observations of this sort and quality run throughout the great years of Mogul painting, which can be dated roughly from 1555 to 1857. During the three centuries of Mogul rule in India, paintings made in watercolor or gouache and small enough to be put into albums or held in the hand had an immense popularity at court. Beginning with Akbar, who took the throne in 1556 at age 14, the Mogul emperors not only did all they could to encourage the art of painting, but the Mogul nobilty and the minor provincial rulers also were delighted to follow the imperial example. Throughout north India and the Deccan, painting flourished and was protected, with results that can be enjoyed not only in India itself but in many a great museum in the West.
Mogul painting was concerned with portraiture, with demeanor and with differentiation. No two people were alike, and it was their differences, not their likenesses, that should be brought out. Mogul art was attentive to every detail of gardening, and it shows us how wretchedly the great Mogul gardens have been allowed to go to rot, and how easily, and at how small an expense they could be brought back to life. At this moment, looking at them is like looking at a broken phonograph, and just about as much fun.
Mogul painting was also minutely attentive to the strange and beautiful animals that came to India from time to time. Once well-described as ”the first and ultimate connoisseur,” the Emperor Jehangir could not believe when he saw a zebra, that the delicate black line around the zebra`s eye was not owed to cosmetics. Convinced of his mistake, he annotated a portrait of the zebra to that effect. Mogul painters missed nothing–neither the purposeful tumult of a building site, the transports of secret lovers, the concentration of the calligrapher as he pored over a page of poetry or the brief definitive savagery of battle. Missing nothing, they put everything down, but with a finesse that is still a sure guide to Indian mores.
Mogul painting is also unbeatable if we want to decipher the life of the labyrinthine town houses to which we may one day be introduced. Mounting the stairs that line the inner courtyard, we see into room after room. If there are doors, they are rarely shut. Ventilation, sociability and a determination to be in the know combine to keep them open. We see cushions, divans, parted curtains. Here and there we see a dark and penetrating gaze or a beautiful nose turned away in affectation. We hear laughter and the swift movement of silks. If there are echoes of harem or whorehouse, they are misleading. This is just Indian life, going on as usual, with a mix of what is, what might be and what ought to be. But to decode those looks, those squeaks, those mirages of coffee and sweetmeats, we need Mogul painting, and Mogul painting will not let us down.
What we remember most vividly from an Indian journey may not, in the end, be the great set pieces that people cross the world to see. They are just as likely to be a matter of chance, whim, patience, private affinity and luck. Once we have been to India, our India turns into a private India, a confidential India and an alternative India.
People don`t always want to hear about it. They prefer the big standard remarks about the big standard sights, and of course it is true that many of the monuments for which India is best known are on a colossal scale. The 30 and more cave chambers of Ajanta, the huge temples cut out of the living rock at Ellora, the northern medieval temples at Khajraho, the temple of the sun god Surya at Konarak, the enormous granite relief called ”The Descent of the Ganges” on the natural rock wall of the reservoir at Mahabalipuram–all these and many another are as impossible to ignore as they would be to move. They will always be places of pilgrimage, just as was once the case with Persepolis and Angkor Wat. They are a part of everyone`s imaginary India.
It is important in this context to remember that Indian art is not just painting or sculpture. Talk, costume, food and drink are a part of Indian art and a part of Indian life, also. Indian art penetrates into every crevice of Indian life. The decorative arts, in their relation to Indian architecture, do not function either as fillers or as mere ornaments. The Taj Mahal is not simply a matter of noble forms and mother-of-pearl tonalities that change from moment to moment. It is spiced, prickled and, in a strange way, put to the test by the linear decoration–much of it invisible in photographs–that adds color, tone and nuance to surface after surface.
Anyone who goes to the largely unvisited museum that lies not 100 yards from the Taj Mahal can see for himself the great variety of materials that were put to use in these partly abstract and partly botanical ideograms. The materials in question came from Baghdad, from Russia, from Afghanistan, from China, from Tibet and from Sri Lanka as well as from India itself, and their names are sometimes familiar (jade, malachite, coral, carnelian, turquoise, lapis) and sometimes anything but (pankhuni, sangmusa, summog, khattu, hira and surkh, among others). In any other country, all this could have turned to mere elaboration. In India, it turns to nuance.
Anyone, equally, who looks into the interior of the Taj Mahal, or stands at the knee-high balustrades that overlook the indolent river Jumna, will see that the profile of the great and justly famous building is no more than the equal partner of many another element in the general ensemble. To understand the Taj Mahal, it is indispensable to take it by surprise, difficult as that may be. On the far side of the Jumna, with the loud railroad trains crashing to and from and the water from the river pumped up to feed the archetypal Mogul gardens, we see the Taj quite differently–with a train conductor`s eye, a gardener`s eye, even a water buffalo`s eye. It is worth the trouble.
Among the many attractions of the Festival of India are performances of the Kathakali dance dramas that are the apotheosis of the interaction between dance, music and art. Anyone who knows Indian sculpture and goes to see a Kathakali performance will see at once that the body language is the same in the one as in the other. Indian sculpture without Indian dance would be much impoverished. Indian dance without sculpture would lack the brevet of authenticity that is given by sculptures that have existed for a thousand years or more.
Singing and drumming likewise have their part to play in the Kathakali dance dramas. Indian singing has within it an element of heightened speech–of speech, that is to say, in which something especially important is being said. The word as sound is fundamental to Indian culture and has been so ever since the Indian who knew how to read was a rarity. As for drumming, it is an activity that may take a lifetime to master, so complex is the role of the fingers, whether singly or jointly, of the thumb, of the knuckles, of the palm of the hand, and of all these in partnership.
Indian painting of the Mogul period is to this day our best guide to Indian mores, even if the gardens have gone, the palaces are no longer inhabited and the stylized manners of two or three hundred years ago have fallen into disuse. To go into an Indian movie house is to see entertainments that, laughable as they often are, make ”The Jewel in the Crown” look like Aeschylus or Racine.
Portly heroes and no-less portly heroines act their heads off in archetypal soaps. Second-rate film stock gives them magenta complexions, and third-rate dialogue forces upon them a style of acting that Hollywood would have rejected even before the coming of the talking picture. But let us make no mistake: There is in these movies something atavistic, something immutable, something that inspires instantaneous recognition.
It has not escaped me, even at a distance of more than 2,000 years, that Indians in general are paradoxical and contradictory people. Perfectly at home in the life of the spirit and positively prehensile in their power of adaptation to its complexities, they are born, dedicated and full-time politicians. They are volatile, much given to banding and disbanding in short- lived and ferocious alliances, capable of great feats of energy and perseverance and yet happy at other times to sit the long day through, doing nothing much of anything. All this, and more, is set out in Indian art.
The very word ”thug” is of Indian derivation, and never did men live up to it more thoroughly than those who practiced thuggee in its original form, strangling the visitor from out of town when he least expected it. One archetypal thug said in a matter-of-fact way that he had strangled 700 travelers to date and only wished that it had been a great many more. Acts of criminal ferocity can be found in that same canon of painting that excels in the portrayal of acts of love and learning.
As for the look of India itself, as distinct from the look of India in Indian painting, in the prints and watercolors of English travelers, and in 19th-Century photographs, it will immediately strike the visitor that only quite lately have Indians had any sense of conservation. Buildings that were not in current use had no meaning for them. Had it not been for the all but anonymous English army officers and civil servants who saved one monument after another, and for Lord Curzon, who, during his years as viceroy, set in hand a nationwide program of rehabilitation and paid for much of it out of his own pocket, most of India`s great monuments would have fallen into a definitive decay.
As E.M. Forster discovered in 1912, the Indian concept both of time and of history is completely different from our own. We delight in differentiation and vie with one another in the search for arcane scraps of knowledge about style and dating, species and place of origin. Forster found that Indians were content with general statements. Trees were trees, birds were birds, ruins were ruins.
But then talking, not looking, is the prime activity of the Indian. Language is, of course, the great instrument of confidentiality, and Indians are prodigious, irrepressible, never-tiring talkers. But it takes only a short morning in the bazaars for a visitor to judge that there is something quite special about the uninterrupted clicketyclack of Indian speech.
Language works, among Indians, on a one-to-one or one-to-two-or-three basis, but it also works on an altogether vaster scale. In this context, I have a last image to offer. One of the great experiences of Indian travel is to climb to the top of one or another of the historic forts that overhang town after town in central India. You climb until your knees give way. You cross courtyard after courtyard. Monkeys scatter at your approach, spitting and squawking. Vultures veer up and away, scenting that you are still in passable health. And then, eventually, you reach a belvedere–often sexagonal or octagonal–from which you look down on the town.
Below you are blue doors by the thousand, white roofs as far as you can see, and alleys, terraces and open shopfronts by–as it seems–the tens of thousands.
Perhaps a hundred-thousand people are down there beneath you, and every one of them is talking. They never fall silent. Other noises there may be
–transistor radios of appalling quality, indiscriminate beatings and bangings of unknown origin, automobile horns worn to the point of no return
–but fundamentally what you hear is Indians, talking. An Indian city rides on talk, the way a full-rigged sailing ship rides on the sea. Art and life are one, in that experience. It has in it something of speech, and something of song, together with echoes of music and intimations of dance. It is the Indian moment, par excellence and in excelsis, and–let me tell you–it is worth crossing the world to be there.
New York Times Magazine, distributed by Special Features/Syndicate Sales. John Russell is the chief art critic of the New York Times.
