Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity Page 16

  Such a critique is not intended to belittle Corbusier. In the context of the evolution of his own country’s architecture, his brave futurism was of value. He was a man with the courage of his convictions, and the inability of his peers in Europe to understand or appreciate him never made him waver from his personal vision. The critique of his design for Chandigarh is not so much about his oeuvre per se, as it is about its relevance to India. The idiom and syntax of his concepts and drawings were located in Europe, part of the evolving psyche of the west. He had neither the pragmatism nor the respect for local realities and cultural and historical traditions to even attempt a synthesis of his aesthetics and those of a newly independent but ancient country. And in the idealistic, rational and proud Nehru, eager to earn respect for his country in the eyes of the west and in the language of the west, he found a patron who encouraged this arrogant insularity. Chandigarh, therefore, rose as a monument to the post-colonial deference of India to the west, not as a statement of her rediscovery of herself. The city, intriguingly and unthinkingly celebrated as ‘the city beautiful’, is in fact a symbol of the absence of synthesis between what needed to be borrowed and what should have been preserved.

  The inability to make such informed choices is the handicap of colonized nations. Colonizing nations don’t have such a predicament. No one in Paris or Belgium or London ever needed to contemplate the possibility of an architect from Senegal or Congo or India designing an entire city for them that had nothing to do with their architectural traditions. There lies the inequity in the creative interaction between the colonizer and the colonized, and it is important to understand the historical reasons that made this possible even in newly independent nations that were committed to repudiating the influence of their past masters. It is significant, too, that the consequences of Chandigarh continued to be felt for years after the completion of the city. A generation of Indian architects grew up in thrall to Corbusier, leading to a great deal of unproductive imitation. As Gautam Bhatia writes with biting satire:

  And the ripples were slowly beginning to be felt throughout the land, and certainly much beyond the Punjab. Other native architects also began to congregate at Chandigarh to get a close glimpse of the master, to grovel at his white feet, so that generations to come would remember that they too were involved in the making of history … They were his devotees, some from Madras and Ahmedabad and Bombay, staying close to his heels, and happily following his sacred routine. Some began to wear French berets and thick glasses. Others began to paint and write feverishly, discussing architectural polemics over wine and French toast in the faint hope that some day they too would achieve greatness. But they were not white, and Nehru was not looking for brown saviours. Their only hope lay in a lifetime commitment to Corbusian mimicry. 66

  Lutyens and Corbusier are revealing examples of the dialectics of colonialism. Architecture has been the single biggest aesthetic failure of modern India, because having lost the animating impulses of its own traditions it reduced itself to rudderless mediocrity and mimicry. The cities of India are dotted with a recent ugliness of form that is difficult to associate with a civilization that could produce wonders with brick and stone. The government is the largest sponsor of this unaesthetic excess, but private constructions are no better—the upmarket apartment complexes and malls that have mushroomed all over India, products of the new urban boom, are testimony to this. In late 2009—nearly a century after Lutyens’ New Delhi was built and half a century after Corbusier’s Chandigarh—two landmarks of urban Indian architecture were in the news: the Global Education Centre-2 (GEC-2) in the Mysore campus of Infosys, and the recently renovated New Delhi railway station. The former is a colossal semicircular building inspired, without subtlety, by classical Greek architecture, and the latter has a brand new Lutyens-style façade with huge white pillars and, perhaps as an element of modern design, purple glass. Both buildings are designed not for the benefit of the predominantly Indian clients who will use them but for first world approval: Infosys is India’s famously global IT company, and New Delhi is preparing to host the 2010 Commonwealth Games.

  In her brilliantly titled story ‘Kings of Xeroxia’ in Outlook magazine (9 November 2009), Shruti Ravindran points out the absurdity of building such structures in today’s India. ‘The GEC-2 might win the awe of its young executive trainees, and the New Delhi railway station the glancing attention (or dismay) of those hurrying through it,’ she writes, ‘but … is imitating the architecture of the past—including colonial styles intended to intimidate and subjugate us—really the way to engage a contemporary public?’ It isn’t surprising that the unsuitability of the new façade of the capital’s main railway station is already apparent, with dust ‘caking the purplish glass front’. Interestingly, even this incongruous design was a compromise; the original grandiose plan submitted by a Hong Kong-based firm to convert the station into a ‘world-class’ one was far more alien and absurd. Shruti quotes the noted architect K.T. Ravindran: ‘It was the Postdamer Platz (station in Berlin) plan copy-pasted on to the New Delhi railway station … It had astonishingly little relevance to our context. It was unsustainable, an insult to this country.’ Concluding her excellent story, Shruti Ravindran asks, ‘When will we evolve our own “starchitects” and icon-makers?’ and gives us Gautam Bhatia’s answer: ‘When we stop being imitative and become inventive … Right now, we see ourselves as second-rate; our approach is just to play catch-up to other cultures—the Chinese, the Europeans, or Lutyens. It’s about time we followed our own instincts.’

  There are, of course, some pockets of excellence—buildings that attempt to incorporate indigenous elements and are suited to our needs. But they constitute a near-invisible minority, and even here, much of the creativity is derivative. Urban kitsch will disfigure the soul of our new nation for a long, long time. While a bad song or dance has a finite life, a bad building survives to haunt us for decades.

  5

  Creativity and Distortion

  Possibly 200 years before the birth of Christ, a gentleman called Bharata wrote a treatise of 6000 shlokas in Sanskrit called the Natyashastra. This seminal work is a meditation on every aspect of creative expression, including theatre, literary construction, music, dance and body movements, rhythmic patterns or tala, architecture, sculpture and painting. What is important, however, is that it does not purport to be only a technical manual. Bharata’s encyclopaedic investigation is about what constitutes the aesthetic experience—rasanubhav. Rasa, or the sense of pleasure derived from artistic expression, is the primary concern in the text. What is rasa? How is it evoked? What are its manifestations? Who experiences it? What must an artist do to enhance it? Is it an inner experience or a state of transcendence? Is one conscious of its unfolding, or is it a remembered experience, to be relished after the event? In the course of these inquiries, Bharata expounds on the navarasas or nine sentiments—heroic, erotic, comic, marvellous, pathetic, odious, fearsome, furious and peaceful. He lists the ashtanayikas, or eight types of heroines, classified in accordance with their emotional state in relation to the nayaka or lover. He also enumerates the three categories of expression: nritta (dance based on pure rhythm), nritya (dance to a rhythm with mime) and natya (drama with music and dance). He specifies the hand movements and postures that constitute the vocabulary of dance, and dwells at length on the bhavas, or emotions. He describes fifteen types of dramas, ranging from one-act to ten-act, and speaks of four types of acting—through gestures, speech, costumes and display of temperament—which he further classifies as either masculine and vigorous (tandava) or feminine and graceful (lasya). The Natyashastra, therefore, not only propounds ‘a complex and coherent grammar of performance’ but, through its preoccupation with rasa, also presents ‘a comprehensive theory of cognition’1 which is meant to take the artist and the audience to a higher level of consciousness.

  A document of this nature could not have been written without an already well-established tradition for the dis
cussion of art and aesthetics. In fact, historians say that the Natyashastra is based on the Natyaveda, a 36,000-shloka document, no longer extant, which is much older. The theory of rasa or aesthetic pleasure, which some scholars consider to be India’s most significant contribution to the world of art, was further developed after Bharata by a series of commentators, most notably Bhatta Lollata and Sri Shankuka in the eighth century, Bhatta Nayaka in the tenth, and Abhinavagupta in the eleventh. Kapila Vatsyayan, the respected art historian who has written a learned book on the Natyashastra, argues convincingly that the text had a pivotal role in the making and evolution of Indian art right up to the eighteenth century.2

  The essential inference is that art and creative expression in India have had a deeply deliberative and sophisticated tradition that is centuries’ old. At a time when most other parts of the world had not yet fully developed a language to communicate, Indian thinkers had come up with a vision of aesthetics that encompassed every aspect of artistic endeavour. If they had merely put together a compendium of art, it would have been, for those times, achievement enough. But for them to have been absorbed with such depth and insight with what constitutes the fulfilling artistic experience, is astonishing. The basic tenets that they came up with, or debated, grew and evolved, but they always belonged to an overarching philosophical world view. If Bharata advanced a powerful theory of aesthetics, other areas of human thought and expression, both religious and secular, received as much intellectual attention. The ancient Vedas and Upanishads are among the most acute meditations in human history on philosophy, metaphysics and the nature of reality. The Arthashastra of Kautilya, written around the fourth century AD, is a clinical exposition of the principles of statecraft; Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra, written possibly in the third century, is India’s best-known treatise on the art of lovemaking and has—and this is not known to many—a very detailed account of the prevalent techniques of painting. Panini’s Ashtadhyayi, attributed to 400 years before Christ, is arguably the most scientific and detailed lexicon on grammar composed before the nineteenth century in any part of the world.

  When culture in all its myriad aspects has such a lineage, it has the power to influence people over millennia, both within and without. The impact of Indian culture for over a thousand years in South and South-east Asia proves this, and must count as perhaps the world’s only example in the ancient and medieval periods of significant cultural export without military conquest. From the sixth century BC onwards, the tenets of Buddhism were taken abroad in Pali, a dialect of Prakrit which, much simpler than Sanskrit, was what the masses spoke at that time. Pali is still the language of Buddhists in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and much of South-east Asia. From the Amaravati period in the second century, through the Gupta, Pallava, Pala and Chola dynasties in the succeeding centuries up to the twelfth, Hindu culture spread across all of South and South-east Asia. The largest Hindu temple in the world, and one of only two dedicated to Brahma, is at Angkor Vat in Cambodia. The epic Ramayana has immensely popular local variations in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar. The Champa dynasty, which ruled for over 1000 years in what is present-day central Vietnam, was Hindu and followed the cultural mores and practices of India, including the Sakya calendar. Tamil is an officially recognized language in Malaysia and Singapore, and in Thailand, which is predominantly Buddhist today, the names of people and places are derivates of Sanskrit. In fact, archaeological findings across the region, right up to the Philippines, show that Sanskrit, and its most important religious and secular texts, were part of local cultures. The Borobudur temple in Indonesia is a monumental example of the influence of Hindu philosophy and architectural principles; and Bali is still a Hindu enclave in this overwhelmingly Islamic nation. (It is also, as I discovered on a recent visit, perhaps the only place in the world where a huge statue of Bhima dominates a city square.)

  It is not the intention here to elaborate fully on every aspect of Indian culture, or discuss at length the footprint it created abroad. There is enough and easily accessible scholarship on both these aspects. The purpose is to provide some compelling examples that emphasize the central thesis of this chapter—that from its origins, Indian culture evolved in response to a clear thought process, and a great deal of scholarship within the framework of a distinct world view underpinned that evolution. Creativity, thus, had both context and ideology and wasn’t rootless, random or passively reactive to external influences. If this strength allowed Indian culture to propagate itself abroad without the force of arms, it also allowed it to survive conquering armies at home. Throughout history invaders from across the Himalayas sought to either plunder or own India. The Greeks led by Alexander conquered the northernmost areas in the fourth century BC. Alexander’s premature death prevented the consolidation of a lasting Greek kingdom, but a series of subsidiary Greek invasions continued for the next 400 years. In 57 BC the Sakas, a foreign tribe from Central Asia, also made their entry, albeit briefly. Greek influences were confidently assimilated by the indigenous culture, and the best manifestation of this can be seen in the stylized depiction of the Buddha in the Gandhara school of sculpture.

  However, the most sustained challenge to the established culture of the land came when Islamic invaders swept into the subcontinent from Central Asia after the tenth century AD. The Muslims came to north India as conquerors and proselytizers. Their aim was to impose their religion and their customs and way of life on the local populace. Inevitably, a great deal of wanton destruction was inherent in this process. But because of its intrinsic strength, the indigenous culture could not only withstand the onslaught but also absorb elements from the culture of the conquerors. What followed, therefore, in the succeeding centuries, was a most remarkable phenomenon of cultural intermingling. As mentioned earlier, Hindu masons built mosques, palaces and mausoleums to Persian or Central Asian specifications but brought in designs and techniques that were local (Islamic conventions did not permit the depiction of human figures, but the ornamentation was not immune to local influence). The ateliers of Muslim rulers, most notably the Mughal emperors, had Hindu artists producing miniatures that combined aspects of both traditions. Religious divides existed, of course, but in time there developed a powerful Sufi tradition which drew from the metaphysics of both Islam and Hinduism.

  The poetry of Amir Khusro (1253–1325), composed in Persian and in the local dialect, Hindavi, and his music, which combined India’s ancient musical traditions with those of Persia, best exemplifies this enriching synthesis of cultures. The sombre and reflective dhrupad tradition of Indian classical vocal music developed the seduction of the khayal form through the influence of the newcomers, while musical instruments from Central Asia were modified and added to the repertoire of India’s classical and folk instrumental music. Persian and Arabic resonated with Khari Boli and other local dialects to ultimately produce a viable hybrid in the form of Urdu, which became the lingua franca of much of north India and beyond. Cuisine, too, underwent a transformation, resulting in a menu that brought biryani and halwa into Hindu homes and kachauris and kheer into Muslim homes. This intermingling happened gradually and organically, almost unconsciously, enriching both the conqueror and the conquered without diluting the authenticity of either.

  However, unlike the Turks and Afghans, who came as invaders but made India their home and became Indian, the British neither desired to be nor were capable of being assimilated in India. Kipling’s famous line about the east being the east and the west the west and ‘ne’er the twain shall meet’ was motivated by racial arrogance but wasn’t entirely off the mark. The invaders from Central Asia and Afghanistan represented essentially a variant of the eastern ethos that was capable of finding a home in the accommodating soil of India. The British came from an industrially developed occidental culture, with plans for sustained and long-term plunder, and with no doubt whatsoever about where they belonged. Both Islam and Christianity were proselytizing religions, but while the Muslim rulers allowed for their cultura
l attributes—cuisine, music, language, dress, custom and aesthetics—to blend into the weave of Indian life, the British were made of an entirely different fabric. They stayed in India but lived separately, in the Civil Lines away from the historic city, pervasive but aloof, seeking to create Indians in their image for functional reasons but never wanting to lose their separate identity. While some kind of assimilation did take place in the very early years of their rule, when a handful of British officers went native, it was short-lived, and soon an evangelical spirit that celebrated the separate and superior culture of the rulers and looked down with sustained contempt upon the natives became the norm. Some Indians learnt English, and thought themselves more British than Indian, and some aspects of Indian life rubbed off on the British, but essentially this was the interaction of two fundamentally separate civilizations. To say this is not to purvey Samuel Huntington’s theory of the clash of civilizations, but to understand that some cultures can be different enough to make genuine synthesis based on a principle of equality impossible.

  As rulers the British could project their conviction about the inherent superiority of their own culture relentlessly and effectively. The initial respect for the culture of the ruled by people like William Jones dissipated quite fast, and was replaced by a combination of curiosity and hostility. The curiosity was central to the insatiable desire to catalogue, categorize, examine, assess, analyse, gazette and objectify the ‘other’; the hostility was essential to sustain the sense of superiority and provide ideological legitimacy for colonial rule. Caste, community, tribe, family, texts, physiognomy, dress, behaviour, antiquity, even complexion and facial features, were carefully observed, classified and recorded. In the name of scientific precision, an entire people were dehumanized. A good example of this kind of study is the eight-volume work entitled The People of India—‘A series of photographic illustrations, with descriptive letterpress, of the races and tribes of Hindustan, originally prepared under the authority of the Government of India’. Edited by J. Forbes Watson and John William Kaye, the complete set was published between 1868 and 1875 and contained over 460 photographs of people from different Indian castes and ‘races’. In almost every photograph, except perhaps of those from social groups that had aligned with the British or were politically and economically useful, the men, women and children are presented as trapped or drugged animals being catalogued for a science project. There is no social or cultural context and no room for individuality or nuance. Some of the images recall photographs of convicts taken for police records.