Courtesy: The Gita. Niyogi Books
T
he advent of photography in the 1840s changed forever the meaning of the visual in India. For the first time in South Asian history the starkly realist photograph, as an incorruptible monument of memory, blurred the boundaries between reality and representation. Even a summary look at any sizeable sample of the 19th century photographs, largely put in place by the British administrators for the purposes of survey and governance, would reveal that the implicit point of photography is to delegitimize what Michel Foucault calls certain ‘familiar landmarks of thought’, the very notion of representation inherited by the Indian psyche from pre-modern India being one such landmark. Photography brought along with it a certain way of ordering reality; it forced the seething and spilling surface of what shows up as the real to adhere to the conformist demands of its lens. The rhetoric of the real stands attenuated to the two dimensional surface of the photograph. So, what was the visual in South Asia prior to photography? More pointedly, how did the visual acquire its legitimating function is South Asian societies prior to the arrival of colonialism? This is an important question as much for understanding the historical evolution of visual culture in South Asia as it is to understand the role of the visual in integrating the social order and its components. Alok Bhalla’s and Chandra Prakash’s Deval’s The Gita: Mewari Miniature Painting (1680-1698) by Allah Baksh, primarily a book of Mewari miniature paintings, could offer some important clues.
The Gita is beautifully produced, and all the paintings are accompanied with a humane and helpful commentary. It perhaps never happened in the history of writing about Indian art that an entire book is devoted to reproducing several hundred miniature works of one single painter, Allah Baksh. Indeed, it is altogether rare that works of painterly art are credited to persons with distinctive identities in India. Allah Baksh was a 17th century painter who belonged to the reputed Mewari School of miniature painting. Under the patronage of Maharana Jai Singh of Mewar, he produced a painting each for all the couplets of the Bhagavadgita. The Gita then is a selection of paintings representing all the 18 chapters of the Bhagavadgita, generously accompanied with a commentary-cum-interpretation devoted to each painting.
Also Read: THE GITA: MEWARI MINIATURE PAINTINGS (1680-1698) BY ALLAH BAKSH. AN INTRODUCTION BY ALOK BHALLA
First of all, a few primary details about the paintings. All paintings are of the standard miniature size. A Mewari version of the corresponding Sanskrit couplet from the Bhagavadgita is featured at the top of each panting. Each painting is a pictorialization of the verbal content expressed in the couplet. Hence, these paintings are unlike others of the same genre because the pictorial content draws its meaning from the propositional content expressed in a couplet; the visual in each miniature is a representation of an idea or a complex of ideas (abstract) which is featured at the top. Paintings of high quality color printing are very well produced in every alternate page—one to two pictures per page—of the book so as not to miss the complete view of each painting. It is a pity that the book contains only a fraction of Allah Baksh entire work, albeit an important one, for several thousands are attributed to him.
The Gita can be viewed as a book with two parts which run parellely. One is the painterly text, and the other the commentarial text about the painting. The paintings together are about the moral universe of the Bhagavadgita: its prescriptions, ideas, doctrines, devotionalism, social attitudes and sentiments, values, ironies, priorities and emphases and several other things. In this respect, the paintings are at one level tied up with the “text”, both at the surface level and at a deeper level, as it was interpreted by the hand which painted them. At another level, the “text’s message is targeted at an implied devotional audience/consumer, perhaps designated by the patron who commissioned the paintings. Thus, the paintings have into them encoded a moral sensibility and a clear soteriological emphasis that was contemporaneous to the painter and his audience. Any typical painting, viewed as a painting per se detached from the couplet, is a colorful assemblage of persons, animals, plants, landscape, institutional emblems and ritual objects. Besides, in all the paintings one finds the Arjuna, seated in a chariot drawn by a couple of white horses, with Krishna in the driving seat as a constant presence. It must be mentioned that the color schemes explored in the miniatures offer a striking testimony to the remarkable chromatic sensibilities of the Indian artists. The colors used are rich and diverse; the visuals are stunning and imaginative. Each painting is ensconced in a narrative context whose content is suggested by the overarching couplet that guides it. Since the ideas are abstract and propositional in nature, the painterly craft is obligated to find dramatic and innovative modes of turning these ideas into meaningful pictures. One would encounter the frequent employment of symbolic and allegorical modes of representation in the paintings. Hence, the paintings frequently show invisible demarcations within them to accommodate multiple moments of action. If in one corner there is a depiction of the fire ritual, in another corner there would be an ascetic practicing penance. The text is in this sense multitextual and multivalent, and calls of great interpretive dexterity on the interpreter’s part.
The commentary is astute, intelligent and adequately sensitive both to the formal and the moral dimension of the text. The Indian miniature paintings, owing to the constraints of the medium and the craft, are not quite amenable to capturing the moods, personalities and expressions of characters. Sometimes the depicted persons could resemble stock characters offering very little scope to understand their individualities and psychologies. Despite these limitations the commentary makes valiant efforts at several places to correlate colors and images with thoughts and emotions suggested by the shlok. The commentary offered for the series of paintings beginning with the 56th couplet in the second chapter is a good example of this. At the same time, I would also think that any interpretive effort must be guarded, especially if it were to impute content in excess of what is warranted in terms of psychological depth or emotions to these characters; or, whatever one sees in them ought to be sanctioned by the choice of interpretive principles one follow, which may be offered as caveats to any exercise of reading these images. In this respect, the commentary is more on the generous side, and shows a certain lack of discipline and slack in attempting at a systematic reading of the text. The commentary exhibits a strong tendency to draw connections and parallels, both intratextually and intertextually; and is indeed liberally peppered with eclectic references, from Simone Weil and Theodor Adorno to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Stanley Cavell, which is strongly indicative of the intellectual breadth and perspicacity of the commentator. Another aspect of the commentary is its pellucid prose, not too critical often, but very lively and comforting. It is simply delight to read the prose written by Alok Bhalla, who already attained ample recognition as an able and virtuoso translator par excellence of his generation.
Related Essay: Narratemes of the Visual: D. Venkat Rao reviews The Gita. Mewari Miniature Paintining(1680-1698) by Allah Baksh
Although Bhagavadgita is a poem inscribed in a pedagogic context of spiritual enlightenment, Krishna enlightens the benighted Arjuna, it is also a rich compendium of metaphysical ideas and doctrines. It spawned generations of commentary across centuries, both scholastic and apocryphal, and for the erudite and for the laity. There is also the astute Jnaneshvari by the exemplary Jnanadev which bridges high and the low traditions of commentary. More recently, the 20th century saw a veritable explosion of commentaries by several Indians, like Gandhi, Tilak, Aurobindo and so on. Alok Bhalla is persuaded that the Bhagavadgita, in its advocacy of ahimsa—nonviolence, forcefully communicates a humanist ethos of love, compassion and resistance to violence and cruelty. And he shares this persuasion with Gandhi. While Gandhi’s approach to the Bhagavadgita is an intensely moralistic one, he primarily uses it as a source of moral guidance. Gandhi, as a saint and as a political worker, turned to the Bhagavadgita to clarify his own moral position with respect to a range of conflicts and issues he faced in his public life. He looked toward the Bhagavadgita as a sourcebook of inspiration and guidance, in the face of the exigencies of his own personal and political life. For example, the visionary ecumenism that Gandhi sees in the sattvika view of things, i.e. the universally harmonious and approbatory view of everything, is not something that one finds in the original text. Since the commentary in The Gita reflects the author’s general outlook, the paintings also bespeak a certain kind of secular humanist view of things. I am however not very confident about such a reading. I would think that the visual text, as one sees it, given its historical distance from our current location and standpoint, and our own position as scholars in the academic business of producing knowledge, does not permit us entirely to make such a reading a plausible one.
Allah Baksh’s paintings are a part of premodern India’s visual culture. These works belong to a much larger tradition emanating from various geographical centres of South Asia. They are not realist in the modern sense of the term, nor do they employ techniques like linear perspective; they however generally adhere to the aesthetic principles of colors, curves and lines of the Indian craft culture. As pictures, they are largely meant for private consumption, both for amusement and edification. Hence the painterly text does not cater to public viewing and reception, as indeed is the case with European painting traditions across the centuries. The Indian miniatures are records of private memories and fantasies, or records of ceremonial events and public commemorations among others, constrained and enabled by the codes and conventions of their painterly craft. What is public about them is that they tend to be couched in a particular style of depiction, with stock features and formulae. Given that it is visual medium mostly controlled by the artist who in turn is bound to obey the conventions of his art, the text potentially acquires proportions far in excess to what is construed as reality. In this sense, the miniature paintings amount to being totally obverse to modern photography.
Any act of reading an image is always in relation to the pertinent system of signs within which it is embedded, making the very act of reading a highly constrained affair. The visual text itself is embedded, rather deeply, in all that is patently known today as the complex and entrenched context of the Hindu tradition and its system of signs, including what to many is corrosive about the hierarchical social order it sanctions, “a rigidly segmented society” as the author puts it. It is a central feature of the Bhagavadgita that a strong devotional ethic runs throughout the text in so much that the divine and its embodiment, as Krishna, is transcendentalized and universalized at the same time. This kind of a complex vision of the transcendental and pantheistic divinity is at the heart of the Bhagavadgita’s theology. The paintings pertaining to Krishna revealing the cosmic form—vishvaroop—in chapter 11 offer stunning visualizations of this theology. As one can see, the tradition is writ large into Allah Baksh’s text: the yogis and householders, the various symbolisms of mortality and fertility, the iconography of religious practices, the social types of people, the separation of duties and vocations, the imagery from the textual lore of the Hindu narrative traditions, images of good and evil, the depictions of the diurnal ritual and life, food and the social context, the forms of social and ritual communication, the sense of community, and a plethora of other features of these paintings indicate that the painterly text acts as an apologist for a traditional moral universe informed and accented by a corresponding soteriology. All that is ‘shown’, such as animals, objects, colors, rituals, pleasures and pains, sufferings, emotions, sentiments, moral duty and obligation, ideas about spiritual life and guidance, its social world etc are deeply marked by the accents of the general teleology of the Hindu tradition. It is perhaps difficult to imagine a crack or a furrow in the firmament imagined and etched by this tradition. The Bhagavadgita’s humanism is actually embedded in this sort of an entrenched soteriological context. To what extent is Allah Baksh’s text framed and limited by the ideological makeup of the Hindu tradition is an important question. It is perhaps the case that the text forges some kind of a legitimation of the traditional worldview. Alternatively, given the non-realist graphic surface of a miniature, as opposed to a propositionally delimited linguistic expression—the couplet, it could potentially harbor images and symbols which may explode the ideological consensus that anticipates the meaning of the text. That is indeed the force of the visual. Being a non-propositional medium, the visual tends to be relatively more liberated from the commonplaces of consensus and approbation. I would think that the text calls for an interrogation of this sort with deliberate force. In my view, all relevant positive interpretive constraints an interpreter adopts should be cognizant of the historical specificity of the text so that the tenor of the interpretation does not contradict or invalidate the ideological character of the text.
The Gita offers an eminently viewer friendly reproduction of images, and a highly readable and companionable commentary to these images. Scholars interested in India’s visual culture, and in particular those working at the intersection between the Hindu tradition and visuality, would find this book immensely rewarding.
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Bharani Kollipara is on the faculty of Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information an Communication Technology (DA_IICT), Gandhinagar, Gujarat. He writes and teaches in the areas of modern philosophy, political theory and South Asian Studies.
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