Treasures from the North-East

Time was when one — certainly I — knew virtually nothing about painting activity in the North East of our land: all attention went almost naturally to mainstream painting, and schools such as Mughal or Rajput or Deccani dominated one’s thoughts. That is, if and when one was dealing with the history of painting of India. It is when I was hunting for works that might go into an exhibition on the manuscript tradition of India for the Frankfurt Book Fair — some eight or so years ago — that painting from that extreme end of India came swimming into my limited ken. As I began to see with eager eyes some of these manuscripts — they all came from Assam — I was told that they were written and painted either on sanchi-pat, or tula-pat, materials or grounds that I was not familiar with at all. (Now, incidentally, I do know: sanchi-pat was prepared from the strips of the bark of the locally grown sanchi tree (aquilariaagallocha), and tula-pat, translated roughly as ‘cotton-leaf’ because it looks more like fine lint than paper, was made by ginning, felting and pressing cotton into the sheets.) But quickly from that I moved on to the texts and the paintings that these manuscripts contained.

I remember being drawn instantly to a folio that showed nearly completely abstract shapes in different, glowing colours, for I had not seen anything quite like it before: superimposed triangles, stepped pyramids, uneven cylinders, and the like, all integrated into a lively pattern. The brief inscription in Assamese at the bottom simply read: Meru Parbat. Now, ancient texts do, of course, speak of the mythological Mount Meru that stands in the midst of ‘the Lord’s unfathomable creation’on the Jambudvipa continent: ‘the king of all mountains … as high as the continent itself, the pericarp of the lotus in the form of the earth”. This mountain, the texts state, has four separately named smaller mountains standing on its four sides as its support, and on each of these stand four forests of great trees: the mango, the jambu, the kadamba and the banyan, as if they were their flags. With these descriptions in his mind, the painter of this stunning folio went about envisioning the Meru. At the heart of the leaf is the great mountain itself, bathed in gold, rising in tiers from the bottom to the top, one inverted-cone shape topping another. These gold cones are contained in a stepped pyramid, painted in red ochre. These look as if these were some cosmic vessels with curving handles attached to their top rims. Each of the cones is larger and more decorative than the one below it. On either side of this glistening structure are two curved forms filled with coloured stripes, leaning away from Meru, yet supporting it. These, of course, are the four ‘mountains’ that the texts mention, and on the top of these mountains are vegetal forms – part leaf or bud, part stem – that resemble nothing recognizable but stand here for the four forests of trees. Remarkable imagination, and a sense of design, is at work here, one can see, almost like that of the composers of those ancient texts. But also typical of the leaps of thought and vision that mark so much of the work produced in those remote regions.

Clearly, in the manuscripts from this region, at least of those going back to a few hundred years, is reflected the influence of the great Vaishnava saint, Shankaradeva (1449-1568), whose towering figure still looms over the very thought of Assam. The Bhagavatapurana — pre-eminent among the Puranas — as a text was an obvious choice, for not only was Shankaradeva a great devotee of the text himself: he also wrote the Anadi Patan, which is seen as an Assamese version of that Purana. But there were other texts and other painters than the one who painted the great Meru folio.

Speaking of myself, paintings of the region have somehow stayed in my awareness for all these years although I have not worked on them. But I was pleasantly and emphatically reminded of them by an essay of Samiran Boruah which he wrote for a volume on the lesser-known traditions in Indian painting put together by Anna Dallapiccola. Clearly he knows the collections of manuscripts in the great satras — Vaishnava monasteries — of Assam where a priest regularly reads aloud from them for devotees who assemble in the namghars or community prayer halls. The air of sacredness clings to these manuscripts, one can see, and this is in some ways appropriate, for that evidently was the feeling with which they were scripted and painted.

It is not easy to define the Assamese style, for one still does not know enough about the range of work done in the region and the changes that came over it across time. Echoes of some folkish work in Bengal, a stray streak of Rajasthani painting, some connection with Oriya work, one can hear or see in it. But what one is most struck by is the utter freedom with which the painters of these manuscripts went about their task: playing with space and colour, envisioning things, using pan-Indian conventions but bending and twisting them to their own ends. The Meru painting is an outstanding example. But also consider, for instance, the folio in which Krishna is seen playing on his flute on a moonlit night in the groves of Vrindavana. At one extreme end of the folio is Krishna — dark-skinned, wearing a crown of peacock feathers, dressed in his favourite yellow garment — playing on his flute; but at the other, opposite end, the painter brings in the source of all moonlight in the form of Chandra, the moon-god, riding his stag-vehicle, in a perfectly drawn circle. The rest of the folio is completely filled with a filigree of flowering trees and bushes. When, in a scene of the ashoka vatika from the Ramayana, while Sita is gazing with wonder and excitement at Rama’s ring thrown into her lap by Hanumana from the tree above her, the painter brings in, in dense dark formation whole hordes of demonesses piled one upon another, suddenly asleep. One does not even notice them at first, but there they are, as if frozen into rocks through divine intervention. One is startled and excited at the same time, for the eye, almost unaware of this detail, had all the time been travelling towards the elegant blooming bushes in the painting and the two birds who have taken to wing above.

There are surprises in these splendid works from the north-east. And the paintings — the few that we know — continue to beckon.

(This article was published on 11 January 2015)