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“The greatness of the ideals of the past is a promise of greater ideals for the future. A continual expansion of what stood behind past endeavour and capacity is the one abiding justification of a living culture. India of the ages is not dead nor has she spoken her last creative word; she lives and has still something to do for herself and the human peoples.”
Sri Aurobindo
Ancient Indian civilization is not something over and done with, relegated to the past ¾ it continues to live and that is what makes it so utterly fascinating. To study it in depth may not be a must, but to become aware of some of her phenomenal contributions, to understand what made those achievements possible, to apply some of the secret recipes for brighter futures… all that certainly is. To get under the skin; to soak in the essence; to become one with the spirit of India ¾ there is still much to be learnt…
In our attempt to create an awareness and interest in this wonderful country called India, over the next one year we will be presenting edited excerpts from the book Of Past Dawns and Future Noons.
Here Today, Gone Tomorrow (cont)
Shonar
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It is obvious that present-day handicrafts have lost some of that intensity which gave each individual product a uniqueness of its own. But let’s not spew forth this theory as a mere criticism and instead, explore and validate its utterance. For this, you need to take one step back into time:“It is said that so gossamer fine used to be the muslins of India, that once Princess Zeb-un-Nissa was seen in public apparently dressed in nothing. Her father, the Emperor Aurangzeb, rebuked her severely for desecrating the dignity of the royal court. The Princess calmly retorted that not only was she fully clad but had actually wrapped the muslin garment seven times around her slim body!”
This was in the 16th century. Now take one more step behind…“The ancient temple structures represent women dressed in embroidered or brocaded cloaks and in muslin so fine so as to expose the contours of their bodies, only the lines of their folds or the edges being represented to show that the female forms are in reality garbed.” This was in the 12th century; and now for one last step…
“It was a blessing for the Egyptians to discover the fine muslins of the Indian subcontinent, for, it served perfectly towards the preservation of the mummies in the tombs. It is said that centuries would pass and one could still find the body intact under the rolls of muslin which save for a shade of yellowing, remained as good as new.” This was before the advent of the Christian era!
Where, o’ where is this fine gossamer muslin, this unbelievable treasure that we made on this soil till just a few centuries ago? Something which lasted over millennia is so obscure even to our imagination that it seems to belong to a book on Indian myths. And yet, its presence has been attested by travellers and artists, kings and courtesans; poets have sung of the rich embroidery, which is ‘as weightless as that of the moonlight on a tulip or a dew drop on a rose’.
The suggestion is not that today’s textiles are worthless or a dead industry having left rags in its stead. But the change, which some take to be inevitable, has left a deep rift between what was and what is. The saving grace is that while we have little to boast of in the realm of sculpture and architecture, at least the handicrafts and especially the textile industry still endeavours to keep its head above the water, in spite of the machines having replaced block printing, the traditional gold zari now a copper thread with gold paint, chemical dyes blazing through the demure vegetable colours… Yes, afloat they are although struck by mighty blows of modern civilization. But for how long? How much time will it take for the consumer to realize the acidic effects of what he clothes himself in or what he feeds himself on or what he pays so dearly for?
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India, in spite of her size, is dictated by a handful of factors – religion, society and weather. The last is the most tangible and felt by all, present ‘every-moment-of-the-day’.
Everything revolves around where one lives¾in the north or the south, in the forests or by the ocean, in the hills or the plains. Sloping roofs for the rain with terracotta slates, bamboo stilts and high platforms for the marshes. Bare mud packs with thick thatched roofs for the hot sun in the valleys and teakwood houses in the hills. Interiors are simply done, not for the cause of fashionable ethnicity but for function and utility mixed with inherent beauty. The raw materials, more often than not, are indigenous to the area, keeping costs reasonable.
Clothes are dictated equally and so the Rabaris don gorgeous mirror-drenched ghunghats, Rajasthani men sport multicoloured turbans; the South remains cool in lungis, Maharashtra mixes dignity with white starch in dhotis and the Kashmiri drapes phirans under which he holds a pot of coals to keep warm. Haats or marketplaces are assigned special days, where the trader and craftsman display their goods – everything from jewellery to pots to clothes to ropes, sold in one place, at one time.
A lot of this still exists. A lot of it doesn’t. A lot of it is trying to keep from slipping out of the first into the second. Haats are no longer a city feature, having been taken over by the permanency of the small-time entrepreneurs shielded by aluminum shutters. But the more one travels towards the outskirts, the more the chances of still stumbling across these colourful fetes of wares and humanity. The gust of fresh air within the suffocating pressing of the carnival is reduced to a colourless and impersonal nothing in the town shops. No one wants to spend so much time perhaps, nor does one want to necessarily throw the being into this cacophony, but there is a feeling, a certain camaraderie that infuses itself into these haats between the traders, between the consumers, and between the traders and consumers. That sense of amity is what defines relationships amidst strangers; it is what spins an invisible thread of unity amongst an entire cultural treasure. It is what binds people together on grounds of simply coming into contact with each other, sharing a smile, sharing a moment. We have ostracized others and ourselves into such infinitesimal pens that the sense of belonging or being offspring of the same soil is all but negligible.
The haat is only one symbol of many.It is not a question of jumping into the chaos when faster, easier options exist, but simply imbibing the cleaner, purer nuances that lie attached to one given activity and infusing it into the newer, the latest version. In that the smaller towns strike a compromise: commerce will be conducted without the immediate returns; strangers given their wares in exchange of a promise to pay another day. Here, a man’s word still holds good.
Of course the haats that exist are also not as ‘pure’ as they were once upon a time. Jutes have gone, nylons are in. Bright florescent plastics have taken place of earthen pottery. Polyesters with butterfly prints line the market like flags, luring the vulnerable by their gaudy colours, shining with synthetic flavour. While travelling in this country one realizes the obvious geographical, societal, urbane and rural demarcations by the presence of these haats and by the contents they exhibit – a marketplace full of handmade, handcrafted, natural-born goods is a rarity.
And the day is not far when even this haat of the past will be consigned to a page in our history books. This is not cynicism but hard reality if we should not wake up. The traditional people who breathed in the open are now replaced by the third generation which has grown up in quarters too small, made of hot cement, covered by hotter tin – the heat has suffocated the very thought of beauty from their lives. Coomaraswamy who had foreseen the state of crafts made a bold statement nearly sixty years ago – “I do not think we fully realize the depth of our present intellectual poverty. If everything produced in India during the 19th century were to be suddenly miraculously destroyed, the world would be very little the poorer. The creative force in us has died because we have no faith in ourselves.”
Why? Where did that indomitable faith in our own skill vanish? One can accede that the repeated foreign invasions could have altered or left an after-effect of sorts, something especially true of the British era, vividly exposed by Marx when he said, “…the native crafts were swamped by the cheap merchandise of Manchester, and Indian plains littered by the bones of Indian craftsmen.” However, somewhere inside, in the face of the absolute truth, one cannot help but take this to be only part of the reason. It is not possible to lose cultural wealth and knowledge, integrity and faith, nurtured over god only knows how many millennia, in less than three hundred years! Our fame after all traces back to the Harappan days. Marshal, the leading excavator, was astounded at what he found. “Utensils, plain and painted pottery, terra cottas, dice and chessmen, toys… so well finished and so highly polished that they might have come out of Bond street jewellers today rather than from a prehistoric house 5000 years ago.”
Other than implying that the quality of these ancient relics was excellent, he has also suggested that the quality has still not been surpassed. That itself is an unbelievably sad fact. When one had the knowledge and skill ‘then’, had it been preserved and nourished, it would have grown and evolutionized in conjunction with man’s own growth. One simply crushes into the dust, fragments of the most unbelievably smooth pottery that this world has ever seen, without once lifting it, admiring it, and taking it back to make smoother with our modern minds. This present day, there is no excuse that we can offer on our behalf for not only lacking the initiative to exceed the quality of ‘then’ but also to have lost any and all interest in maintaining it as it was.
This point is best illustrated by two statements –if on the one hand we have Shanti Swarup saying, “ In nothing do the people of India display their sense of gorgeous and the artistic so much as in jewellery,” on the other we have Jamil Bhushan wiping that self-appreciatory smile with a statement that proclaims, “it would seem that ancient India had experimented with and perfected the art of self-decoration so much that in the 20th century we have not been able to improve on these patterns and workmanship.” We have nothing to feel so self-contained about – if at all, we are supremely guilty of letting down the ancients in more ways than one. What we have achieved on our own, through our progress in technology and intellect, is commendable and one cannot cheat oneself of the credit. But progress doesn’t necessarily indicate a revamping of values, ideals, standards or of obliterating the good, the simple, the traditional. We don’t have to live in mud houses but we can certainly make concrete beautiful. True progress is what India practised over thousands of years, by always assimilating the good into the existing, from any new contact – not what we are enthusiastically doing now which is to throw out of the window, unceremoniously, all that they worked on, only because ‘they’ are antiques thousands of years old and not ‘with’ the present times.
That is why we cannot make scapegoats of the British for our own follies. They were responsible, yes, but not entirely. We seemed to have given up just a fraction of a second before they entered our lives. The decadence that set in, post-Shah Jehan, was also to do with the lack of patronage which was so essential to the traditional craftsman. Without this, the guilds subsisted in penury, members broke away to indulge in the game of ‘survival of the fittest’ and goodwill and fellowship was replaced by cutthroat competition and rivalry. That is what is still prevalent till today. And Bernier’s observation seems to be a figment of poetic imagination of the 17th century – “In one hall embroiders are busily employed, superintended by a master. In another you see goldsmiths; in a third painters; in a fourth varnishers in lacquer work; in a fifth joiners, turners, tailors and shoemakers; in a sixth manufacturers of silk brocade, and those fine muslins of which were made turbans, girdles with golden flowers…”
These craft-centres used to be the hub of the towns and cities. All activity took place here. The craftsmen received due honour – “carpenters presented with white flowers, unguents and cloth” 1 – and due prosperity – “the pavilions of the different companies and the corporations, vast as mountains, were decorated with banners, bearing upon them the implements and emblems of the several crafts.”2
All this is now standing on the borderland. Those who wish to survive, gravitate towards the middle, once again securing turf even at the cost of their ideals, the others fade away with the setting of the sun. There are no longer any hubs – one literally has to hunt for an artist who is still genuine, still real and true, not an impersonation like the many crafts that circulate today. It is a change in our mindset. It is a change in our heart and in our soul. We have disconnected ourselves from the very raison d’etre of our art, the driving force… who are we creating for? What are we creating? Why are we creating?
“Kabir remained a weaver all his life…the ordinary profession of a weaver is not a distinction from enlightenment; on the contrary his weaving becomes a prayer.”3 Each spin of the potter’s wheel was a prayer, a mantra like the Buddhist’s prayer wheel. Every thread being woven was in the very fabric of the universe, which he understood as “…one continuous fabric with its warp and woof making one grid pattern.”4 Every spark from the furnace travelled Godwards. Craft was an offering, a sacrifice. It was a means for effecting the steady climb towards the Light above.
What the craftsman or artist wove, chiselled or painted was with this belief and when there is a guiding force such as this, when one is offering oneself in the guise of the art to that guiding force, beseeching It to pour forth Its Light into the soul of both the art and the artist, how can the creation be at all ordinary? The beauty of thought becomes the beauty of expression. And the reason there was such an abundance of beauty in all that they have left behind, be it thought or form, was because it sprang from the same source, as an offering.
“Folk art, being completely unadulterated by extraneous influences, supplies the purest rhythmic mould or inspirational channel worked out by the race soul for its creative activity.”5
There is a man in Aranmula who makes metal mirrors with a two-thousand year old history. The uniqueness of this mirror lies in its perfection. And what was a common utility, used by all and sundry (a fact attested to by the plethora of sculpted feminine figures) is now exceedingly expensive and so close to the brink of extinction that very soon, the sculpted remains are all that one may have left. To make it worse, he has vowed only to teach his son and his son has vowed never to learn. The same holds true for the double-stitch Patola sarees of Patan where only three brothers are left practising this craft. Their children find it laborious and computers less demanding.
There was a time, not too long ago, when each home of the Kutchchi villager was unique for it revealed treasures of its own making. No longer do they decorate their individual homes with mirror-work on the walls; instead, they doll up one house and invite visitors to take a look in exchange of money or journalistic features. In Barmer, few families thread the unique bangles that were once famous all over and although they cannot read, they hand out a printed appeal to be saved from getting submerged by the isolation of the dunes that surround them. A visit to the Calico Museum in Ahmedabad will open a world of textiles, such that one could never even conceive. They now remain as exhibits, and printed on cards that can be posted all the way to the North Pole. The ancients gave us matter for these cards. We gave them extinction.
A Madhubani artist describes this scenario more poignantly: “In earlier times, the market liked what we made, today, its what the market wants. I have knocked on many doors to save this art. Do you know there is a Mithila museum in Japan? Foreigners take away all our paintings. A Japanese gentleman told me that a day would come when my children will have to go to Japan to see our national art and they will have to buy a ticket to enter the museum!” The story is similar in every nook and corner and it is desperation that is saturating the industry, not ideas, not enthusiasm, not hope. Lamentable and shocking. But that’s how it is. Or how it may be in the future if we don’t wake up. The craftsmen have been amputated from their art, seeing it as something to serve materialistic ends with not even a hint of spiritual edification. This then corrodes the fabric of their being, where beauty takes second place. Even if beauty is apparent it is worthless, for beauty without a soul is ugly.
The people who consume his art are as worthy of blame for they no longer expect or ask or appreciate the old sense of beauty. They have lost the connection between aesthetics and utility – fluorescent green plastic bottles will do just as easily as earthen pots – they have lost that soul-feeling. Whatever the advantages of machines may be, at the end of the day, there is nothing that can explain away the look of desolation on the face of a woman who has laboured for a month to make an embroidered wall-hanging and finds no takers; the reason for this is the machine which has in a single day, churned out by the hundreds, copies of her pattern and inundated the market before she can even get to the village bus-stop. Everything handmade had the stamp of uniqueness on it. Everything machine-made has the stamp of sameness. And thus, no longer do you see new designs or innovations because the source has all but dried up.
We do not intend to rob the children of our craftsmen of brighter futures only because we want our cane work just as always. But if craft was truly understood for the role it plays in our lives, not only would we insist that they learn from their mothers but also beg them to teach us as well.
Perhaps, there is complacency because we still see so much around us in comparison to other cultures. Our own diversity has resulted in an astounding variety of crafts: Chamba handkerchiefs, Kinnauri caps, Ladhaki jewellery, Kashmiri paper-mache, Lukhnavi embroidery, Banarsi sarees, Bidari boxes, Kolapuri slippers, Khurja pottery, Kerala bell-metals, Tanjavur bronze-work, Oriya handlooms, Rajasthani mirror-work, Kondapalli wooden toys, Ferozabad glass… the list goes on and on with every state, city, village and tribe contributing its unique craft. Obviously when confronted with such variety, a man not well versed with history will assume our concern to be unjustified and ranting paranoia. But once the hard facts, the chronology of events, the actual comprehension is established, even a haat full of everything we make will still point to an emptiness within.
(Sourced from 'Of Past Dawns and Future Noons'; Published by UBSPD and Sri Aurobindo Society. © Sri Aurobindo Society).
(Shonar likes to dabble with words and experiences, creating a moment that can be shared with others.)1. Bana in’Harshacharita’
2. ‘Harivamsa’
3. Osho
4. Stella Kamrisch
5. Coomaraswamy