Sunday, June 20, 2004

'ART AND SOUL
Sentinels in stone
B.N. Goswamy

The stone sculptures of Easter Island have been carved out of volcanic rock

THIS piece is about one of the most isolated places in the world – well over 2000 miles from the nearest centres of habitation – that is also home to some extraordinary sculptures, and was recognised as a World Heritage Site by Unesco, just eight years ago: the Easter Island. One had seen a stone image or two from that island in art books long back, but when, intrigued by a recent article in the New York Review of Books, I started looking up more information on the place, it started tumbling out at a furious pace.

The Easter Island, a large triangle of volcanic rock set deep in the heart of the Pacific Ocean, and named so because it was on an Easter Sunday in 1722 that a Dutch explorer discovered it, is no ordinary place. It has none of the lushness that one associates with all those Pacific islands – Hawaii, Tahiti, Marquesas, and the like – and very little is known of its history. The natives, who call themselves the Rapa Nui, speak of a double hulled canoe that landed on its shores, ‘filled with seafarers from a distant place’, some 1200 years ago, and gave it the name Te Pito O Te Henua, meaning ‘The Navel of the World’. More sober accounts speak of the land having been peopled in about 400 AD by a group of Polynesians led by Hotu Matua. Thor Heyerdahl, the explorer whose name will forever be associated with the Kon Tiki expedition, and who was on this island some 50 years ago, held the view that it was the Peruvians who came here first as settlers.

But truly nothing is known with certainty. All that one is aware of is the sad plight of the land upon which man-made desolation descended in the 19th century. All forests on it had been cut down by then, and its population fell from 10,000 or so to only 111 at the beginning of the 20^th century. From a flourishing and presumably happy place, Easter Island had turned gradually into an ecological disaster, with civil war between tribal groups breaking out and cannibalism being resorted to. Contacts with western civilisation brought to its people its own ‘gifts’ – slavery and disease – but almost certainly the responsibility for wiping out whole forests of lush palms rested with the natives. The population of the island, it has been suggested, far exceeded at one time the capabilities of the island’s ecosystem. Wooded forests were therefore cleared for agriculture. But also – and this is where one of the enigmas of the island lies – for providing the logs that moved the giant stone statues, hundreds of which stand like mute sentinels on the land even today.

There is much else that one can see on the island which belongs now to Chile, and to which tourists are drawn today in fair numbers: wood carvings, bark cloth, string figures, petroglyphs. But it is those gigantic sculptures that give the island its identity. Carved out of volcanic rock, these statues, called the moai, "some of the most incredible ancient relics ever discovered", seem to have been fashioned by unknown hands over a period of centuries. Monumental and mysterious, some of them rising more than seven metres in height and weighing close to 50 tonne, they are truly aringa ora, as the natives describe them: "living faces". They end at the waist and look like torsos, with square elongated heads, staring eyes, very prominent foreheads with wide noses, narrow lips, and enormous ears. Raising their heads at various points in the island, they stand like brooding spirits, with their backs turned towards the ocean. More than 800 of these dot the island but what they originally represented remains mostly unknown: the best guess is that it was the mana or protective power of the aku-aku, ‘ancestral spirits’.

There is nothing quite like these statues anywhere else in the world. And they pose questions that are not easy to answer. For, apart from what they truly represent or stand for, there is the matter of how these mammoth objects were carved, with the simple tools that must have been available to the carvers, and, even more than that, how these colossi were physically moved from the spot where they were carved – the Rano Raraku quarry – to where they stand now. All kinds of theories have been advanced and examined: that these were ‘walked’, for instance, meaning that teams of men stood them on their feet and then moved them very very slowly. Or that they were moved with the aid of enormous logs of wood and pulled with the help of massive ropes. Once they were taken to the spot chosen for them, however, the question of how they were raised on to those high stone pedestals on which many of them stand now, and how the rounded rocks that rest, cap-like, on the heads of some of these, were placed there, still remains.

This feature was published on June 13, 2004