Living Traditions 2: Everything everywhere, in an Indian mural
First published in January, 2025; background to my forthcoming reflections on the 'Ancient India, Living Traditions'exhibition at the British Museum, London, May-October, 2025.
Kochi, on the south western coast of India, in the state of Kerala, was the centre of the Indian spice trade for hundreds of years. Protected by the Chinese in the fifteenth century, ruled by a succession of Rajas, the first European settlement in India when the Portuguese arrived in 1498, subsequently ruled by the Dutch and then the British, today it’s a thriving commercial port city and tourist destination.
December, 2013, and I’m back for the second time that year. It’s the Christmas holidays, people are at night markets, being entertained, chewing on sugar cane. Sophisticated art cafes, favourite junk shops, distinctive architecture.
On my previous trip, I had discovered Mattancherry Palace, a 16th century palace gifted to the Cochin Rajas by the Portuguese, apparently to appease them after they had plundered a temple nearby.1
It doesn’t look like much from the outside, but stepping inside you’re immediately swallowed up by wall after wall, room after breathless room of brilliantly coloured mural paintings. I hadn’t been allowed to take pictures before, so this time I intended to draw for hours on end as I let the colour and images wash over me. No chance. Drawing was also not allowed.
Eventually, after some searching and mainly sticking to Indian publications, you can find a few books that contain photos of these mural paintings. Like most books on art, however, they focus on close-ups of sections of the walls, and tend to simply describe the mythological stories that the murals narrate. Apart from the copyright issues of reproducing these images here, as I’ve said before, I’m not really interested in describing subject matter in this way.
What I am interested in writing about is what it felt like to be there. What the murals looked and felt like when you stood back from them, rather than focussing in on detail, and what it felt like to be in a whole room of them, with paintings on all four sides of you.
I managed to sneak a small camera in and take some pictures without being noticed. None of them are sharp, many are really fuzzy, but I love these images now, because I can still feel the experience in them.
I’ve been fascinated by the composition and use of space in paintings like these for a long time. I probably first read about this in a book called The Speaking Tree, by a visual artist called Richard Lannoy, published in 1971. Lannoy appears in searches as an artist and a photographer, but also in a more academic looking publication called ‘Saundarya: The perception and practice of beauty in India’, published in 2003.
In The Speaking Tree he talks about his experience of the paintings on the walls of the caves at Ajanta, which are the earliest existing remnants of older painting traditions in India that have now been lost. He has a fabulous interpretation of the ritual practices that might have taken place in the caves, involving the use of hallucinogens, flickering candles and sonic effects2. Much as I’d love to, I’m not going to go into that here, and I’m not sure it fits in the Ajanta context anyway, as the caves are Buddhist, and I’ve not come across hallucinogens being used in Buddhist ritual practices (please get in touch if you know more!).
Lannoy talks interestingly about the way that the forms at Ajanta are placed on the walls in terms of space:
[The paintings] are exceedingly elusive to ‘read’; one must make an appreciable effort to slow down one’s reading of their visual language in order to perceive the spatial and tactile relations established between the the figures. There is no recession - all advance towards the eye, looming from a strange unidentified source to wrap around the viewer … Each figure is inseparable from its environment …
He goes on to suggest that this effect is created through the ‘controlled use of equal tones’, a technique, he says, which was used by Bonnard, Vuillard and Matisse ‘to obtain a hallucinating, visionary effect’, which he also says was used by psychedelic poster artists. I loved reading this guy. For once someone writing about art wasn’t just describing the forms and pigments and techniques of the paintings being discussed. He was assessing them in relation to what he knew of the wider historical and social context of the paintings, and at the same time describing their effect on him as he stood in their presence.
I’m thinking as I write this about whether his comments about space can be applied to the Mattancherry murals, and I think they can.
Every inch of the painting plane is covered; there’s no foreground and background. There’s no perspective. The priority seems to be the inclusion of all the details of the stories that the panels narrate, embedded in a teeming natural world. There’s no above or below; events happen high above other events, occurring at the same time as what’s going on underneath, everything taking place in a form of ritual time which is not remotely linear. The spaces between figures are crammed with animals, birds, small decorative panels; ornate jewellery and stacked up headdresses merge with plants, demons, musical instruments, servants and leaves. Everything seems to merge with everything else, as what Lannoy describes as the uniformity of colour and tone prevents too much of a sense of anything being any more important than anything else. In the earlier (16th century) paintings, at least, even though the stories do often revolve around a particular deity who can clearly be identified, the overall impression is one of a glorious overall fecundity, a celebration of life in all its forms, which for me is a key characteristic of so much of Indian art.
‘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
This celebration of the interdependence of all life forms is perhaps what I most love in Indian art, and the thing that I’ve most wanted to appear in my own paintings. In contrast to what, for me at least, was the dry, cerebral world of contemporary painting, which appeared to me to reject aesthetics and focus only on the individualistic, marketable idea, Indian art floated down from the heavens and gathered me up in its perfect arms, restoring my faith in both art and humans.
Something that I haven’t yet found mentioned in books about the Mattancherry paintings is their strengthening and protective function, part of the meaning of the word alankara.
Alankara can be translated as ‘decoration’, though in Anglophone countries this carries a subtle derogatory nuance. ‘Decoration’ is often associated with either craft or folk art, both of which are placed low in a hierarchy of art snobbery that sees ‘fine art’ as the pinnacle of sophistication, and functional or decorated things as somehow lesser. In architecture, it’s common for people to say that, culturally, Europeans have preferred smooth, unadorned planes (associated with Greek temples), with ornament and decoration being seen as trivial or unsophisticated. I was certainly told this during my degree, that Europeans were horrified by brightly coloured and lavishly decorated Hindu temples, and I’ve read plenty of colonial literature which seems to bear witness to this3.
Vidya Dehejia, in her book ‘The Body Adorned’ (2009), points out that people often refer to Indian sculptures as being naked, when in fact they are ‘adorned’:
The perfectly formed body of the Indian tradition, whether male or female, is decorated with fine fabrics, jewelled ornaments, and flowers. It is further adorned with an entire range of conventions … [which] includes elaborate hairstyling; the heightening of the body’s beauty by anointing it with oils, pastes, cosmetics, fragrances; and a range of other refinements, such as elegance of gait, gesture and posture’. (p24)
As well as representing a complex and refined ideal of beauty, she explains that the Sanskrit word alankara literally means ‘to make sufficient or strengthen, to make adequate’, and that it suggests ‘enhancement in the efficacy of the thing or person thus adorned’. In other words, it makes the person stronger and more powerful. She also talks about another Sanskrit word for ornament, abharanam, which means ‘to bring near, to attract (through magical power)’, in the sense of attracting forces that act to protect the person:
Ornament is auspicious; ornament is protective; ornament makes the body complete, whole beautiful and desirable. To be without ornament is to provoke the forces of inauspiciousness, to expose oneself to danger, even to court danger ... In the context of India, the significance of ornament cannot be overstated. (pp24,25)
Architecture is also protected and beautified by ornament, particularly temples and palaces:
Frequently, barely an inch of plain space remains visible, so that this tendency toward overflowing ornamentation has been termed ‘horror vacui’.4 But the underlying idea is not so simplistic: alankara is much more than a mere dislike or abhorrence of plain surfaces. The ornamentation of buildings in pre-modern India is not ‘mere’ ornament; alankara had a symbolic content of auspiciousness, protection… (p71)
The lavishly painted walls of the Mattancherry palace would have been seen to have this function of strengthening, beautifying and protecting the Raja who lived in the palace.
The idea of art strengthening and protecting figures and buildings will come up again in relation to the next part of my 2013 trip, which continued on to the Jain pilgrimage centre of Sravanabelagola, and the temples at Halebid and Belur (both in Karnartaka, the state ajoining Kerala to the north).
Send me your questions!
Still can’t remove this previous footer, I think it’s because it’s a repost.
https://indianculture.gov.in/paintings/other-portfolio/wall-paintings-kerala
The use of hallucinogens is verifiable at least in principle: The Rig Veda, for example, one of the oldest and most sacred texts of India, discusses ritual uses of an still unidentified hallucinogen known as soma
Having said that, I also wonder how much of this is a cultural fantasy that somehow grew up as part of the Darwinian ideas of progress that I’ve talked about before, which saw cultures and religions as ‘developing’ in a straight line of progress from lesser to superior. In reality, it seems, Greek statues were not the plain, white, unadorned figures we’re used to seeing. According to Gombrich, these are often lifeless copies of huge original statues that were destroyed, which were originally painted in bright colours and decorated with inset jewels.
‘fear of empty spaces’
Greek statues were indeed not lifeless, plain white statues, they were made of gold, bronze or painted marble.
Those who were horrified to see color in India would have gotten quite a shock had they travelled to Ancient Greece!