Like a stream, never stopping, never rushing, never pushing
Indian art sutures me into the deep layers of the world
This time I’ve picked up again on Buhner’s idea of going deeper into the world, which two weeks ago I made into a question to consider in relation to the art that I see - Does it take me deeper into the world? I came across this image from an Indian temple recently and was so seduced by it that the question came back to me with this figure as its most resounding answer. Yes, a thousand times yes…
I’m not going to tell you what this image represents. I’m not going to tell you whether it’s ‘a god’ or a form of decoration, and I’m not going to tell you what or why that thing that looks like a skull is in its hair, or anything about that thing that might be a serpent on its neck.
I can’t stop looking at it. Although the legs seem chunky and the feet large, the body has a graceful energy that to me feels like a velvet wave rippling through the air.
The arm and hand on the left echo and support the curving body, the hand stabilises everything by unexpectedly planting itself in the opposite direction to the wave. It’s not a rigid stabiliser though, its thumb and forefinger are delicately touching each other as the rest of the fingers counterbalance the whole.
This left-hand side is male. His chunky knee shows beneath his embroidered body-covering, there’s no fat on his torso. The snake that winds around his earring echoes the line of his necklace; the shape of the sacred thread from shoulder to hip.
On the right, the thread encounters an unexpected breast, folds of female torso, and a belly that looks like a plump loaf of freshly-baked bread. The waist narrows here and then blossoms out into the hip which sweeps down to the ground in one line to meet a piece of foot jewellery. The arm on this side points back towards the body with elongated fingers which, like the body, follow three angles, each plane moving away from the one before. The whole figure is a river of pulsing, flowing life, even though not a single one of its elements is ‘true to life’.
Indian art pulls me in to the deep world; the world of interconnected ecosystems, of life energies; it shows me forms moving with blood, creepers moving with sap; animals interacting with humans, flowers floating in the sticky air.
It shows me seasons of rain and of heat, human longing and the sting of love.
Humans in landscapes filled with trees, plants and animals, in relationship; here a deer is transfixed by the musician’s playing.
Gods walk with humans; Krishna sits on the roof of a building, dances with the milkmaids. Earthly love is often a symbol of longing for the Divine. Creatures, imaginary and real, intermingle with humans in a teeming creation where everything is connected, where the human world is just a part of the whole.
Gods embody energies; cycles of creation and destruction, male and female principles. They have wives, produce offspring, exemplify the generative forces in all living things. In human life, love and sensuality are simply part of the fullness of life, along with colour, form, texture, scent, movement, music, line and word.
In Classical India the arts were not seen as distinct categories, but as mutually complimentary and reinforcing:
Speak to me about the making of images
Without a knowledge of the art of dancing
the rules of painting are very difficult to understand
Please speak to me about the rules of dancing
The practice of dancing is difficult to understand
by one who is not acquainted with music
Without music, dancing cannot exist at all.
So tell me first about music
Without singing music cannot be understood
He who knows the rules of singing
Knows everything properly.
Selective translation of the opening verses of the Vishnudharmottaram, an Indian text on painting
Paintings engage with multiple layers of meaning, as can be seen in the ‘Garland of Ragas’ (Ragamala ) series. These are paintings which depict ‘variations of the Indian musical modes called ragas. They stand as a classical example of the amalgamation of art, poetry and classical music in medieval India’1.
The Vilaval ragaini is to be performed in the morning, as suggested by the sun rising in a dark sky. In poetry this raga is described as a lady preparing to meet her lover, and here she is shown looking in a mirror and fixing her earrings.
Even after years of studying and absorbing Indian art, when I look at these paintings I still find myself lost in this way of seeing and being that refuses to recognise boundary or separation.
Coming back to stone sculpture, the idea of everything in all of the worlds being a single living whole is represented somewhat differently in the image below, which I photographed recently in the British Museum.
Perhaps you’ve seen an image like this before; ornate, mysterious, explained to you by a label. What a museum or a textbook can't give you a sense of is the physical context which such an image would most likely have been a part of. Even in this lone piece, God is not in isolation, but embedded in a multitude of figures and creatures.
On the Hoysala temple wall below, the images of God are crowded into a continuous frieze of elements from the natural and beyond-natural worlds; flowers and winding creepers, animals, dancers, musicians; serpent gods and mythical creatures, waves of water and tumbling vines.
Nothing is set apart. The whole universe is a vast ecological system in which the primary life process is one of bursting forth, pouring forth, growing, flourishing, dying, decaying, withdrawing into seed form, and coming to life again. Within this systemic whole, everything is alive and interrelated.
Diana Eck, see below
Zooming in to the image… a mythical creature, or lion, above an elephant; an elephant with a human body2.
Figures bending like trees in the wind, a cow curving its neck to look at them.
A human-type creature emerging from the jaws of another creature.
A flower as one of the main signifiers of God.
A fish, a boar with a human body, a turtle.
If you know your Hindu iconography you’ll recognise some of these symbols and signifiers, not least that God always has a ‘vehicle’ which is a bird or an animal, and that he or she can incarnate in various forms. The academic study of Indian art seems to focus endlessly on naming and recognising; here I want to simply draw attention to the fact that God is represented as part of an undulating sea of animals, humans, mysterious creatures, plants and flowers.
The sense of opposing or diverse aspects of life being seen as elements within an overarching whole is exemplified by this Harihara image in another way, which is that it portrays two usually individually-represented forms of God; Harihara is half Shiva and half Vishnu.
Similarly, the image at the beginning of this essay, Ardhanarishvara, combines the male form of Shiva with the female form of Parvati, who is variously seen as God in her own right, Shiva’s female energy, or sometimes his wife.
Ardhanarishvara represents the synthesis of masculine and feminine energies of the universe (Purusha and Prakriti) and illustrates how Shakti, the female principle of God, is inseparable from (or the same as, according to some interpretations) Shiva, the male principle of God, and vice versa. The union of these principles is exalted as the root and womb of all creation. Another view is that Ardhanarishvara is a symbol of Shiva's all-pervasive nature. The right half is usually the male Shiva, illustrating his traditional attributes.
People have often spoken to me about Indian sculpture being ‘sexy, or ‘erotic’, but it’s impossible, in my mind, to reduce the philosophies and practices of these traditions (for example, a stone monolith embodying the generative principle of life, a lingam) to what we might mean by ‘sexy’.
The lingam is an emblem of generative and destructive power. While rooted in representations of the male sexual organ, the lingam is regarded as the "outward symbol" of the "formless reality", the symbolization of merging of the "primordial matter" (Prakṛti) with the "pure consciousness" (Purusha) in the transcendental context. The lingam-yoni iconography symbolizes the merging of microcosmos and macrocosmos, the divine eternal process of creation and regeneration, and the union of the feminine and the masculine that recreates all of existence
In fact, the very idea of the lingam being ‘a representation of the male sexual organ’ is a deeply contested idea which scholars have been arguing about for many years3.
This essay has grown a thousand arms and legs since it began with my response to the glorious image below. I don’t know what I’m doing even mentioning the complexities of Prakriti and Purusha, which I have no way of understanding as a complete outsider to these traditions.
Indian art takes me into depths of the world that are completely beyond my capacity to understand.
I’d like to finish with an attempt to return to the overall principle that this rather scattered and unsatisfactory piece of writing has tried to grapple with in the space of one short week (thanks, algorithm).
‘Creation’ in this Hindu view of things is designated by the word srishthi, literally the ‘pouring forth’ of the universe from the source. As a complex plant or tree grows, bursting forth and developing from the simple unitary seed, or as a complex creature emerges and grows from an embryo, so is this whole and diverse universe poured forth ... There is no God who stands apart from it and creates it. Indeed, everything there is, as far as thought can reach, is within the unitary systemic whole … One could say that everything is a manifestation that has poured forth from the living body of the Whole …
The notion that the universe is a systemic whole is foundational in the Hindu imagination. Whether it is the egg, or the seed, or the body - all of which are important originary symbols - the system is complete. Nothing is left out. Nothing is set apart. The whole universe is a vast ecological system in which the primary life process is one of bursting forth, pouring forth, growing, flourishing, dying, decaying, withdrawing into seed form, and coming to life again. Within this systemic whole, everything is alive and interrelated.
Diana Eck, 2012 India, A Sacred Geography, p114
Everything
is
alive
and
interrelated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragamala_paintings
The images here are all closeups from the same image in the British Museum, but the camera overcorrected for the changing lighting conditions.
Sexualization in Orientalist literature
Since the 19th century CE, states Dasgupta, the popular literature has represented the lingam as the male sex organ. This view contrasts with the traditional abstract values they represent in Shaivism wherein the lingam-yoni connote the masculine and feminine principles in the entirety of creation and all existence.[9]
The colonial era Orientalists and Christian missionaries, raised in the Victorian mold where sex and sexual imagery were a taboo subject, were shocked by and were hostile to the lingam-yoni iconography and reverence they witnessed.[9][58][59] The 19th and early 20th century CE colonial and missionary literature described lingam-yoni, and related theology as obscene, corrupt, licentious, hyper-sexualized, puerile, impure, demonic and a culture that had become too feminine and dissolute.[9][60][61] To the Hindus, particularly the Shaivites, these icons and ideas were the abstract, a symbol of the entirety of creation and spirituality.[9] The colonial disparagement in part triggered the opposite reaction from Bengali nationalists, who more explicitly valorised the feminine. Swami Vivekananda called for the revival of the Mother Goddess as a feminine force, inviting his countrymen to “proclaim her to all the world with the voice of peace and benediction”.[60]
According to Doniger, the terms lingam and yoni became explicitly associated with human sexual organs in the western imagination after the widely popular first Kamasutra translation by Sir Richard Burton in 1883.[62] In his translation, even though the original Sanskrit text does not use the words lingam or yoni for sexual organs, and almost always uses other terms, Burton adroitly avoided being viewed as obscene to the Victorian mindset by avoiding the use of words such as penis, vulva, vagina and other direct or indirect sexual terms in the Sanskrit text to discuss sex, sexual relationships and human sexual positions. Burton used the terms lingam and yoni instead throughout the translation.[62] This conscious and incorrect word substitution, states Doniger, thus served as an Orientalist means to “anthropologize sex, distance it, make it safe for English readers by assuring them, or pretending to assure them, that the text was not about real sexual organs, their sexual organs, but merely about the appendages of weird, dark people far away.”[62] Similar Orientalist literature of the Christian missionaries and the British era, states Doniger, stripped all spiritual meanings and insisted on the Victorian vulgar interpretation only, which had “a negative effect on the self-perception that Hindus had of their own bodies” and they became “ashamed of the more sensual aspects of their own religious literature”.[63] Some contemporary Hindus, states Doniger, in their passion to spiritualize Hinduism and for their Hindutva campaign have sought to sanitize the historic earthly sexual meanings, and insist on the abstract spiritual meaning only.[63]
Rejection
The sexualization is criticized by Stella Kramrisch[64] and Moriz Winternitz who opines that the lingam in the Shiva tradition is “only a symbol of the productive and creative principle of nature as embodied in Shiva”, and it has no historical trace in any obscene phallic cult.[65]
According to Alex Wayman, various works on Shaivism by some Indian authors, following the Shaiva philosophical texts and spiritual interpretations, “deny that the linga is a phallus.”[66] To the Shaivites, a linga is neither a phallus nor do they practice the worship of erotic penis-vulva, rather the linga-yoni is a symbol of cosmic mysteries, the creative powers and the metaphor for the spiritual truths of their faith.[67]
According to Swami Sivananda, the correlation of the linga and phallus is wrong; the lingam is only the external symbol of Shiva’s formless being. He further states that it is the light or power of consciousness, manifesting from Sadashiva.[68]
The popular belief is that the Siva Lingam represents the phallus or the virile organ, the emblem of the generative power or principle in nature. This is not only a serious mistake but a grave blunder. In the post-Vedic period, the Linga has become symbolic of the generative power of Lord Siva. Linga is the differentiating mark. It is certainly not the sex mark.[69]
From fon Wikipedia
Beautifully written :)