If you look at the map of the
world you will not find the village of Madhubani on it. Even if you can trace
the contours of the saried woman, which is the shape of Bharat Mata, you will
not find the beautiful mole on her face called Madhubani. But if you translate
the word Madhubani, you will soon know where it could be. The forest of honey,
which is the literal meaning of the name of the village, could be anywhere in
the vast landscape of our subcontinent.
Certainly, it was a very apt
name in the olden days, when the greater part of our earth was full of dense
jungles, in which the folk made little clearings and settled down in the
eternal world of birth and rebirth, so they believed, according to their Karma,
of good or bad deeds in the past life. The poetical myth, which is enshrined in
the name of Madhubani may have been based on reality. In the trees of the
forests near the village, the bees may have made beehives. The people may have
gathered these hives and extracted from them the honey to sweeten their own
lives and those of others. In the feudal centuries, there were terrible
hardships in growing grain on small portions of land, with the wooden plough,
in good weather and bad. Green harvests depended on the will of the gods. The
honey may have been a constant source of happiness. And, in their innocence,
they seized upon the perennial source of pleasure as the name of their hamlet.
The innocence, which seems to
be obvious in naming the village, is also revealed in the traditional character
of the folk of Madhubani. It may have come from a dim sense of the revelation
of things from the obscure areas of the heart. This is the way in which men and
women become aware of nature, as mother, hear echoes of the emotions they feel,
which they put into words to signify the phenomena around them, so that the
obscure feelings about the verdant earth, the sun, the moon and the stars, the
flora and fauna, may become manifest to them.
But before they pronounce words
they make images of their myths, dreams and fantasies. The myth of the name of
Madhubani is one of the many fables through which the folk here, as elsewhere,
have connected themselves with the cosmos. Some of these legends were invented
by the local bards, but many of them were inherited from forefathers, and are
part of the oral culture of our peoples, only varied somewhat in the telling,
by the salt of the tongue of the teller.
Actually Madhubani has now
become a market town and the village where most of the painters continue to
paint is Jitwanpur, about three miles away.
Surrounded by mango and banana
groves, the hamlet is outwardly just a typical north Bihar cluster of thatched
huts beyond a green pond in which some buffaloes are cooling themselves, while
children try to goad them out with little bamboo sticks.
Squatting on the cow dung
plastered floors of their houses, some women daily paint pictures, under the
shadow of the walls which they painted long ago.
In this and a few other hamlets
they have been doing this ritual colour work for generations.
The primary myth about the
origin of the world is known to every Hindu villager in Bharat. The Great God,
Brahma, was filled with the desire to play. In this mood he played hide and
seek with his consort Lakshmi, loved her and created the whole world. So the
universe is the soul and body of the Great God.
The early myths of the Rigveda
in which the Aryan ancestors had enshrined their poetical reactions, to the
surroundings in which they found themselves, have been passed on by word of
mouth, by father to son, and mother to daughter, for generations. As the
Gayatri hymn to the Sun has been sung for centuries on the banks of the Ganga,
not only during festivals, but every morning and every day, Surya has been
worshipped through prayers, and also by the way in which the eyes bend down
before the refulgent Sun, over joined hands, when Surya appears at dawn to give
light, and before he departs into the twilight of the evening. The dawn is an
experience for every peasant, who begins the ritual of everyday life by going
out into the fields and to the river for his ablutions before sunrise. The god
of thunder and lightning, Indra, is welcomed after long months of the parching
summer. The moon is watched as it matures from the crescent into the full round
shining face of Poornamasi, when the folk dance to celebrate the heightening of
the nights to the splendour of golden light.
In this ritual, the aspiration
to the connection with the gods becomes a vague sense of connection with the
Supreme God from whom men and women are separated. And meditation on the
pictures connects.
This urge for connection, for
absorption, and salvation, became the curve of the inner journey towards the
Self through the outward strayings in the mundane world.
Even before the ardent
stirrings in the soul of the Vedic poets, our primitive ancestors had looked
for protection to the mother, and there had been evolved the myth of Saranyu,
daughter of Tavstar, the god who made the cosmos and all loving things. In the
Rigveda she appears as the Goddess who moved at great speed, rushing out of the
creator into existence, but going back again to the gods. The name Saranyu
means she who runs. She is the pristine goddess, the primary power, who once
assumed human shape and became incarnate in other forms. The images of the
mother goddess include: Sarama, Saraswati (the mighty river which went
underground); Vak the goddess who sings of herself; Aditi the boundless sky,
air, mother and father and essence of all the gods and goddesses, the five
kinds of being that are born and will be born; the auspicious Lakshmi giving
wealth, the lotus-born standing in the lotus, lotus-eyed, abounding in lotuses;
Usha, the dawn, the virgin daughter of heaven; Durga, the gracious mother;
Kali, the dark flame of fire who consumes the world and existence; and Devi,
who takes the innumerable shapes and gives grace to all worshippers.
The mother goddess, in all her
exalted incarnations, was worshipped by the folk as a fertility image, as the
naked woman with the emphatic pudenda, shown squatting almost in the act of
giving birth.
The mythical stories of the
heroes and heroines of the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata were also inherited
by the folk in Madhubani, through the recitation of these narratives during the
yearly festivals.
Apart from Rama and Sita, the
ideal pair, whose devotion to each other became the symbol of devotion between
husband and wife, the hero-god Krishna seems to have been adored in Eastern
India, specially as the twelfth century Mithila poet, jayadeva, celebrated the
amours of this love god with his consort, Radha, in his Gita Govinda.
The various tales retold in the
Puranas, or old books, rendering old stories, became part of the inheritance
and fulfilled the desires of many peoples in different ways.
I take the forms desired by my
worshippers,' Krishna said in the Bhagavad Gita. And there was always an answer
in some vital story or the other, to the urge for alliance with the gods,
against the dangers, the in clemencies of weather, and the forces of evil and
death which may end life.
As the feelings, urges and
stirrings towards security, longevity and prosperity, by alliance with spirits,
were the curves of desire, but could not be easily fixed in words, so images in
clay, in wood, stone and colour began to be made by the folk to define the
contours of the wished for spirits. And these figures were often sanctified by
prayers and the god or goddess incarnated in the material shapes and
worshipped.
The child, or the primitive,
creates an image in the likeness of what he or she wishes to become. Words are
vague. They only affect the soul where they are rhythmically intoned or
rhetorically delivered by an orator, or breathed in magical whispers by a
priest into the ear as Sruti, inspired by God. Images are more precise because
they are concrete. They picture vibrant feelings, metaphors and recreate myths,
so that we may remember the shape, size and texture of the spirit which has
hovered over the head, or is moving about in the soul, as a fleeting feeling.
When made and put on the mandala and holified by puja, the image as icon
affords the worshipper rest in the symbol, against the torment of not being
able to connect with a god or goddess through changing emotions. For instance,
once the imagination, recalling the memory of thunder and lightning, has
conceived the image of the God Indra driving his chariot across the sky, so
fast that the wheels create terrible sounds and spread sparks of fire, the
spirit of this dynamic god becomes incarnate on a wall when drawn as a concrete
expression.
And, then, He is not a mere
sound of the rhetorical flourish of a hymn in the Rigveda, but the certainty of
the divine presence, liberating the devotee, through expression, or the making
of the picture, from the dread of the bursting sky with its loud crackling
sounds and its piercing shafts of fire. The religious icon is, therefore, the
complement of the poetical metaphor. The first language of the naive mind is in
images, which are magical shapes that evoke the protective spirit when beckoned
in meditation.
The art of Madhubani is thus
mythology. Not art in the sense of 'significant form' of the West. The
paintings are legends to which the folk turn to pray in the daily ritual.
The feeling, or energy, or emotion,
or invisible stirring, is sought to be imaged as a vital flourish of lines and
colours which enshrines the powers of the divinity and can be contemplated with
a view to receiving those vitalities into oneself. In fact, the whole basis of
Indian creativeness seems to have been to evolve images through which the
worshiper desires to become god or goddess.
This kind of transformation of
human beings into gods and spirits and demons through idols has, in fact, been
the source of all achievements in the arts of the refulgent genius of Indian
peoples.
The underlying idea of seeking
alliance with the image, is enacted as a drama in a festival like Durga Puja.
The images of the Goddess are made by the female folk or by the local
craftsmen. They are worshipped during the special festivals, at a particular
time of the year. The powers of the goddess are sought to be absorbed in one's
own inner life through worship. And then the image is thrown into the river, so
that it may become part of the cosmos, to be made again the next year, but
leaving the residue of the feeling of its force in the worshipper, so that he
or she can turn inwards and recall the image at will. The intention behind the
ritualistic use of the icon made the whole tradition of the art of India
possible. Every idol is for contemplation, in a dhyanamantra, or is meant to
evoke the vision of a concrete divinity, by seeking whose powers, in the
grooves of one's person, the awareness of the worshipper can extend itself
beyond the everyday round, and thus acquire ineffable devotion to the higher
self which may be exteriorised.
This kind of contemplation of a
ritual image is quite different from looking at a work of art in the West,
except in the early Christian art, where the holy figures were placed in church
for bent-head reverence. These images were quite different from the pictures of
the Renaissance art. Thus Raphael's Venus, modelled on a beautifully
proportioned human female, is supposed to invoke, in the onlooker, the sensuous
sense of her chiselled face, her gracious bent neck, volumes of the breasts and
the excitations of the naked belly, the shapely hips and legs, as aesthetic
delight. There is no doubt that the vision of Venus uplifts the spectator.
But the dramatic composition of
Durga, as Mahismardini, showing her slaying the buffalo demon, is supposed to
suggest the fight of good against evil, revealing also the power of the
goddess, in all the intensity of her destructive force, to ally the worshipper
with the protective mother, devotion to whom would quell all those forces which
are inimical to life.
If the naturalistic form of
Venus arouses mainly the senses, the vision which is behind the creation,
destruction and preservation of the world is supposed to be part of the creative
intuition of Hindu ritualistic-art-expression in the Mahismardini image of
Durga.
We cannot, therefore, equate
the rasa, or flavour, which seeps into the devotee, with the aesthetic delight
which is the ideal of Western art, though rasa includes appreciation of forms.
But it denotes more comprehensive appreciation than the aesthetic term of Clive
Bell's 'significant form'.
The creative energies in every
work of art, in India, until the end of the mediaeval period, and in rural
India until now, were dedicated to self creation, self-perpetuation and
self-expression, as a part of the process of increasing awareness and thus to
attain insights and heighten consciousness.
As Brahma had created the
world, so every human being recreates his or her life, every day of the year.
This recreation takes the form
of exalting the house above the decay of the previous day.
The dwelling is swept clean and
plastered with the sacred cow dung wash. The rice powder drawing of flowers
called alpona is traced by the hand on the threshold, by the mother of the
family, the creator, before anyone wakes up.
The water of a holy river or
stream is brought and sprinkled all over the house, or the Ganges water,
fetched on the last pilgrimage to the mother Ganga, is sprinkled to purify the
precincts.
The flowers, which have been
brought from the fields, are put before the mandala, on which the favourite
gods are arranged in images of stone, metal, or on paper.
The puja or meditational
prayer, is then performed by all the members of the family, together or apart.
The incense or dhoop is taken
around the house to all the corners, to smoke the evil spirits away.
The first portion of food is
sent to the temple for the gods before the family is served the meal.
Almost every act is made holy
by the frequent remembrance of the favourite God's name.
In everything, then the
empirical Self is related to the higher self. The dream of every man or a woman
is to rise above the earthly condition and become a god or a goddess. The family
had already exalted every child, male or female, to the status of divinity, by
naming the young after the celestials. A boy would be called Shiv Shankar,
Krishan Lal or Vishnu Dayal. A girl would be called Savitri Devi, Lakshmi Devi
or Parvati Devi.
This exaltation of the human
self is integral to all cultures. In almost every part of the world, in all
societies, some form of magic making, which is a poetical faculty, has been
current. The pantheistic tendency to ascribe a soul to a tree, a bird, a river,
a mountain, or a house, can be seen in the most primitive societies.
In India the daily self was
reminded every day by the sloka of the Upanishads:
- Whence are we born?
- Whereby do we live??
- On what are we established??? Under whose orders do we suffer pains and pleasures?
- For obviously the ego is not a free agent
- Being under the sway of happiness and misery
This questioning was literally
adopted by custom by the folk. Because it was to give a jolt from the habitual
life to every person, so that he or she may wonder why we are here and not
there, why we were born at all, and who put us here.
The tendency to be attached to
the world of dailiness, of samsara, has to be got over by discarding the
standardised reflections, abhasa, and transcend to the mystery of being, by
putting before oneself the image of the god into whose particular incarnation
one may aspire to.
In the pursuit of the authentic
life, as against the unauthentic habitual existence, everything has to remind
the individual of the model of the grace of Vishnu, or the elemental force of
Shiva, or the love of Devi.
As the spiritual presence which
human beings seek is hidden behind everything, the sense of wonder has to be
kept alive and rahasya, or the mystery, revealed. The realisation of the
mystery may elevate one to ananda or transcendent bliss.
The painting of the forms of
God's creation, or image-making thus become part of a way of life.
The ritual painting is a simple
process. Certain symbols had been handed down by tradition. The recreation of
those in the alpana of the threshold or on the walls has been repeated day
after day without much variation. Perhaps on a festival, the grandmother of the
family, or the older aunt, may bring out, from the welter of images, a memory
image from her own youth in another village. The form of some flowers, or the
vessel in which the flowers are put, may thus become a variation on the old
theme.
Occasionally, an individual
talent may arise, like the now legendary Sita Devi, a Brahmin widow of three
score and seven, who began scribbling in her girlhood. sShe might have been the
odd woman out, who dared to dramatise certain forms, was perhaps emboldened,
mischievously, to caricature Hanuman, to emphasise his powers and transgress
the norms of the routine drawing, with brighter earth colours. She and her
youthful companions must have gone to the village fairs, across miles of
ploughed fields, along dusty roads to the riverside.
They had sung songs, as they
bore the effigies they made of the goddess, after weeks of worship, and then
threw them into the Mother Ganga. In the fair were the toys shops, selling
images of the gods, and birds and animals, made by village potters, which may
have come back as echoes. Then they would have been the itinerant players,
enacting the yatra the rural theatrical performance, singing the story of the
Ramayana, or the tale from the Mahabharata. And she and her own family would
have come back singing songs on the journey back home.
The impressions of the faces of
the brides, taken by the mothers-in-law to the fair, would have emerged in the
hand of Sita Devi, as the heroine Sita and Rama would be dramatisation of her
own husband in the painting she would make.
In talking to Sita Devi, I
found that she is a natural naive painter, who has observed the malleable faces
of the performers in the yatra, their movements and stances and their tableaux.
Her hands move quickly around the circle of sun. She is so fluent in her
drawing of curves that she goes on from rounder to rounder. Equally easily, she
radiates from the orb little edges of rays, which she slowly embellishes with
delicate lines into flower beds. Or she goes to connect the sun-faces, already
emergent, with big eyes, and a sacred red mark on the forehead, to symbolic
squares for drapery. And then she creates a little universe of lotuses, flame
flowers, and peacocks dancing in the garden. One can notice that her dynamic
fingers have a natural sense of design. Her eyes are concentrated. And she has
immense patience with the minor lines and points, in the morphology of
pontillism, which is her unique contribution to the composition. And the
binding lines are energised beyond the prototypes.
The impression she gives is
that her body-soul creation, is an original rhythm which she has initiated, a
unique of Madhubani style of her own.
In so far as the forms
recreated by Sita Devi are new beginnings of multiple relations of rounds,
squares, triangles, and rhythmic binding lines, in overall patterns, we are
struck by the pictures as novelties above the stereotypes.
There are other creative
talents in Jitwanpur. In fact, almost every second person in a family paints.
Surya Dev, the son of Sita
Devi, learnt from his mother, first by filling in the outlines of her drawings
with colours. Since then he has developed a fluent line and can do even large
scale paintings. He absorbs impressions from outside Jitwanpur and says he
prefers the torried glare of the day, to the night when the monsters of the
dark swarm around. He is conscious that he comes from a family of priests who
used to perform death ceremonies. Yama is everywhere, he whispers, and must be
driven away with all his doots.
A nearby neighbour, Bana Devi
paints surrounded by children. Two young girls help her, learning from the
elders as in the past. The littlest ones are given paper and colours to play
with. They are luckier than Bana Devi, who was married at the age of five and
was a maid-of-all-work until she matured and began to earn money with her
paintings. Shyly covering her demure round face, she concentrates on a smiling
moustached sun, obviously an ambivalent symbol of happiness itself, the
protective father image.
A perceptive collector
discovered some Harijan painters. In the pictures of these 'lower' peoples, the
deities and the victims coincide.
All the painters are aware that
the loving adoration of the preferred spirits liberates them through the
recreation of the traditional myth as a personal myth. Besides, there are the
incipient urges to rise above the dailiness of ploughing, washing, cooking and
doing the chores, in the seemingly changeless samsara, to authentic life of the
future from the urgency to be immortal.
In the deeper layers of such
creativeness, is the intent to offer the sacrifice of one's self to the gods.
It is conceivable that though the ancient Aryan Yajnas or self sacrificial
ceremonies by burning clarified butter, so that the heat of the passion should
rise to the heavens and the earth be purified.
Racial memory gave place to
image worship. The instinctive urge to go to pray was transformed into the
struggle to beckon the gods. And the energies of the body-soul were sacrificed
in the magical act of drawing, painting or sculpting.
This struggle to invoke the
spirits seems to have become a racial characteristic. Not only the Brahmin
members of the hierarchy paint pictures in Madhubani, but the people of the
lowest caste, also indulge in such symbolic expressionism.
And, curiously, the same family
gods and goddesses appear in Harijan paintings as in the free-hand work of the
'twice born'. The sameness of the theme confirms the process of hieratic art,
as also it emphasises the notion that the Harijans are also offering prayer and
sacrifice as part of the fourfold Hindu order, even though they are considered
beyond the pale, because of the menial work which is their function.
Actually, if we go to the
sources of creativeness in our civilisation, we find that the gods and
goddesses being our own higher incarnations and near neighbours, the invocation
of them is a purely human act, subject to no other law, except the vitality of
the rhythmic impulse which creates forms in different proportions, contours,
with emphasis on colours according to the individual talent of the painter.
Thus though the family gods are
the same, because of mythical contours of divinities are fixed, the forms by
the 'upper' hierarchy are thinner and the colours of the 'lower' peoples are
thicker. The lines of the former are more curved, while sharp triangular lines
are visible along with roundings in the latter. The Brahmin paintings tend to
be decorative, while the Harijan works are more expressionist and passionate.
If on the surface the symbols
of both strains are similar, the thickening of tones in the works of the
Harijans imparts a certain vitalism to their compositions. The dark necessities
from which thick paints are imparted seem to inspire in men and women, urges
towards freedom of action beyond the oppression of millenniums. It seems that
each God forgotten by the God-forsaken is being recalled, in all innocence,
perchance He may deliver the Harijans by the renewal of their faith in Him.
In every creation of man there
is implicit the ambiguity of the relationship between the originator and his
work. While the painter may be revealing the mysterious idol in a recognisable
shape, the bent of his own empathy turns or twists the forms.
Unlike other folk of other
areas, the Madhubani painters, both Brahmins and Harijans, venture into the
realm of the gods, to dissolve their fears in the continuous resurgence of the
hope of receiving from the beneficent holies, for their body-souls, a certain
depth in which may be resolved the daily predicament of being-in-this-world
situation.
If the creations of the
craftsmen of the courts lapsed, because there was no patronage left after the
alien impacts, the arts of everyday life of the folk have, fortunately,
survived wherever the myths of a faith are sung or recited or enacted in
dance-dramas.
This organic relationship
between the performing arts and the visual expression in images must be noticed
as an important departure point in the making of images. In eastern India and
in Rajasthan scrolls were taken in procession and unfolded before the folk with
the myth or legend recited.
The core of the relationship is
in the connection with the old symbols, which die from repetition and must be
made alive, to appease the makers and the onlookers, through the battlements,
the miseries and the challenges of the daily life. The personal recollection of
a moral tale is, indeed, a repetition of an eternal human attitude, accepted in
uncritical, blind worship, in answer to every baffling new situation. But the
drums and cymbals renew the memory and make for the warmth of a living
connection between the worshipper and the god, even in the shells of the old
fables.
The folk in a village find that
they have to survive in the hamlet on their own mental and physical resources.
Some of the questions of the daily life have been answered in the recitals. All
the desires, emotions, frustrations, aspirations, lusts, greeds, jealousies,
have been expiated in the myths about the gods, who were originally based on
heroes or exalted fantasies of behavior, which were models of angels against
the evil demons. And behind the gods, there is lurking, always, the Supreme
God, the exalted, the unreachable, the impenetrable, who has inspired the
essence of the good, the beautiful and truthful in all creatures from which
they can hark back in yearnings and desire, which become myth, and which are
the means of reaching him in moments of ecstasy that is to say in being
oneself.
The sources of folk art of
Madhubani lie on the dim areas of silence, of the approximation to the
heightened moments of creation itself.
Writer
– Mulk Raj Anand
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