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Today, it can mean
"a thing regarded as a symbol of belief, nation, community, or
cultural movement", as one dictionary has it; also a person
regarded as a sex symbol, a symbol of the latest fashion trends, or of
glamour, and so on. In the world of computers, which is being
increasingly inhabited, it means, of course, "a graphic symbol,
usually a simple picture that denotes a programme or a command or a
data file, or a concept in a graphical user interface". But time
was when, at least in the Indian context, it was understood simply as
a sacred image, for the most part in sculpted form.
It is strictly in this last sense that Devangana Desai, highly respected art historian, uses the term in her latest collection of essays on early Indian art. Art and Icon is how her book is titled and she makes a distinction early on between the two: icons, as she sees them, are ‘sacred objects of veneration... generally guided by elaborate rules and conventions, detailing their size, posture of sitting or standing, hand gestures, and so on’, which have as their basis what is prescribed in ancient shilpa texts. In contrast, art is freer, artists having ‘more flexibility in non-iconic subjects’. The two — icon and art — can come together, of course, the line between them ‘often thin’. Art, in any case, she says, has to be treated ‘in a total framework against a network of relationships — social, economic, cultural, religious etc., a network which is dynamic and which changes in different period of history’. Having said this, she
takes the reader on what can only be termed as a grand tour of Indian
sculpture, halting briefly at some places, and in an engagingly
leisured manner at others. She makes one take delight in seeing
Ganesha dancing across centuries, introduces Mother Goddess and her
partner in folkish terracottas, looks at the seven Buddhas in bronze
excavated from Sopara, wonders at the great figures of Shiva dancing,
views the temple as an ordered whole, lingers over seductive
shalabhanjikas and surasundaris, speaks of tantrism and erotic
sculpture, examines symbols and explores their meanings. It is a
complex world that she invites one to enter: layered, expansive,
mysterious at times, steeped in time but not burdened by it. But there
is excitement in this world, for it gives one much to think about.
Take, for example, the myriad figures of Ganesha — elephant-headed,
pot-bellied, large-eared and ponderous as the deity is — dancing, as
Devangana introduces them. It is easy to understand that he is the adhipati
— presiding deity — of the arts and of knowledge. Also that he is
the first among the ganas of the great god, Shiva, apart from
being his son. But him dancing? Suddenly, as if to explain, or at
least to hint, at the poetic and the philosophical dimensions of it
all, she brings in a verse from that classic work, the Kathasaritasagara:
an invocation.
"May that Ganesha, whom, when dancing in the twilight intervals between aeons of time, all the world seems to imitate by rising and falling, protect you! May Ganesha, who at night seems, with the spray blown forth from his hissing trunk uplifted in ecstatic dance, to be verily feeding the stars, dispel your darkness!" From this almost cosmic vision, we are introduced to Ganesha, in a sixth century image from Badami in Karnataka, where he stands, a small hesitant figure, close to the feet of the magnificent figure of Shiva dancing, trying out his first steps as if mimicking the great God’s movements. It is sights like this that the reader is made to see on the ‘grand tour’ that I mentioned: grave and profound at times, and delightfully playful at others. Take again Devangana’s essay on the Temple as an Ordered Whole. Here she speaks of the iconic scheme at Khajuraho, with the great temples of which place her name stays so strongly associated because of her authoritative, early work on them. Rightly, she reminds the reader that, in the popular imagination, ‘Khajuraho is regarded as synonymous with erotic sculpture’, even though erotic figures ‘constitute less than one tenth of the sculptures at Khajuraho’. There are images there of ‘Vishnu in his various incarnations, the childhood sports of Krishna, notably without any reference to Radha, Shiva in his various lila-murtis, the goddess Parvati, Surya in his different aspects, and so on’. The important question here is: ‘Are the images indiscriminately assembled to fill in space and balance the architectural design of the temple? Or is there a central focus in their arrangement? Is the pantheon of deities or devata-gana related to the religious system associated with the temple? In short, is there any order or system in the arrangement of images in the Khajuraho temple, the Kandariya Mahadeva?’The question posed, she proceeds to unravel as it were the iconic scheme of the great monument, its entire programme. There are things to be learnt here: the untrammelled vision of the architects, the range and the meaning of teeming, piled up images, the puns and the allegories. A whole world seems to swing into view. In this manner, it all proceeds in this work, in essay upon essay: dense discussion and meaningful interpretation. But eventually nothing keeps one, as she says herself, from ‘standing silently in the evening light’, and taking the sights in, feeling the vibrations of the thought and the subtle skills of the past.
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