Living Traditions 5: Why Indian art?

First published in February, 2025; background to my forthcoming reflections on 'Ancient India, Living Traditions'at the British Museum, May-October, 2025.

In my four recent (republished) essays on Indian art, I introduced my lifelong fascination with India and its art, and then reflected on the three sites that I visited on my trip to South India in 2013/2014. I talked about the extraordinary murals of Mattancherry palace, and the role that ornament (alankara) plays in Indian aesthetics; its function of strengthening and protecting people, palaces and temples. I wrote about the use of space in those paintings; the way that the painting plane is completely covered with animals, gods, foliage, servants and kings, with no sense of either perspective/distance or linear time, and how this reflects a recurring theme in Indian art, that of life ‘pouring forth’ in a tumbling celebration of its own abundance.

Mural paintings at Matthancherry and Sravanabelagola

I wrote about the very different Jain paintings that I visited in Sravanabelagola; neglected rather than celebrated, arranged in boxes and frames in contrast to the teeming walls of Mattancherry; before finally discussing the supremely ornate Hoysala temples of Belur and Halebid. Now, though, I find myself wanting to pause and ask, what was I doing there in the middle of rural Karnataka, looking at these things? Why was I there?

I wrote in the Mattancherry piece that one of the things that drew me to Indian art was its celebration of the vivacity and interdependence of all life forms, and how this compared to the impression that my early art school experiences had left me with; that contemporary art was dry, cerebral, rejecting aesthetics (and figurative approaches), and focussing only on the individual, marketable idea.

Bhutesvara Yakshis Mathura reliefs 2nd century CE

I didn’t realise it at the time, but engagement with the energy, sensuality and wildness of life which I found in Indian art, over and over again, in so many different forms, satisfied a thirst that I had no idea was in me. Meeting Indian art felt like a relief, like finally being able to breathe after being shut up for a long period in a dank, stuffy room. In India I was allowed to love beauty, to love form, to love life itself, without cynicism, without cleverness, without individual one-up-manship.

In India there was no need to choose between abstract or figurative representations because they co-existed without being named; both temporary creations in villages and festivals, and permanent sculptures and carvings in temples, used patterns, symbols, figures and objects interchangeably. Figurative images in this context were based on an entirely different history and set of ideas; notions of beauty, for example, were idealised and based on the meaning of particular shapes and the importance of measurement, rather than trying to create an illusion of reality. Symbolic patterns and designs were not seen as being lower than figurative forms in a hierarchy of importance¹ , in fact, non-figurative representations were sometimes regarded as being more important or significant than figurative ones; abstract shapes and designs were often used as sophisticated tools in esoteric traditions which grappled with deep questions about the nature of reality.

Rangoli, auspicious decorations outside the doors of houses; copper Yantra meditation image; and non-iconic and iconic images of Shiva

One of the things that bound so many different forms of visual expression together in India was the fact that a great many of them them, at least perhaps before the 20^th century,² were created for use in the practices of a daily life, where there was no sense of secular/religious, ritual/philosophical, or even Hindu/Jain/Parsi etc. Until very recent times the practices and daily rituals of people living in India were inseparable from all other aspects of life.

‘Hinduism’, though now often appearing to have a clear set of principles and a key text³ was never a religion like Christianity, Islam, or Judaism. The term was invented by Muslims who, arriving in India seeking trade, noticed many strange practices going on around them. Coming from a religion that had a prophet and a central text, they assumed they were looking at something similar, and called what they were seeing Hinduism, which at the time simply meant ‘the religion practiced by the people who live around the Indus river’ (now in present day Pakistan). What they were actually observing were the practices of many different systems and philosophies; local goddess cults, ancient ascetic practices, and later Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, and a variety of devotional cults.

With the absence of a distinction between secular and religious, and the fact that so many artistic expressions were made for philosophical, metaphysical or ritual purposes, not only was there no recognition of ‘abstract’ and ‘figurative’⁴, but questions about ‘originality’ and ‘individual expression’ would also not have been recognised (at the time the art I was looking at would have been made), as most art-making related to social function rather than focussing on individual artists⁵.

I was an outsider to the many complexities of the various traditions that coexist, side by side, in India; I was never going to understand what anything ‘meant’ in its original context. All I had was the way that what I encountered affected me, the way that it entered my senses.

India assaulted me with beauty, which had been banned from my studies and experiences of contemporary European and American art. The whole culture seemed to revel in joyous engagement with every possible form of aesthetic experience; colour and shape, sound, texture, smell - a kaleidoscopic attack of atmosphere and sensation. Brilliantly coloured saris, shot silk weaves, golden threaded borders, kohl-lined eyes; music blasting out from radios, trucks and buses sounding deafening horns, street-sellers shouting their wares. Glistening oils, coloured pastes, sandalwood and patchouli; jasmine-braided hair, starry white flowers tumbling down against black oiled strands. Images on billboards, on painted trucks, and pasted to time-faded walls; images on amulets, pinned above roadside tea-stalls; braided marigolds hung in strands above tiny shrines. It flowed over me, soothing my parched soul, welcoming me in some way that I’ve never really understood until this moment.

A coffee plantation in the north of Kerala; street vendor in Kochi; new year celebrations in Kochi; Kochi street scene

India was alive. From the exposed, dusty earth succeeding on every street, despite attempts to cover it with tarmac; to the wild wedding processions that blasted the night with amplified music powered by portable generators, lit up by people carrying striplights attached to poles walking in front of painted elephants festooned with mirror-embroidery, followed by cars sounding their horns. Alive with the jingling of ankle bracelets and bangles on moving arms, with people dancing at the slightest opportunity, with classical musicians still singing for God in the warm night of a modern art centre in the heart of a thriving present-day city. It lifted me up and made the blood move in my frozen veins, even though I knew that large numbers of people still lived in poverty, that the politics were dark, and that the culture embodied serious inequalities and injustices. Despite all of that, India pulled me back again and again.

When I returned to South India in 2012/2013, and then again in 2013/2014, all of these feelings and impressions had been dormant for many, many years. But when I started to paint again, it was Indian colours that appeared.

Watercolour and ink, 2013

I don’t know what I was hoping for when I went back to study the paintings and the temples in 2013/2014. I had no clear agenda in terms of my art. I knew that I loved Indian forms but I also knew that they were loaded with philosophical significance, and that I wasn’t looking to bring that significance into my own work. Yet still they pulled me. It was an unfathomable mystery, and all I knew to do was to follow.

Something in me just wanted to be there, to feel the warmth of temple flagstones under my bare feet, to gaze into the dark interiors of ancient sacred spaces, to see a shocking red smear of vermillion paste on a black stone image, garlanded in a wreath of fresh marigolds. I wanted to hear chattering voices and birds bouncing off the polished stone, inhale the smell of incense and burning oil, all the while surrounded by earnest humans intent on something I had no chance of ever understanding.

1. I talked about this in Everything Everywhere….in an Indian mural in relation to the idea of alankara. Alankara can be translated as ‘decoration’, but in Anglophone countries this word 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.

2. So leaving aside developments in Indian art in the 20^th century that were initially influenced by European art.

3. These things have developed in relatively recent years to serve both specific political interests, and/or the development of a sense of identity in the diaspora.

4. The one place that I’m aware of where this distinction is discussed is in some texts about the use of images in philosophical or devotional practices. It’s not an artistic discussion, but a philosophical one, about figurative images being made for ‘the common man’ who is unable to appreciate the more subtle, invisible aspects of God without some kind of visual representation.

5. Of course this it true for medieval Europe as well, but I’m not trying to do a fair historical overview. I’m exploring my own experiences and motivations in relation to my ongoing questions about making art.