|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Indian Painting, The Great Mural Tradition
THIS well-produced book on Indian painting by Mira Seth focuses on the mural tradition of India as a cohesive and continuous tradition as distinct from the parallel tradition of the painted manuscripts and miniatures. It traces and maps the vernacular nuances across the diverse regions of the vast Indian subcontinent, unravelling, in the process, interconnections, influences and adaptations that are inherent in the maturation of a particular style or tradition. Like migrating people bound by shared precepts, in this case the epics, puranas and plays provide for a common strand for transposing into varied folds of religious, regional and ethnic characterisations, delineations and adaptations. The vast cultural canvas dissolves into the bylanes of local humdrum, united by narrative climaxes of familiar and rehearsed episodes, embedded and lulled into memory from time immemorial. With the rise of an aristocracy, it also documents the shift from the religious to the secular domain, particularly in the north and north-western regions. Within the localised and religious script unfolds the great human theatre, the narrative structure and visualisation of which are attuned to the local ambience, form, style and performance. The epic forms, conglomerating and budding as it were, from the chanting and rhythmic invocations that carry within them a sense of musicality that is matched verbatim in the sinuous delicacy of line, form and colour. As in form, so in content; the space transcends and soars from the physical and worldly realms to the imagined and the aworldly and the alaukik, engaging in an unending vocabulary of poetic and sensorial metaphors.
Embedded and ideated in the visualisation are seminal cultural traits that in style of narration and lay-out— linear, simultaneous, centrifugal or centripetal, fluid or framed –encompass a world view that is shared with other portable and parallel traditions of visual arts including theatre, embellished textiles and costumes. Exhaustive in research and documentation, Seth has created a vast and vital resource, which is likely to benefit scholars and initiates of not only the visual/ plastic arts but allied disciplines—costumes, textiles, performing arts—as well. Beyond the intent and scope of this book, her concluding chapter dwells on the influences of the tradition of wall paintings spilling beyond the borders. It envisions a continuity which, hopefully, would be equally elucidated, compiled and fleshed out in the near future. Under the impact of second modernity or fluid modernity, with instant connectivity and communication cutting across space and time, transient cultural traits would incessantly be injected, diluted, replaced or wiped out. These vast inheritances with gestated and cultured genes of distinct and connected cultural biospheres alone could question and challenge the rationality of an amorphous, undifferentiated global culture.
|
Seth assiduously discerns
the converging and bifurcating sinews that link and delink one tradition
from the other, stringing the otherwise scattered and amorphous
fragments into a unified, consistent whole. Moving from the Deccan to
the South, she traces the continuity of the mural tradition through
Ajanta, Bagh, Badami, and Ellora and present-day Tamil Nadu and Kerala
paintings. The cultural affinity in the north is traced through the wall
paintings in the monasteries of Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh and the
post-Mughal mural traditions of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Himachal
Pradesh. The trajectories stretching across the vast peninsular regions
provide a kaleidoscopic and form panoramic projection of continuous
tradition of wall-paintings, assimilating in the process the cultural
contours and stylistic lingua of the vast and varied terrains it
traverses.