5th Feb, 2007Today we had a lecture on Bhakti in Indian art, took a dance class from 3 very talented women, received a lecture and concert from “Chamuprana”, and attended the last half of a class on Hindi. It was a long and wonderful day. I was misconceived about Bhakti. I assumed that it was just like any other religious movement or devotion – but our lecturer described it as a deeply personal relationship with a God/dess, in which one is “divided” from the world and “united” with the God/dess. According to our lecturer, Bhakti is about love, whereas religious devotion is more based on fear.
Speaking of religion – I was glad to go to the Mosque and the
Hindu
Temple yesterday; one of the things I love about
India is the spirituality seemingly ingrained in everything. However I think I missed being surrounded by it – not just learning about it and seeing examples of it – it felt really good to be in a location where people were praying. I thought a lot about my own limitations when it comes to meditation and prayer – the feeling that I need to understand something, to figure it out before I can let it go, the difficulty for me to have faith in something I cannot see, or something someone tells me to worship. So I liked when our lecturer described the Indian understanding that God is unborn unless humans give him/her human form (through words, imagination, and ones’ own consciousness), such as in one ritual where the devotee gives communion to the deity in its anthropromorphic form, and dissolves the deity at the end of the ritual. He connected this to Yates. The love of Bhakti is focused. Whereas some religions can make you lose your capacity to love by demanding that you love your enemy as your friend, followers of Bhakti create the object to love, embodying ones’ own temperament. The love is so intense that the object disappears; such as, “the color and the page are all” (not what they depict) – and eventually one becomes able to love as Buddha and Jesus did. I would probably follow the sort of Bhakti that worships a formless God/dess (Nirguna Bhakti). I love these aspects of Bhakti: empowering the downtrodden, paradoxes and spontaneity in art forms, incorporating aspects of folk and other cultures, freedom from convention, and that passion is more important than technique. In incorporating folk and Islamic art into traditional Hindu art, were Bhakti followers appropriators? Or fusionists? If race is an social construct, and culture is a blurry many-layered something that for many must be defined post facto, if language is becoming more uniform and globalization more multifaceted, where do appropriation and fusion begin and end? No idea is new or fresh. Where do they come from if not from another space/time? Are superstitions really challenged in Bhakti? What is
India without superstition? Is there a balance or synthesis between Yogi and Commissar world-changing? If the world is an illusion, then what isn’t? If senses are paths of greed, then what isn’t? It is interesting to hear how different each person’s definition of Rasa is. Today: “all that is capable of engaging and moving us produces Rasa”.How Bhakti is accepted and suppressed to the world?1) It exhibits great ebullience, creativity, enlightenment, and energy (what do Hindustanis think of creativity? Can it exist? In FPA 111 we learned that nothing is ever new, nothing is creative – we are simply art-producers. I suppose then we could talk about art-ownership)2) It flies in the face of establishment, and establishment oppresses3) It goes underground or compromises with establishments – creativity ceases, theological writings increase, and the creativity goes somewhere else. I always take the side of the underdog – anti-establishment. But if transgressions against the norm become normative, then “the establishment” becomes the transgressor. I wonder if this is a common dynamic between Muslims and Hindus. It becomes so very complex when you consider multi-normatives and multi-transgressions (ie, add the English into the equation). Fanton (in our first custom courseware reading) says that this conflict is necessary for a national identity to emerge post-colonialism. I am very curious about the process of compromise that follows the realization or introduction of “difference” – from modernity in
India to the incorporation of western instruments into Indian music (the flow of tradition).
From the documentary: I would like to learn more about the differences and similarities of Indian and Western documentary methods – symbolism, perspective, angles, and choice of music. I would like to learn more about connections (which is perhaps the new study for poor ole binary lovers) between religions in different parts of the world, such as the saint of education in
South America compared with Sarswati, female deities and their affect on “collective consciousness”, and so on. It what ways does a documentary artist impact those he/she is studying – by existing, by filtering, by editing?
And concerning the concert. Strong, medium, medium, strong seems as common in Hindustani music as it is in pipe music. What can I say but how lucky we are to have evolved ears and brains sensitive to colorful vibrations, vibrations which “remove physical dust and psychological dust and stain”. The self shines forth (swara)… like scent, music can have the ability to evoke memory. When I am lucky enough to listen to in-the-moment engaging music, I am reminded of times in my life when I have felt very alone, but strong in that alone-ness, and knowing that in the end, alone is really what my experience on this earth will amount to – but that this experience is shared by everyone. Connected to how Rebecca reacted to the musings on Bhakti, perhaps we are never alone (the god/dess is within us).
February 10th, 2007 I have a lot on my head from the lectures with which we have been treated here in
Delhi. I love being immersed in this artsy world, here on the other side of the earth. Lucky me. So here goes… something of an expanded list, I suppose.
On “universal” emotionsThere are 8, 9, or 10 Rasas/ Bhavas (I am unclear on the difference between these two). In my biased upbringing, I learned of fewer base emotions – sadness, joy, anger, and fear. (Elham says they are just fear and doubt, in the west).In Rasa, they are:Love in union and separationHumorPathos/sorrowAnger/wrathHeroismFear/panicDistaste/recoil/disgustWonderment/surprisePeaceShyness
A little bird told me I love to classify. I’ll just call it organization, or simplification…
Sadness:Love in separationPathos
Joy:HumorHeroismWonderment/surprisePeace
Anger/wrath
Fear/panic:Distaste/recoil/disgustShyness
These emotions are also associated with color… intriguingly different from western counterparts:Love in union/separation = green = jealousyHumor = white = purityPathos/sorrow = dove = I’m assuming this is gray = dullness, industry (SFU!)Anger/wrath = red = anger, eroticismHeroism = wheat brown = dirtFear/panic = black = deathDistaste/recoil/disgust = blue = calm, coolnessWonderment/surprise = yellow = cheer
Do these inconsistencies mean anything? I am reminded of personality tests that ask you to organize color or gain some meaning from your favorite colors. I guess, then, that “meaning of color” is a cultural construct. There being different scales of culture – perhaps the “meaning of colors” is different at individual, familial, community, city, state, national, world, and universal levels? Are emotions felt differently by color-blind people and animals? Do we all perceive colors differently?
I am reminded of another connection. I met Rahul, an art critic, on the art-installation field-trip bus. After much discussion of structuralism and post-structuralism and truth and identity, he told me about one perspective in which we are defined by who we are not. Kind of like, a color is actually whatever is not reflected. I like that. In the same vein, are there implications of meaning in sound? In the west, we seem to have adopted Shakespeare’s “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”, while here, syllables and sounds carry more meaning (such as “om”). Are certain sounds more masculine and feminine, and does this create division in language and experience as well as in gender? Perhaps the meanings and genders of sounds carry over to non-human acoustics.
Somewhere between minimalism and ornamentationCan ornamentation be un-superficial? Can it be simple? I am drawn to both simplicity and complexity. I love fractals, where the mega-structure is similar to the micro-structure, such as flowers and galaxies, atoms and planets. I love intricate detail (in doodles, visual art, music, and dance). I am drawn to ideas such as “words within words” and “reading between the lines.” I loved how Matvi Gupta, an Orissi dance instructor, described pieces as flowering – the gradual addition of more and more detail and ornamentation. Maybe it is the contrast, or balance, between minimalism and ornamentation that strikes me (is this possible?). Is there a difference between contrast and balance (not to confuse balance with symmetry)? The division between a fraction and the whole leads me to discretization. Whenever we take photos, take notes, or attempt to document an event, we discretize it. We no longer experience it continuously. Yet, engagement (for me) is never continuous either (I filter and fall in and out of focus). Some people prefer analog photography to digital because the discretization of the silver particles is irregular as opposed to regular – it is possible that we are aware of this subconsciously if not consciously. We can apply this concept to acoustic vs. digital music as well. I haven’t really thought about irregular vs. regular discretization before, but maybe this is why I fell in love with Chuck Close in high school, and gush over mosaics whenever I come across them. Maybe it’s also the notion of creating a whole from fragments and broken parts (potential trash). Every particle is as important as the whole (though perhaps the whole is greater than the sum of its parts). Mosaics seem to exist the world around.
Where clothing is more erotic than nudityKavita Singh, in discussing Indian miniatures, told us that in
India the clothed female is considered to be more erotic than the nude. Most sculptures of females that we have seen here in lectures and on tours are nude, and to my eyes appear erotic. In much of the “obsessively erotic art of Khajuraho and Konarak” shown in Partha Mitter’s Indian Art – the sculptures are nude, but perhaps it is their actions (“oral sex, group sex, and bestiality”) which make them erotic (not their clothing). Perhaps it is in Islamic art that the female body is more erotic when clad and in Hindu art that it is also erotic when unclad. Certainly clothing can make a person appear more sexual than no clothing (if it is cloth which accentuates the titillating hot spots of the time). I find contradiction in Partha Mitter’s descriptions of ideal beauty and the ideals that we have seen. She quotes the ideal as “Slim, youthful, with the eyes of a frightened doe, fine teeth and red lips like the bimba fruit, slim waisted, deep-navelled, slowed down by the weight of the hips and bent by her full breasts, she is the best of her gender created by god”. The Cola bronzes we have seen in lecture and in Indian Art are quite slender at the hip. Many of the female sculptures we have seen are round, and many of them are slender. The turn of the century artist Abanindranath Tagore, in search of an “indigenous style eventually led to his paintings on the divine lovers, Radha and Krsna, which introduced to the Bengali audience an alternative, emaciated ideal of feminine beauty” (Mitter). I suppose beauty is different all over
India and throughout time, as well as different around the world. And concerning eyes of a frightened doe: coming from a different time period, many of the women in the movies we have seen are more belligerent than “frightened” or “submissive”. Hooray for variety. I liked the embracing of Akka in the documentary we watched the other day – that her nudity was not a symbol of sex, but a symbol of asceticism. However… I wish it wouldn’t have been such a bad thing for her to be a sexual figure.Are breast portrayed differently around the world? Are they smaller in Western or East Asian art than South Asian? I remember going through art museums in the states and in
Europe when I was younger, and marveling at the often odd looking breasts (maybe they are difficult for artists to mould). Like any other Westerner, I am fascinated by temple-connected erotic art in
India, and I want to romanticize the roles of Devidasis. I want to be able to appreciate sexuality, beauty, and eroticism (whether male or female). It is not always exploitative – it can empower women (such as Prof. Shamsul Islam’s impression of the Cabaret in 1900s
France). I suppose one example is the Tantric movement – “Yoginis or female ascetic-sorceresses were feared because of their association with Tantric practices.” And - “the mother cult: Prehistoric north-west India was part of a large swathe extending from the Indus valley to
Asia Minor where a matriarchal religion of sexual cults and sacred prostitution was practiced.” PARTS OF
INDIA WERE ONCE MATRIARCHAL?? Tell me more. Power and repression have such strange cycles and manifestations. It makes me sad that most religions and societies are hell-bent on virginal purity (especially with women). It makes me sad that women oppress other women because they themselves have been oppressed. How are these sculptures horrific and erotic at the same time, as described by Professor Naman Ahuja? Is this a social construct?
It is fascinating to me that sculpture can be revered to the point of having a legal identity, yet sculpture artists/producers lived and worked on the outskirts of town (according to Professor Ahuja) because what they did was “dirty” work – physical as opposed to intellectual labor. Elham and I, looking at a sculpture in a museum one day, talked about how we looked at it: I think about the artist’s intent, and what they would be proud of in the “finished product”. Elham gives importance to the art production process, and that is the artfulness that matters, which resonates in the final object. Both of us consider the “production process” to be potentially meditative, which in my mind is intellectual. But not always – sometimes work can be pretty wretched. Often workers produced art that was for a religious purpose different from their own, which leads to a questioning of the importance of intent.The destruction of these sculptures is such a powerful image – Taliban destruction of Buddhist sculptures, stealth bombing of archaeological sites. To me it is tragic, but clearly others have different agendas. I am mystified by (the living, breathing) Prof Shamsul Islam’s Bush-bashing experience. Was it because of ignorance, repression, and fear? The same reasons that over half of
America voted for Bush in the first place?The destruction and undervaluing of sculptures is sad, and inevitable, but also seems to be necessary. There is so much artistic production – will it fill up the world? Would this be such a bad thing?
The bird as a symbol of connection to the heavensThe hyma bird, in the miniatures, was a symbol of royalty. The Muslims spread corn kernels for the birds at the Jamu Mashi Mosque. A stork (escaped from the local zoo) brought my sister’s soul to my mother before she was born.
Narratives. There are so many different methods – syncretic, synoptic, continuous, frame-by-frame, aural/oral, musical, dance, film… For a time, Western art was as connected to the bible as Indian art is to the Ramayan or Mahabharat. Like life in the west, I believe the art has become less dependent on the bible for inspiration. Yet, as an art student deficient in Biblical understanding, I feel I can still appreciate Western artwork (though I may not understand the background or context). Would this be possible in Indian art? Perhaps it is the emphasis on the narrative in so much of the Indian art that we have seen that would make appreciation less difficult without understanding. Or maybe I know more about Western Biblical references than I think. Anyway, the timelines and evolutions of art seem to be different everywhere, depending very so much on social, political, and economic situations.
The importance of DarshanAccording to Prof. Ahuja, when one removes an artwork from its environment, it loses a sense of scale, context, and understanding. Does it removed darshan, as well? How does darshan exist to people who believe more in nonimage? Are works in
India less precious because of the notion of nonimage (such as the “Jain Nonimage” representation shown in class)? Can devotion be as strong to a nonimage as it is to a religion or God/dess, to an art form, to a parent or lover? Devotion requires faith, I think, which is perhaps why it eludes me – but it fascinates me – I think one can gain a more in depth experience and understanding of the devoted, with devotion. It seems so connected to passion and love. I’d like to explore this further. Can the process of de/recontextualization (at the same time) be experienced by a non-image?
On the evolution of religion, tree spirits, and sculpture“The Pagan” has influenced religion in Europe, India, and the
Americas (as well as other places, probably). Mythic stories evolve into bibles and moral codes, such as the “abducted woman” evolving into Sita. I am drawn to the Yaksha/Yakshini figure of old who reciprocates and embodies nature – the tree spirit who gives the Buddha a hand as he walks over water, the protector – exhibiting grace, seductiveness, and ornamentation, and symbolizing fertility. (According to the professor that I’m in love with, they are represented best by terracotta for its fluidity, freedom, and immediacy). How are they represented in religion today? I was very moved, also, by the (simple) earth goddess image we saw in class.
A few questions on symbols.Garnet eyes are so striking in an otherwise stone/clay sculpture – this contrast I am sure is experienced much differently when the sculpture is painted “garishly” (we have no idea).How did the British respond to the use of human bones for ritual purposes?The simple symbol of Tripataka (palmed hand facing forward) is everywhere… in Southwestern American Indian rock-art, the Hand of Fatima, the symbol for Buddhism, and a mutra in Indian dance. It is a symbol I like so much I wouldn’t mind getting a tattoo of it on my body. But due to its ubiquitous-ness, does it have more potential to become the new Swastika? I am interested in the dress/ceremonial gear aspect of a cultural production. There is such a ritual to costuming oneself. My band certainly performs better when we are in uniform – some people believe that children who wear uniforms to school do better.
FearlessnessIn cultures where dance is a part of every-day life, imperfection and wild abandon seems okay and even commonplace (such as, the spontaneous dance). The connection to other people via body movement is sometimes seen as a path toward enlightenment (for example, whirling dervishes). Many people in my social circles back home fear dancing and body movement, feeling self-conscious and awkward. Does the lack of fear in these “other cultures” carry over to different aspects of life? Is it evidence of an alternative aesthetic that classical Indian art (eg dance) seems more open to portrayals/appreciation of life-ugliness and awkwardness than classical art in the west?
