The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art by Chakrabarti Arindam

Author:Chakrabarti, Arindam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2015-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

A Complex Web: Approaches to Time in Rajput and Mughal Painting

B. N. GOSWAMY

Mughal art is secular, intent upon the present moment, and profoundly interested in individuality . . . It is dramatic rather than static, young, fond of experiment. Rajput painting is essentially an aristocratic folk art, appealing to all classes alike, static, lyrical, and inconceivable apart from the life it reflects.

—Ananda Coomaraswamy

For us trusting physicists, the separation between past, present, and future is a bare, yet stubborn illusion.

—Albert Einstein

It is appropriate perhaps to begin with a painting.

Based on a pada from the Sur Sagar, work of Surdas, the blind poet of Mathura, it houses in the top register the text in five lines. The composition is in raga Nata, and begins thus: “Laal, tumhari murali nekey bajaaoon/jaun taan tum gaavat ho piya, tey hi taan banaaon.” The words are Radha’s, and she addresses Krishna. Let us exchange roles, my love, she says. Whatever melody you are playing on your flute, let me now strike that. And then goes on to detail each reversal of role. Let me do your hair, and let me wear your peacock crown with me wearing your jewellery, and you wearing mine, she says; you turn into the proud and offended beloved, and let me sit, appeasingly, at your feet; you cover your face with a veil, as I did, and let me take the veil off you with love. And so on, it goes. The sport generally goes under the name: viparita rati, meaning love with the roles reversed. Surdas says it quite beautifully.

But equally engaging is the way in which the unnamed Mewar painter visualizes the scene/s. Beginning with the top left, Krishna and Radha are in their normal rupa, so to speak: Krishna playing upon his flute, and Radha listening, completely enraptured. But then, in vignette after fragrant vignette, the roles change: one sees Krishna, instantly recognizable on account of his dark complexion, turn into a woman, and Radha taking on the role of her lover. Krishna has his hair done by Radha; they exchange clothes and jewelry; they walk about in the forest, she leading him; there is mock anger and appeasement; eagerly the lovers bend in an erotic embrace but the roles stay reversed. Finally, after the eye has traveled over the page and traced their cadenced movements, in the bottom register—Radha playing the flute and Krishna listening—they stand, unmoving in time as it were, very close to where Surdas is seated, singing: eyes closed, cymbals in hand.

The work is quintessentially Rajput: aristocratic and folk at the same time, “universal” in its appeal, “at once hieratic and popular,” and “essentially mystic in its suggestion of the infinite significance,” as Coomaraswamy characterized Rajput painting once, of an intimate moment. Here, the same figures appear repeatedly, eleven times in fact, within the same frame; they change positions and places; everything moves and yet remains static; the space in which all this happens remains essentially the same; the “actors” and the composer, divines and mortals, come together, within touching distance of one another.

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