Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

[Flex Mentallo]

The 'Great Stupa' at Sanchi is the oldest stone structure in India and was originally commissioned by the emperor Ashoka the Great in the 3rd century BCE.

 

 

 

Edited January 22, 2013 by alanna

[Flex Mentallo]

Its nucleus was a simple hemispherical brick structure built over the relics of the Buddha. It was crowned by the chatra, a parasol-like structure symbolising high rank, which was intended to honour and shelter the relics.

 

 

 

 

Edited January 22, 2013 by alanna

[Flex Mentallo]

It has four profusely carved ornamental gateways and a balustrade encircling the whole structure. They each represent love, peace, trust, and courage

 

 

Edited January 22, 2013 by alanna

[Flex Mentallo]

Legend has it that after a great conquest that caused the death of thousands, Ashoka converted to Buddhism.

 

What have I done? If this is a victory, what's a defeat then? Is this a victory or a defeat? Is this justice or injustice? Is it gallantry or a rout? Is it valor to kill innocent children and women? Did I do it to widen the empire and for prosperity or to destroy the other's kingdom and splendor? One has lost her husband, someone else a father, someone a child, someone an unborn infant.... What's this debris of the corpses? Are these marks of victory or defeat? Are these vultures, crows, eagles the messengers of death or evil?

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Remorseful, he built many Buddhist shrines, and he sent his only daughter Sanghamitra and son Mahindra to spread Buddhism in Tamraparni , which Horace Walpole later knew as the isles of Serendip, and which we know today as Sri Lanka. Buddhism still flourishes there.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

I visited Sanchi at dawn one day in 1981, and as the sun rose, light and shadow animated the densely populated scenes. The Emperor Ashoka enters his city on the back of a great elephant escorted by a troupe of drummers. Above them, lying on a roof top, they are observed by a young woman. A radiant smile plays across her features. By her side is a tame peacock. In the fruit laden trees behind her, monkeys are at play. Everywhere is life, and light, and motion.

 

And I understood what Coomaraswamy meant – the great Indian sculptors worked not with stone, but with light, with evanescence – and through light they strove to capture the transience of life, it’s beauty and its joy.

 

 

 

Edited January 22, 2013 by alanna

[Flex Mentallo]

I fancied I could see what the still photograph cannot possibly convey; a message in a voice sculpted in light, transported through time, for as long as the stupa endures, that spoke to me and said, “Remember us. We lived life joyously. We shared life openly and gladly with all living things. Now we have been transported beyond duality as will you be.”

 

 

 

 

Edited January 22, 2013 by alanna

[Flex Mentallo]

What stood before me was nothing less than a depiction of the mundane world transmogrified into the earthly paradise, now free from want, now free from war, Buddhist, spiritual, enlightened, earthy, vegetarian, pacifist, but above all, vibrantly alive.

 

 

 

 

Edited January 22, 2013 by alanna

[Flex Mentallo]

During my first two years in India I travelled extensively, and took numerous photographs, only to discover that the Orwo brand of film negative I had been buying and using there was virtually all useless. Only one roll was printable, of which only a single print, the one below, from my visit to Ajanta, survives.

 

 

 

 

Edited January 22, 2013 by alanna

[Flex Mentallo]

My visit there was the most unearthly experience of my life, and nothing before or since has more profoundly affected my attitudes to life and art.

 

 

 

Edited January 22, 2013 by alanna

[Flex Mentallo]

The Royal College of Art is in the same building as the Victoria and Albert Museum (which has the sculptures of Meera Mukherjee in its collection), and on declaring my interest in travelling to India, was advised that the V&A had a collection of life sized transcriptions of the murals of Ajanta which on request the Curator would allow me to view, and I did so.

 

But nothing could prepare me for the reality, which if anything has grown, rather than diminished in the memory.

 

 

 

 

Edited January 22, 2013 by alanna

[Flex Mentallo]

The Ajanta Caves in Aurangabad district of Maharashtra, India are about 30 rock-cut Buddhist cave monuments which date from the 2nd century BCE to about 480 or 650 CE.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited January 22, 2013 by alanna

[Flex Mentallo]

Ajanta means “place of tigers”. The caves are cut into the side of a cliff that is on the south side of a U-shaped gorge on the small river Waghora (or Wagura), and although they are now along and above a modern pathway running across the cliff they were originally reached by individual stairs or ladders from the side of the river 35 to 110 feet below.

 

Edited January 22, 2013 by alanna

[Flex Mentallo]

The area was previously heavily forested, and after the site ceased to be used the caves were covered by jungle until accidentally rediscovered in 1819 by a British officer on a hunting party.

 

 

 

 

Edited January 22, 2013 by alanna

[Flex Mentallo]

The caves include paintings and sculptures described by the government Archaeological Survey of India as "the finest surviving examples of Indian art, particularly painting", which are masterpieces of Buddhist religious art.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited January 22, 2013 by alanna

[Flex Mentallo]

On 28 April 1819, a British officer for the Madras Presidency, John Smith, of the 28th Cavalry, while hunting tiger, accidentally discovered the entrance deep within the tangled undergrowth. There were local people already using the caves for prayers with a small fire, when he arrived. Exploring that first cave, long since a home to nothing more than birds and bats and a lair for other larger animals, Captain Smith vandalized the wall by scratching his name and the date, April 1819.

Within a few decades, the caves became famous for their exotic setting, impressive architecture, and above all their exceptional, all but unique paintings.

 

 

 

Edited January 22, 2013 by alanna

[Flex Mentallo]

The paintings have deteriorated significantly since they were rediscovered, and a number of 19th-century copies and drawings are important for a complete understanding of the works. However the earliest projects to copy the paintings were plagued by bad fortune. In 1846 Major Robert Gill, an Army officer from Madras presidency and a painter, was appointed by the Royal Asiatic Society to replicate the frescoes on the cave walls to exhibit these paintings in England.Gill worked on his painting at the site from 1844 to 1863 (though he continued to be based there until his death in 1875, writing books and photographing) and made 27 copies of large sections of murals, but all but four were destroyed in a fire at the Crystal Palace in London in 1866, where they were on display.

 

 

Another attempt was made in 1872 when the Bombay Presidency commissioned John Griffiths, then principle of the Bombay School of Art to work with his students to make new copies, again for shipping to England. They worked on this for thirteen years and some 300 canvases were produced, many of which were displayed at the Imperial Institute on Exhibition Road in London, one of the forerunners of the Victoria and Albert Museum. But in 1885 another fire destroyed over a hundred paintings that were in store. The V&A still has 166 paintings surviving from both sets, though none have been on permanent display since 1955. The largest are some 3 x 6 metres. A conservation project was undertaken on about half of them in 2006, also involving the University of Northumbria.Griffith and his students had unfortunately painted many of the paintings with "cheap varnish" in order to make them easier to see, which has added to the deterioration of the originals, as has, according to Spink and others, recent cleaning by the ASI.

 

 

A further set of copies were made between 1909 and 1911 by Christiana Herringham (Lady Herringham) and a group of students from the Calcutta School of Art that included the future Indian Modernist painter Nandalal Bose.

 

 

 

 

Edited January 22, 2013 by alanna

[Flex Mentallo]

It cannot be too clearly understood that the mere representation of nature is never the aim of Indian art. Probably no truly Indian sculpture has been wrought from a living model, or any religious painting copied from life. Possibly no Hindu artist of the old schools ever drew from nature at all. His store of memory pictures, his power of visualisation and his imagination were, for his purpose, finer means: for he desired to suggest the Idea behind sensuous appearance, not to give the detail of the seeming reality, that was in truth but mâyâ, illusion. For in spite of the pantheistic accommodation of infinite truth to the capacity of finite minds, whereby God is conceived as entering into all things, Nature remains to the Hindu a veil, not a revelation; and art is to be something more than a mere imitation of this mâyâ, it is to manifest what lies behind. To mistake the maya for reality were error indeed.

Coomaraswamy

 

 

 

 

Edited January 22, 2013 by alanna

[Flex Mentallo]

Much of the criticism applied to works of art in modern times is based upon the idea of “truth to nature”. The first thing for which many people look in a work of art is for something to recognize; and if the representation is of something they have not seen, or symbolizes some unfamiliar abstract idea, it is thereby self-condemned as untrue to nature.

What, after all, is reality and what is truth? The Indian thinker answers that nature, the phenomenal world that is, is known to him only through sensation, and that he has no warrant for supposing that sensations convey to him any adequate conception of the intrinsic reality of things in themselves; nay, he denies that they have any such reality apart from himself. At most, natural forms are but incarnations of ideas, and each is but an incomplete expression. It is for the artist to portray the ideal world (Rûpa-loka) of true reality, the world of imagination; and this very word imagination, or visualisation, expresses the method he must employ.

Coomaraswamy

 

 

 

Edited January 22, 2013 by alanna

[Flex Mentallo]

But why not do as well as say,—paint these

Just as they are, careless what comes of it?

God’s works—paint any one…

…Have you noticed, now,

Yon cullion’s hanging face? A bit of chalk,

And trust me but you should though! How much more

If I drew higher things with the same truth!

That were to take the Prior’s pulpit-place,

Interpret God to all of you!

Robert Browning

 

 

 

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Edited January 22, 2013 by alanna