The observation is striking in its unpeeling of the impulses that lead artists to a study of the past. For often, the artist relies only on these reflexes, these impulses to guide him through the creation of a work. But this looking back at distant pasts is to walk into a labyrinth, especially in these times, when mystification of the past serves as a useful political tool to control the present. A master key is required, or a khevat/ oarsman as it were, to help us navigate the choppy waters.

My first encounter with Prof. BN Goswamy, BNG henceforth, incidentally came through a cubist portrait of the great man drawn on film by Amit Dutta in his Museum of Imagination. It is, as Dutta writes in the beginning, a film made of silences. Until the final third of the film, the man in question is present mostly in his absence or seen from afar, through window-panes, sitting outside holding a thought in his hands, his back to the camera. We see the famous cravat around his neck as his hands wave about in conversation but the face remains unseen, the baritone remains disembodied. A home is seen – a comfortable home resplendent with books and bronze statuettes, Warli murals painted on the walls, a garden with remains of ancient columns. He begins to speak of his childhood but the sentence remains tantalisingly incomplete. A shadow is seen on the wall, soon to vanish.

It occurs to me that we are looking at BNG like he must have looked for the great Pahadi painters hidden behind the shadows of time. This cat and mouse goes on until we find BNG sitting with a book in a walkway at the Museum of Fine Arts, Chandigarh, as if an actor is sitting on stage. What is going on in his head? A little later, in the reference library of Chandigarh’s Government Museum and Art Gallery, BNG sits with an unopened folio in front of him. As the painting is unwrapped, the oilpaper covering it is pulled back, a storm gathers, thunder cracks sharply in the sky, the lens focuses on a whirling chakra – this is the ‘Emergence of the Varaha’  – we are inside the museums of BNG’s and Amit Dutta’s and great Eighteenth century painter Manaku’s imagination.

The ‘Emergence of the Varaha’ is on display at Chandigarh’s Government Museum and Art Gallery. At first the painting’s small size confounds; it is afterall a miniature, meant to be held up almost like a photo-album. But much is gained, as BNG says, in moving inside the picture in a ‘leisurely fashion, lingering over each nuance’. Seen closely, the exquisite craftsmanship of the mussavar becomes apparent – the gold in the chakra, shimmering. Coils of snakes dropping from the sky, black storm clouds of terror raining blood pus and bones, the fleeing from the battlefield of saints and demons; even a strangely delighted ghost – and at the centre of it all, the narrow-eyed,  boar-faced Varaha, slayer of Hiranyakashya, saviour of the Earth, standing tall. In his Spirit of the Indian Painting, BNG writes,

‘One can almost sense the very heavens shake and tremble with sounds that fill all quarters, and a shower of weapons falls from the sky…All this while, Varah stands firm, feet solidly planted on earth…Stillness in the midst of commotion, the good standing firm against evil.’

Between Dutta’s use of sound and BNG’s words, Manaku’s work comes alive.

Learning how to look is also, in essence, changing how one thinks. Knowledge makes the hitherto unseen visible even as it throws new light on all that’s relegated to the back of the mind. A transformation has occurred inside me. I am suddenly seeing Varahas everywhere.

In Lucknow’s State Museum, itself a relic, I come across a massive Yajna-Varaha hidden at the end of a claustrophobic bhulbhulaiya of exhibition-rooms and passages. The imposing, exquisitely crafted tenth-century sculpture from Jhansi evokes fear and respect – in no little measure to convey the might of the avatar, but also reflecting perhaps the sculptors experience of encountering a wild boar (the words boar and Varaha come from the same proto-Indo-Iranian root). On its body are etched rows upon rows of Rishis and Gods and Goddesses being rescued from the primordial waters. On his snout sits Saraswati, on his back Brahma. Under him snakes the Shesh Nag, signifying the waters under the Varahas feet, and from which it has just rescued the earth, which now in the form of its consort Bhudevi, hangs on for dear life from his right tusk.

The Varaha was most certainly a totem of the forest dwellers who would’ve marvelled at the solitary wild boar’s speed and power, which when enraged, could take on a tiger. As these hunting-gathering tribes passed into the caste system, their totems were amalgamated into the vedic Hindu canon, where incidentally it was originally a form of Prajapati or Bramha. With the rise of Vaishnavism, the Varaha became Vishnu’s third avatar. In the Gupta period, with its patronisation of Brahmanism and Vaishnavism, Varaha worship proliferated. Majestic statues and carvings and even temples have been found in important Gupta (and post-Gupta) centres of Eran, Udayagiri, Khajuraho, and Jhansi among other places.

A magnificent tenth-century Varaha from Sunari, Vidisha is being hosted at Mumbai’s CSMVS (Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya), a part of its ongoing exhibition titled ‘Ancient Sculptures’.  It is remarkably of the same size and make as its Jhansi/ Lucknow Museum cousin, indicating perhaps a continuity and even standardisation of sculpting.

Continuing with my Varaha spotting streak, at a small but well mounted exhibition of archaeological finds organised by the Mumbai university and Sathye college, I found a much smaller, eleventh-century statue of the Varaha.

The rows of figures on its body are gone, the sculpture has shrunk to the size of a small animal, more a wombat than a boar. The Varaha seems more ornamental than central to worship. Excavated from an ancient temple complex dedicated to Vishnu, the Varaha worship already seems to be losing its importance, at least in this region.

But there are other survivals. At CSMVS, in the corridor leading away from the central hall at CSMVS, I encounter a female-bodied, boar-headed sculpture. A short inscription describes it simply as tenth-century Varahi from Gujarat.

In a remarkable series of miniatures invoking the Tantric goddesses, attributed to Kripal from Nurpur, called the ‘Tantric Devi’ series, Varahi is seen as a ten-handed Goddess riding a tiger. She holds in her hands an assortment of weapons but also the kapala – the bowl she drinks liquor from, which can also be noticed in the CSMVS Varahi statue’s left hand.

On the Devi’s face is painted a determined ferocity – even the male tiger underneath her, his tail twitching in the air in anticipation of danger, pales in comparison. No less than the sun itself makes a halo behind her. The luminescent stones in her crown and jewels catch our eye – iridescent Beetle wing cases used to stimulate the appearance of emeralds.  BNG calls these paintings the ‘visual counterpart of concentration’ known to Tantric devotees. The ‘meditative verse’ on the back reads:

I worship in my heart ten-armed Varahi, whose lotus eyes quiver from spirituous liquor, whose face is like the sun’s rays, seated on a tiger!

Varahi is known to be one of the fiercest of the saptamatrikas or seven mother Goddesses of the Shakti cult (sometimes ashtamatrikas) found both in Hinduism and Buddhism and are definitely borrowed from the more ancient Tantrism – itself born out of the practice of ‘Mother-right’ rituals and magic as Debiprasad Chattopadhya argues in the Lokayata, his seminal work on Indian materialism. These rituals, considered to be precursors of organised religion, in turn can be traced to prehistoric agricultural rites, practised by women to ensure a good sowing season. Even now, thousands of years later, in the vast majority of Indians with links to agriculture or land in some form, by being dependent on it or in ancestral memories, a form of devi-puja is common. 

The cult of Mother Goddess can be seen in the Indus valley seals, in the name for tantra ‘vamacharya’ (women – path) and in its appropriation as counterparts to male Gods by Puranic Hinduism. And while Varaha worship has completely ceased, Varahi-mata temples are very much in use and are found in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Odisha. The demise of a royally-sanctioned Vaishnav tradition is not an impediment to the continuation of a more ancient cult.

India is a country of long survivals, says DD Kosambi – that other great teacher of the historical method. The past lives on in the present. It percolates, upwards through layers of archeological time, in the palimpsests Nehru spoke of, in the lives of the ordinary Indians around us. We only need to look closely. Deedar ka samaan chahiye. These departures and arrivals of ideas, eddies of time, similar to primordial waters of the Hiranyagarbha as Manaky once painted, swirl around us, inviting us to probe further and make connections.

The eighth century Kashmiri poet and critic Abhinavgupta describes a sahridaya, used often by BNG, as:

‘one whose heart has been made transparent, like a mirror by constant chewing of poetry and who is thus able to become immediately one with the emotion portrayed.’

Through BNG’s ‘chewing’ of the Pahadi masters’ work and Amit Dutta’s ‘chewing’ of BNG’s work, the lives and works of great artists are illuminated for us. Their art flows through disparate, utsahit hearts, drawing into its embrace sahridayas across yawning gaps of time.

But with only a smattering of methods gleaned from the masters, one wanders through corridors of history, knocking at locked doors, picking up shards of broken pottery and peering into illegible portraits of men and women whose names are now lost in the fog of time. Who were these artist-ancestors of ours? What impulses drove them to pick up the brush?

In 1969, BNG, delivered a lecture on ‘Indian Painters of the Punjab Hills’ at the Royal Society of Arts, London. At the end of what was already a deep insight into the lives of the Pahadi painters, he does something unusual and tries,  ‘..to reconstruct an imaginary day in the life of a Pahari artist..’. Slowly, with great care, he paints an image of a master artist going about his daily chores – zealously protecting the fingers he paints with, negotiating with creditors, conferring with other artists, receiving a new text on the erotics brought by the village pandit, inspecting his meagre lands, speaking to his tenants while mentoring the next generation of artists. Technical details are deftly weaved within the narrative – twigs of the basuti bush are used to make pencils, bright red hue is made by drying and crushing of insects gathered from cactus leaves,  brushes are made of squirrel tails, a student grinds the yellow peuri colour, another burnishes a finished painting with ‘highly polished mortar-shaped agate’; But as the day proceeds, the artist is weighed down by the challenges of making ends meet. Anxiety besets him. He hasn’t yet conjured up the drawing he must make for the rani’s birthday. Now BNG unfurls, in his signature style, a brilliant epilogue:

‘Images flit into his mind and are expelled: a tumult is building up; and then, while the mind grapples with the task of selection and rejection, it holds on to one series of images…The search is now over: the master’s mind is made up…. as the night thickens around him, the master puts the prayer-book aside and, sitting cross-legged, closes his eyes, in the effort to concentrate. After a while, the mind stops wandering, becomes sthira like a silent lamp burning in a windless place. All becomes clear at last : no shadow separates the thought of the image from the image. It is at this point, when all is still both outside and inside, when the time is quiet and nothing stirs, when the faint glow of dawn begins to light up the distant rim of the sky, that the master takes out his materials from the wooden box. He bows to the brush and then holding it steadily in his hand moves it on the surface of the paper ever so softly, with so light a touch that the brush seems to be breathing over the paper. The great and gentle task has begun. Another masterpiece is on its way..’

With characteristic sensitivity BNG parts the curtains of history and brings forth on stage an Indian artist, hitherto unknown. He looks deep inside a painting, finding the artist in each stroke of his brush, discerning hints of his inner world spread throughout the canvas. He then looks away, delves into  poetry and scriptures, looks into the ‘stern pages’ of the bahis, to resurrect the portrait of a great master, who, grappling with the difficult questions of life itself, faced with mortality, ‘relegated’ to a carpenter by caste society, chooses to be guided by the reflexes within. He is moved by the small and great things around him, the flowing waters of mountain rivers – elephants bathe in it, kings are cremated next to it, by the chatak’s mournful call, by the whorled branches of the kadamba tree, associated with Krishna, by the music Raja Balwant Singh is so moved by, by the determined passage of seasons, by the timelessness of the epics, by the evocative scriptures, the mystical world of tantra-mantras, the wandering saints, the bhavasagara that the world is. He is aware of the improbability inherent in creating art. The Devi herself speaks through his work. This is not only Indian art through history, but also history of Indian thought through art.

Gura To Ji Ne, Gyan ki jadiya Dai

The Guru has given the roots of knowledge

In BNG, we, the untaught, found a teacher. He lit inside the hearts of some of us, the lamps of knowledge – a way of seeing. And the wax of our ignorance  slowly melted away. Through the hearts of rasikas and sahridayas, artists, historians and patrons, the rivers of Indian art flows, in the work they do, past and present collides and the tide of history advances. And when its many secrets, kept alive through invisible webs, are revealed by an extraordinary guru, the roots of the knowledge tree deepen by a few inches more.

Suhel B is a writer and filmmaker

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The Barn Swallow is a sparrow-sized, agile bird that spends a majority of its life in flight – eating, drinking, and even bathing on the wing. In summers, they breed in the Northern latitudes, above the Himalayas, and when the Earth tilts away from the sun, they flock to Africa and India in millions, accompanied by a new generation. Drive straight on the road leading away from the Palassio mall until you reach water bodies surrounded on all sides by large construction sites, and it’s likely that you will come across thousands of Barn Swallows congregating on electric wires or swooping down one by one on the water below, snagging small insects mid-air. In flight, their bellies appear in many variations of creamy-white with a rusty-coloured neck (hence the scientific name Hirundo Rustica), with wide outstretched wings and a deeply forked tail. Their flight is convoluted, zig-zag, evolved to mimic the unpredictable moves of their prey. When perched, in a ‘bent-forward’ position, their cobalt-blue primary feathers can be seen. These thousands of Barn Swallows feed on insects that rise from a collection of water bodies that dot the area around the stadium.

Nearby lies the Ekana Wetland, now protected by a government order, with work on a watch tower and walkway already in progress. On the afternoon I visited the wetland, young men in large cars were using the ‘natural’ backdrop to record reels, performing reverse somersaults to loud cheers. Behind them, at least two species of wagtails were performing tricks of their own. No less raucous than similar specimens of the human species, these highly vocal, long-tailed immigrants arrive in Lucknow in large groups at the onset of winter and promptly take over feeding areas. The wetland, in this case, is overtaken by their (mis)behaviour. Both species—the white-faced, sombre white wagtail and the black-faced, white-browed wagtail—can be seen chasing each other from one low bush to another. If birds made reels, these immigrants would be best known for the animated twerking of their backsides, which incidentally gives them their name—wagtails.

I walk away from the crowd, towards the stadium. Various water birds call from the thicket. This is home to the Purple Swamphen, a large bluish-purple bird with an amusing tuft of white hair under its tail. Apart from the usual waterhens and moorhens, the wetland also hosts the stunning jacanas – I have seen both the Bronze-Winged and the Pheasant-Tailed Jacanas here – ‘walking’ on water on their elongated toes and nails. In Jamaica, these jacanas are also called ‘Jesus’ birds for this miraculous feat. However, in flight, the bird loses its glamour, appearing gangly with long thin legs awkwardly trailing behind. These water birds, pretty as they are, unfortunately emit a range of off-key, raucous cackles starting from the guttural to the high-pitched, which at times can sound very human-like. Presently a man emerges from the bend with a beer can in hand, looking positively harried. He looks around, alarmed. “Ye kiski awaz hai?” Who is making these sounds? he asks. I tell him about the waterbirds and lend him my binoculars to persuade him. This convinces him. “Humne socha chudail hai. I thought it was a witch.” He says, relieved. He then requests me to take a picture of him with the binoculars. I am asked to hold his drink as he turns into an ornithologist and peers into the marshes pensively.

The witchy cackle is the quintessential wetland sound, its resident symphony. From the croaking Egrets to the laughing White-Breasted water hens, water-birds deploy a uniquely multitude of non-musical calls and songs. Here, in the gathering dusk, Ekana resembles a ghost town. From the tall grass that lines both sides of the path, rise the skeletal remains of babool trees. Devoid of leaves, these wooden towers provide the birds with an ideal perch to survey the marshes around them. In turn, they offer an unmatched view to the birdwatcher who can observe these birds unhindered. This is one of Ekana’s unique specialties.

Hunched, on two adjacent branches of a babool, sit two Indian rollers. The otherwise drab, brown-ish bird reveals a dazzling blue under its wings when in flight. A hundred years ago, Rudyard Kipling’s father wrote about the roller in his book, Beasts and Man in India, saying, ‘ “Undreamed-of wings he lifted,” a quotation that comes to mind when this gray and sober-looking bird suddenly rises and displays the turquoise and sapphire-tinted splendor of its wings’.

It can be seen year after year occupying the same perch—the bare limb of a towering tree or an electric wire. Salim Ali called it the farmer’s best friend for its steady diet of insects and other pests of standing crops. The acrobatic bird is known for gliding and dropping down on prey, battering it mercilessly against the perch before swallowing it; a certainly delisghtful sight to the farmer.

In Northern and Central India the roller is also known as Neelkanth for the faint blue under its neck, the colour of poison that Shiva drank. A sighting of the Neelkanth on Dusshera is considered to bring good luck, for it is said to deliver messages to Ram himself. On the internet, I came across this simple Haiku:

Neelkanth tum neele rahiyo, dudh bhaat ka bhoj kariyo, hamri baat Ram se kahiyo

(Neelkanth, you stay blue, feast on rice and milk, and convey our wishes to Lord Ram).

The Indian Roller is also the state bird of Karnataka, Telangana, and Odisha. In press handouts, published on social media, keen birdwatchers can spy a framed portrait of the Indian roller in flight on the walls of Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge’s New Delhi residence.

The State of Indian Birds report released this year, reports a fifty percent drop in the Indian Roller’s numbers. This was perhaps one of the most surprising revelations in a report that already paints a difficult picture of India’s avifauna. This drop in numbers of the commonly seen roller is almost certainly due to the loss of habitat and the indiscriminate use of pesticides. But that evening in Ekana, I counted at least six rollers including a juvenile.

As the sun sets around me, a mustering of Open-Billed Storks (Ghonghil in Hindi) arrives at the wetland. A low Babool tree close to the stadium is the communal residence of this gentle bird. The name comes from a permanent gap between its reddish-brown beak which helps it extract the soft parts of its favourite food—freshwater snails or Ghonga. One after the other, in the falling light, the storks glide regally back home. In the distance sits a majestic Nilgai, perhaps reflecting on one or another lofty questions of existence. I am close to the stadium and mall now, and can hear the thump of distant music. Behind me, water is being pumped out to make way for the foundation laying of a large mall. A car, perhaps returning from the site, sounds its horn and flushes a bird out of hiding. It is a heron judging by its long neck and long, pointed bill, though I have never seen it before. The bird is a glossy black, with yellowish stripes on the neck and white spots on its back, which on the deep black of its wings, look like stars in the night sky. It looks vulnerable and out of place. When a Pond-Heron takes an unkind swipe at it, flying low over its head, it ducks awkwardly. This is most certainly a rare sighting of the elusive and solitary Black Bittern. Crepuscular and nocturnal, it is most active at dusk and dawn. A bird of thick cover, seen sparsely outside, freezes when startled. The Britten sat on the branch long enough to give me the opportunity to admire it at length. This must be the Dussehra good luck granted to me by the Neelkanths.

As other birds fall silent one by one, a steady hum rises all around me. The darkening sky above the Ekana wetland is filled with tens of thousands of chattering Barn Swallows, flying in no particular pattern, in no particular rhythm, but simply in the celebration of being alive, marking the end of another day. It is a joyous, magnificent melody. A once-in-a-lifetime sight.

Even though the Ekana Wetland itself is under government protection; the extraordinary diversity of birds that arrive here every winter, as well as the resident ones, feed on the various water bodies scattered throughout this area. Most of these water bodies, marshes, and wetlands, though lying in the Gomti’s flood plain, are in-turn fed by water being pumped out of the ground for foundation-laying of active construction sites. Many of these water-bodies themselves seem to be earmarked as construction sites. Soon, the digging will stop, and construction will begin. Families will move in, shops and malls shall be made available to them. In a few years, the ‘Bird Sanctuary’ or Eco-tourism centre of Ekana will become an island in the middle of a sea of high-rises. Eventually it will only support a fraction of the birds who now live or migrate here. This is after all how habitats are lost. This is how species are lost.

Alone in this wilderness, with the star-studded Bittern, water-witches, a sky full of swallows, and a forest of dead babools, I wonder what is lost when a bird disappears.

In Aesop’s fable, a young boy, fond of gambling, sells off his only cloak when he sees a swallow fly by, convinced that spring is around the corner and sadly, freezes to death. In our mad scramble to build our houses over the nests and homes of others, convinced of our immortality, perhaps we are ignoring a warning in plain sight—that it is only a matter of time before a land not suitable for a bird becomes unsuitable for us.

(Suhel B is a writer and filmmaker)

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