’ART & SOUL
Art of the nomads

There is power as well as exquisite refinement in the nomadic art, which carries an extraordinary range of influences, writes B. N. Goswamy

People wish to be settled; but only as far as they are unsettled, is there any hope for them.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

— Isabelle Eberhardt

Pendant showing the ‘Dragon Master’; gold, turquoise and lapis lazuli. From tomb II, at Tillya Tepe; second quarter of 2nd century AD. National Museum of Afghanistan.

All that we knew of nomads as children was defined by the sights we used to see sometimes on the road at the edge of our town: families moving, men, women and children, tall but somewhat bedraggled, the clothes on their backs having seen better times, men with implements under their armpits, all their belongings in daintily decorated carts that moved by their side, drawn by bullocks. On occasions one saw them settle down at the periphery of the habitation, set up little tents, light fires and cook, let the children play around but not stray far. They were possibly gadiya lohars, groups of itinerant ironsmiths, who originated from Rajasthan and remained constantly on the move, eking out a living by making or repairing utensils and implements for townsmen. The elders in the family used to caution us against getting too close to them and would speak of them as ‘khana-badosh’, which meant, we were to find out later, "they who carry their dwellings on their shoulders". Expressive enough, and accurate, but it did not tell us much about these people. There was, about them, an air of mystery.

It was not till much later that one discovered that there was a whole, vast world of nomads out there, going back to thousands of years: not necessarily mysterious, but exciting to delve into.

Anthropologists think of nomadic people in categories like pastorals, hunters and gatherers, tradesmen. Human geographers see them spread out in far-reaching, spaced out regions of the world, from the sandy deserts of north Africa and the parched lands of the Middle East to the vast grasslands of Eurasia.

Historians speak with relish of great nomadic people like the Scythians of the Steppes, who moved out from southern Russia into the territory between the Don and the Danube, and then into Mesopotamia, emerging in the process as one of the most powerful people of the ancient world, riding their ruthless way into building great empires. Archaeologists have been working for close to two centuries on the burial mounds of the nomads in Russia which have yielded remarkable finds: enough for Catherine the Great of that land to have ordered a systematic study of them.

Art historians have kept themselves occupied with trying to establish connections between the artefacts of one nomadic people and those of another. As I said, it is an exciting, remarkably rich field.

What never ceases to surprise one, however, is the exquisite quality of the art that some of the nomadic people produced. Ordinarily, one would not associate much art, leave alone art of any great quality, with people who remained on the move, on foot or horseback, for most of their lives. And yet the arts of the nomads count among the great arts of the world. The Scythians of the ancient world, to take a distinguished example, might have been admired for their riding abilities and feared for their prowess in war, but they also founded a great civilisation.

The great, if authoritarian, organisation of their polity, and the fact of their whole culture revolving round charismatic leaders, created among them an aristocracy of extraordinary means and power. One sees this in the remains of nomad burials that included horse and other sacrifices: in the kurgans — lined pit graves — have been found men and women, evidently wealthy aristocrats, buried in spectacular outfits decorated with gold plaques, carrying decorative weapons and bow cases, wearing belts with elaborate buckles, torques, necklaces, rings and armbands.

One can see from the artefacts that the art of these people, situated in the region in which they were, carried an extraordinary range of influences: they had contacts with the Greeks at one end and with the Chinese at the other. There is no surprise, therefore, that among the artistic remains they have left behind — their love of gold is legendary — one finds designs in which "Siberian bears, Chinese dragons and Persian rams and lions vie with classical cameos, acanthus leaf designs and images of Dionysus and Aphrodite."

What stands out in the art of these nomadic people — in particular the Scythians — is the frequency, in fact the passion, with which animals are rendered. In this art, horses gallop, stags crouch, lions pounce on their prey; creatures of fancy also roam about: dragons with bird tails, leopards with wings, rams with two heads. There is dramatic contest, combat and triumph, in the artefacts. It is all part of ornament perhaps, but somewhere in all this must also have been the belief that the owner of the item will also take on the prowess and the powers of the creature depicted. In the finest works of what has widely come to be designated as the ‘Animal Style’ in art, there is power but also exquisite refinement. When, as in a gold belt buckle from Siberia, a winged and horned lion, whose tail becomes an eagle’s head, attacks a horse whose body curls and coils as it sinks to the ground, one knows that magical things are happening: arousing wonder, lifting the spirit.

Again, in the pendant from Tillya Tepe, one knows that one is being led, with great skill, into a different world of beauty and make-believe. A ‘dragon-master’ stands between two mythological beasts, holding them firmly with his hands as if subduing them to his own will. The fabled creatures curve in an ‘s’ form: still throbbing with power but now on the point of surrendering, as it were. Below these figures, held by plaited gold chains, hang daintily crafted gold discs and stylised flowers, all set with turquoise, garnet, lapis, carnelian and pearl.

And to think that so many of these things were made, using the description of a nomad in a 5000-year-old Sumerian poem, by "a tent-dweller buffeted by wind and rain/dwelling in the mountain/digging up mushrooms at the foot of a mound."

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