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Communication,
culture and magic...
35,000
years ago, Indian art was born. In rock-shelters and caves, atop high
boulders and across cliffs, strange creatures began to appear: other
worldly beings, humans and animals out of a lush and teeming eldritch
world. Significantly, it was at this time that human society took a
great leap forward. In this Mesolithic Age, a distinct
hunter-collector culture began to develop.
Were
the two events connected? Did man begin to paint because his
new-found culture demanded it? Or did he become cultured because he
had discovered the creative wonder of art?
Our
quest for the answers to these questions began, many years ago, when
we first saw the remarkable Stone Age gallery in Madhya Pradesh's
Bhimbhetkar. Here, groups of Stone Age people had lived, protected by
massive outcrops of boulders. And they had painted their hopes and
dreams on the rocks that sheltered them. It was meticulous,
painstaking, work.
First,
they had to find a fairly smooth rock-face. Then they spread melted
animal fat on the smooth rock to prepare the base for their art.
After that, special animal bones had to be selected: large, flat,
thigh or shoulder bones to serve as palettes for their paints. The
paints were collected from their rocky world. Visitors don't have to
look too carefully even today, to pick up lumps of ochre earth
ranging all the way from bright yellow through mustard and strawberry
to rust and blood red. Also white and varying shades of gray and
blue. When these Mesolithic artists worked in the dark, they used
scooped out rocks filled with animal fat in which they lit a wick.
The soot from the wick gave them an indelible black. Next they
shredded the ends of fibrous twigs, or, for more delicate work, tied
tufts of animal hairs onto sticks. These were their brushes. Fine
bones, from which the marrow had been removed, became the Stone Age
equivalent of today's air-brushes: they were filled with dried earths
which were then blown onto prepared surfaces. The final step, before
the actual painting began, was to incise the outlines of the
paintings into the rock using sharp-edged stones like flint or
quartz. These outlines were often gone over with charcoal. Only then
did the painting begin.
And
what paintings! In Bhimbhetkar, and later in the hill-station of
Pachmarhi and high on a bare and rock-strewn mountain in Uttar
Pradesh's Vindhyachal, we have scrambled and crawled an teetered at
the edge of cliffs, bent double and craned our necks to see these
amazingly life-like paintings. A white horse prances while the rider
ahead of him gallops away at high speed. A warrior, his hair flying
and brandishing a spear, leaps on an elephant while another elephant
prepares to charge. A pregnant doe runs from a warrior while a stag,
mortally wounded, carries a spear through its heart. Am enormous herd
of animals including elephant, bison and deer, thunders in a stamped
created by a spear-wielding man sitting in hiding and playing a
device that replicates the roar of a tiger. There are mounted men
with bows and arrows fighting other men with shields; Shaman
witch-doctors, wearing animal heads, waving large shields; women
dancing; men on stilts, with long frond skirts, masquerading as
giants while others stalk awesomely in towering head-dresses.
As
an art-form, these Stone Age paintings have always held us
spell-bound. But they assumed a much deeper meaning when we asked
ourselves: `Why were they done?'
In
that distant age humans led very harsh lives. People became adults
when they were 12 or 13 years old. Few lived beyond the age of 18.
Life was an unrelenting quest for food, shelter and survival. We do
not believe that these beleaguered people had the leisure to create
art for art's sake. What then was the purpose of these paintings?
The
answer eluded us for a long time. Then, one year, we took a trip to
Lahaul: a high and sparsely-populated valley in the Himalayas.
Driving down a stark and winding road we spotted a group of women
trudging up towards us. They were all dressed in their local costumes
so we stopped our car, got out, and set up our cameras to photograph
them. But we never got the pictures. As soon as the women saw our
cameras they began to yell. Their men appeared, running out from
their seed-potato fields. All of them were very angry. We hopped into
our car and raced away. Later, our driver told us that these Lahaulis
believed that photographs ensnared their souls, hold them captive
forever. After that encounter, we have had similar reactions from
people in parts of Nepal and, most recently, in the tribal areas of
Gujarat's Rann.
The
survival-value of the rock paintings became clear.
Folklorists
call this sympathetic magic: the image, in a magical way, takes on
the life of the object. In our own times, if the statue of a great
leader is `insulted', it stirs up as much anger and hatred as if the
great man, himself, had been slighted. Similarly, a country's
national flag cannot be treated as lightly as the cloth of which it
is made. As the symbol of the nation it deserves the respect due to
the nation. When anyone burns such a symbol he believes that he is,
in fact, harming that nation.
Similarly,
many anthropologists contend that rock paintings did not depict
events that had happened but were wish lists of events that the tribe
wanted to happen. They wanted their hunts to be successful, the
animals to be fertile so that there would always be enough of them to
provide food for the tribe, their warriors to be victorious against
their enemies, their Shamans to be skilled in influencing the future.
They believed that if their paintings could capture all this on the
walls of their caves then, by sympathetic magic, all these things
would happen. Our political cartoonists indulge in the same sort of
wishful thinking when they sketch the defeat of their political
opponents even before the voters have gone to the polls!
In
fact many of the events painted three hundred and fifty centuries ago
continue to occur today. In South Africa we saw Zulu girls
re-enacting a dance that the women of the tribe used to do to psyche
warriors to be fearless. Stone Age women, too, have been shown
dancing in scenes devoted to hunting. In Kerala, folk dancers still
wear palm-frond costumes and huge head-dresses which, according to
folk-dance expert. P.K. Devan, go back to the Stone Age. In Bihar we
have seen tiger-roarers made out of terracotta pots exactly like the
ones shown in a Bhimbhetkar rock painting.
American
Indian Shamans wear animal heads and skins and, when European
colonists first went to America, native Americans used to stampede
herds of buffalo over cliffs. Both Shamans and stampedes have been
painted on our rock shelters.
We
believe, however, that such paintings also went beyond magic and into
the socially binding art of communication. Our ancestors could not
read or write. But they wanted to convey their knowledge and skills
to others in their-growing society. What better way to do so than by
pictures? You don't have to speak another's tongue to understand his
pictures. A stick figure with two arms and two legs becomes the
symbol for `man' and it doesn't matter if your tribe calls it an
aadmi or a homme. Thus, the Chinese ideogramic script
can be read by people speaking dialects which are unintelligible to
each other.
One
such ideogramic script became one of the earliest forms of Indian
writing. In the 5,000-year-old city of Dholavira, in Gujarat, seals
have been unearthed which bear pictographs, which seem to have been
evolved from early rock art.
But
the evolution of Stone Age art into the script of the 5,000-year-old
Indo-Saraswati script is not the real wonder of India. Similar
developments could have happened in France and Spain where other
galleries of rock-art have been discovered. In India, however, such
motifs have persisted into our own times and have become a part of
the culture of living communities. Cultures that span time and space
co-exist in our land, as visitors can discover for themselves. Not
far from cyber-cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad communicating
across the world at the speed of light, are vital, pre-literate,
communities bound by webs of understanding that have little to do
with the written word. The symbols of folk arts such as Madhubani and
Warli have been designed for the mud-plastered walls of village huts
in the same way that those of the Stone Age artists were designed for
the surfaces of rock-shelters and caves. In fact, Madhubani and Warli
are only two schools of folk painting which have become well-known.
In virtually every village in India such folk motifs have been passed
down through countless generations.
In
the folk art section of Bhopal's Bharat Bhawan we found reproductions
of some of these designs. We also met an artist named Lado working on
such a painting. The images she created would have blended perfectly
with the pictures produced by those first artists in their Stone Age
shelters.
Quite
clearly, Indian art is communication and culture and magic. And it
has been so for 35,000 years.
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