Story of the Tongue and the Text The Narrative Tradition

Gulammohammed Sheikh

Somadeva’s Kathasaritsagar believed to be an abridged version of Gunadhya’s Brihatkatha now lost, opens with Paravati coaxing to regale her with stories never told before.1 Shiva reminds of her all-knowing powers and parries her with the story of her own past life. She chides him for not taking her seriously. Put to his mettle Shiva muses : The devas are ever too self-contented and mortals perennially in distress, neither really would make ideal material for stories, so I’ll tell the tales of the Vidyadharas2 for they quintessentially combine human and divine nature. Parvati desires exclusivity and orders Nandi to guard the entrance from intruders. However, Pushpadanta, a favourite gana (attendant) of Shiva curious at the goings-on in the secret enclosure enters invisibly by yogic powers to share the stories. When Parvati finds out, she curses him to go through a cycle of life as a mortal. Another gana who pleads for mercy meets a similar predicament, is cursed, but succeeds in extracting a boon of deliverance. The liberation of the first gana born as the great grammarian Vararuchi depends upon his meeting an accursed earth spirit , reborn as , a pishacha in the deep Vindhya forests. This would enable him to regain memory of his past life and recite the tales he had heard from Shiva to the yaksha- pishacha. The deliverance of the yaksha himself from the pishacha yoni could take place only on his conveying the tales to the second gana, now born as the archetypal disseminator of Brihatkatha, Gunadhya – who is turn would find freedom from his curse by transmitting the tales to the world.

The yaksha-pishacha conveys the tales (told originally in ?) in the lowly Paishachi tongue to Gunadhya, who inscribes these seven great tales – mahakathas – in seven lakh couplets, shlokas in his own blood (for want of ink in the forest). The manuscripts are then offered to the Satavahana king by his pupils. The king spurns the offer of the blood-stained and lengthy tales in the lowly Paishachi . Heart-broken Gunadhya makes a fire-pit (-kunda) in the forest to recite the tales for the last time before consigning them to flames. Six out of seven volumes are lost to posterity before the penitent king, brought to reason by sorrowing birds and beasts starving in sympathy with the scribe – a less succulent cuisine on the king’s dining platter – rushes out to a salvage the remnants.

The subsequent tales told in what Basham3 calls a ‘boxed in’ story – within – a – story format include tales of Vararuchi who gets falsely implicated in an illicit liaison with a queen, of dead fish in the market laughing at the folly of a gullible king (reminiscent of a similar instance in the Arabian Nights); of clever prostitutes, virtuous and promiscuous wives; of the friendly or vicious (); of a floating hand in the river and of flying slippers; of princess Patali and the founding of the capital city, Patliputra; of a Brahmana Indradatta who having powers of parakayapravesh4 enters the corpse of the last Shudra king Nanda and gets forever trapped in the alien body as his own left with a friend for safe-keeping gets cremated. The kaleidoscope is full of numberous resonant tales of various dimensions and purport. In short, the preamble of Kathasaritsagar sets the tenor of the vast oceanic narration it is about to unravel.

The deceptively simple, arbitrary sounding introduction conceals innuendoes and camouflages amazing complexity. The reference to secrecy and to sharing, the choice of Vidyadharas rather than mortals or the devas sto represent the spectrum of life, the recurrence of the motif of the curse, the powers of parakayapravesh and co-existence of the historical with fictional and mythical characters are clearly indicative of a meaningful purpose. Secrecy and sharing serve as catalytic devices to reveal the wondrous, magical aspect of the divyakatha (literally, ‘divine tales’ as the narration is subsequently referred to(, the curse is used as a means to introduce the tale

within a tale, and deliverance from the curse as a return to the point of take off, which set in motion a variety of temporal movements. The distinction of the physical world of the mortals from the devas’ demarcate the worlds of tangible reality and the region of the fabulous. Comparable with divyamanushchestha (concerning the affairs of the divinity and humankind) the narrative form combines the magic of an alaukika5 experience without losing its contact with ‘reality’. The choice of the Vidyadharas becomes an appropriate metaphor for an interminate traversal of time-space zones. The co-existence of the historical and fictional characters reflects similar preoccupation with a back – and – forth in time, whereas the choice of Shiva as archetypal narrator and the all-knowing female energy represented by Paravati as audience evoke some imponderable queries. The complexity of the Vedic Rudra and of the non-Aryan, animistic ‘Lord of the Animals’ coalescing in the image of Shiva is intoned in the transmission of tales back and forth from the holy to the lowly of tongues (or from the oral to the written traditions); emblematically even, as in the jiva of a Brahmana encased in the body of a Shudra. It also indicates inherent tensions and conflicts in their relationships. The starving birds and beasts who ‘heard’ the tales lost to humanity hint at dimensions or frequencies alien to human sensibilities.

Perhaps it would appear that the point is being stretched too far, that too much is read into a mere introduction. Subsequent tales of the Kathasaritsagar bear out that it is not really so. In fact the stories would not even make much sense if one did not make these and other ostensibly ‘irrational’ connections. An oblique but inherent system of suggestion interconnects the seemingly disjointed tales and themes which forms an integral part of the structural scheme of the Kathasaritsagar. It is difficult indeed to disconnect tales as each one sprouts organically from the other giving clues for still others to extend the back and forth arterial rhythms. For instance, the story of a past life running parallel to a ‘timeless’ parable intervenes into a tale of prophecy gradually unfolding into the present ! Improvisation being central to the process of stringing together tales, diverse means ranging from impromptu conjurings to pre-planned structures are employed to cut across lines demarcating the rational from the irrational. So the tales circulate, run in concentric or spirally looping movements to make connections or reconnections or zigzag and even zoom out. Some serve as covering layers, flesh, skin or shell, in and around the complex stories for the peeling or gradual uncovering of the core and the savouring of nectar (rasasvada).6 In the process of reading (of Kathasaritsagar) what at first appeared to be a mere ‘boxed in’ format, turns into a maze, a honeycomb and more. The entry into the hidden recesses and shared open spaces that combine magical secrecy as well as a linear through – and – through visibility, something like entering a step-well, is a little different from the progressive laying open of the ‘boxes’. Often to retrieve the original tale after five or seven layers of tales – each like a life lived after Parvati’s curse – is both dizzying and exhilarating. What transpires in the process of continuance of a story within a story, is a gestalt of alternation. A character of the opening story assumes the role of the narrator in the next. The improvisatory nature of narration awakens in the reader a latent narrator to conjure and construe similar tales. Such transpositions of the roles of the narrated character, narrator and audience -–not unlike the chain of transmittance of the mahakatha from Somadeva to Shiva, gana, pishacha and Gunadhya right down to the present reader brings in the narrative form an openness which cuts across the inside and the outside of the tales and transcends the barriers of ‘artiste’ and ‘novice’. In the end the narrative form spills out over a piori constraints of professional skills and styles. What could be a free for all in the appropriation of form gets its acid test from the response of the audience. What counts here is the quality of improvisation and an identification with the magical substance of transformation, like the spirit of Duende that Lorca7 speaks about or a veritable parakayapravesh of the narrator into his characters. The implications are that such improvisatory growth of narration may obliterate or transform the source in the process, like branches growing into roots and covering the original trunk of a banyan tree. The multiple traditions of the both in and outside the country exemplify the range and quality of such transformation. The monogamous character of becomes polygamous in the Jaina or the Malay versions of the

Ramayana.8 It is also not unlikely that in cases of transfiguration the hero and the adversary might switch roles. The possibility that even tales of the Ramayana and the – not to speak of less august secular prototypes – were subject to interpretation, brought in social, regional and personal dynamics. The vast regional tradition of Kathakars and Bhopas-bardic narrators-still operative in the hinterland of shows that the extent and nature of transformation was neither innocent nor limited to stylistic features alone. The narrative form provided not only for varying life perceptions but also became a forum for articulating conflicts. Often the bards having sprung from among a rural-tribal milieu gave subtle twists to subvert an unpalatable message in a transmitted tale. Ingenious devices were invented, especially through pun and mime to convey the external and hidden meanings.

Every transmittance recognising the significance of transformation made it incumbent upon a narrator – performer to make the otherwise familiar tale assume an unpremeditated – apurva form and give it a lustrous translucence that would reveal the hidden web of interconnections or the germination of new dimensions. For a Chakyar, in enacting the story of the killing of Vali, the villainous monkey king of the Ramayana shot through the cover of seven palm trees by Rama assumes the role of a wronged or tragic hero. Into the portrayal of vicious demoness Putana who comes to poison infant , the Kathakali performer pours the tenderness of a mother torn between her mission and her impulses.

Such a fluid, flexible and open-ended tradition with a built-in process of change through transformation ensured its continuance in the life of people from court to the street, to village congregationals and into forests through centuries of historical vicissitudes. The resilience of encyclopaedic narration could contain, absorb or even change course faced with alien tales and their quality alien narrative forms.9 The infinitely vast traditions of the epics, the Kathasaritsagar, and and numerous others in their multiple variations in local tongues bear testimony to the phenomenal impact the narrative had on Indian psyche. The savouring of any of these as audience or while reading, listening or looking arouses simultaneous cognizance of the changes they have undergone. The many-layered response consists of an amazingly complex, almost subliminal ringing of archetypes conveyed through collective memory. A simple tale then is no longer that simple, the ordinary not so different from the extraordinary.

Evidently, in such a process no story, performance or painting is meant to be ‘complete’ or enclosed in itself. There are no linear climaxes and finales in performance, nor a predetermined frame of a picture: each one is considered part of a chain no matter how definite its contours are. And even when there are beginnings and ends like those of the Mahabharata or the ballad of Pabuji, their span is so vast that no single performance can encompass or complete them.10 Among the itinerent Bhopas there is a taboo against completing the saga of Pabuji: its end being equated with the death of the narrator, they perform only portions of the story in one village to go on in the next.

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This additive form of narrative that allows for picking up of the thread in the middle is governed by the principle of internal mobility with its rhythms and tensions rather than guided by predetermined time-space contours. The Jatakas in the murals of Ajanta, not unlike the tales of the Kathasaritsagar, spread all over the walls of the caves in fluid, ambivalent space-zones are connected at various ‘ends’ in the absence of distinguishing contours between or around them. On entering cave 1 one would discover the tale attributed to conversion of Nanda on the left wall moving into the Shankhapala Jataka, only to be invisibly joined to the long and meandering route of the magnificent Mahajaaaanaka Jataka (Illus. 1) spilling over the corner walls. Parallel tales run above and below, back and forth, each growing upon and into each other like meandering

streams or wild vegetation. The visual gestalt of the narrative thwarts any attempt at isolating the tales, leaving the viewer with the option only of interconnections. Clues for continuities of tales are however, provided through figural gestures and postures as also in the repetition of the successive images of the protagonist, whereas formal links are made by conjunctive figures or motifs playing dual or multiple roles, within the two (or more) tales they seem to belong to. Metaphorically they close one and open the other story simultaneously – even where there is no actual reversal of the narrated-narrator roles. The formal articulation of the imagery made with a view to advance forth (literally emerge out of the wall) by excluding or underplaying backward recession of space, is meant to include the viewer into the narrative space converging over him from all sides.11 The viewer then chooses his itinerary into the oceanic narrative to make visual and ideational interconnections between the Jatakas as he walks along scanning the murals. For instance, he discovers in the process a continued use of physicality and body language articulated through means of punctuated or phased repetitions like the beat of sam in musical rhythm or refrain in a song which enables him to return to corresponding points of reference. Repetition conceived as echo or anuranan (or the ringing of the archetype) like a note or set of notes being played in continuous succession causes mesmeric saturation. The gesticulating bodies of figures quiver in unison like leaves of a tree each miming the other in successive rhythms.

In the less fluid narrative structures construed in bands or tiers – as in the Chandod or Parasurampapura murals, the Ramayana is delineated through choreographic figuration of an extemporised dance-drama. Using devices of calligraphic animation like the ones employed by Pandvani narrators through body gestures – the narrative mode here mimes and mimics a ‘high’ tradition; something like the tongue taking on the role of a script. Analogus to a latter-day Paishachi rendering of a mahakatha it has an accelerated pace and forthright humour. The massive figure of Kumbhakarna with bears and monkeys buzzing like bees around him in the Parashurampura frieze or the firangi (European) soldiers in the army or Ravana or the ribald portrayal of desecrating a on the Chandod temple dome (Illus. 2) are explicit enough to need no further comment. By comparison, the Kiratarjuniya panels of Lepakshi return to the dignity and decorum of the mahakatha but are infused with a robust vitality gleaned from a local and not too elevated tradition. Being the inside of domes, the circular space of these murals makes it necessary for the viewer to physically rotate to read the narrative – a process that inducts him into the murals’ spatial orbit.

The Telangana scroll (Plate 1) quite literally uses the logic of the script and illuminated in tiered, successive bands. But here the role of colour is far more crucial. Gestural animation set in primary colour-fields (in contrast to the linear calligraphies of the murals mentioned earlier) assumes a distinct physical gravity. Colour itself works as a synonym of space and makes the narrative gleam with a radiance in a way no other medium can. The (Chandigarh) Chandayana (Illus. 3) or Chaurapanchashika folios use abbreviated theatric motifs – two columns and roof with a bird, bolster and bed for the interior and clumps of trees, steps and half-open door for the exterior – each charged with swift mimetic animation which renders the script into sounds. Most unusual is the presence of the narrator – Maulana Dawood in the Chandayana on every page reciting the holy name while the tale of extra-marital love runs by around him; prefiguring perhaps, the interchangeability of the hero of the tale with the scribe. In the Mewar Ramayana, Sahibdin abrogates barriers on behalf of the fighting monkeys and demons lest they feel constrained by margins (Illus. 4). Designed to be seen individually as pages held in the hand, the chemistry of saturated hues and indeterminate space is meant to arrest and to intoxicate the viewers’ eyes into conjuring visions. While the populated spaces of the Sahibdin Ramayana may involve the viewer into its maze for an eventful unravelling, in stories running in broader units as in the later Mewar Panchatantra folios (Plate 2) he is encouraged to conjure ‘after images’ in the open colour fields with the help of the saturated, intoxicated eyes. Here, the Mewar painter

extends the idea and use of colour as space between two episodes of a story in the manner of a khali beat in music.12

Akbari painting can easily be confused with the advent of ‘realism’ and indeed its increased use of naturalism marks a watershed in the evolution of narrative form. With the introduction of historical chronicles it initiated the process of locating the tale in specific time and place. The notion of historicity questions the relevance of continuous narration and the co-existence of multiple events taking place on a single plane. What we see now is episodic representation of a single event on a single page, ‘framed’ in a hashiya or margin around the central image. With this it would be assumed that the narrative has now entered in the realm of the mortals to use the Kathasaritsagar figure of speech – representing ‘reality’ in the form of life observed. And there are paintings which concern themselves with authenticity as identified with accuracy in the representation of events that actually happened.13 What is important however is the fact that the changing forms of representation produced different means to interpret the notion of continuous narration rather than significantly changing its nature or course.

The use of the hashiya served as a basis for the narrative continum reverberating what was portrayed in the central image. Instead of being just a floral or ‘decorative’ frame it more than often offered an alternative analogue to the picture it surrounded. Other more integral means included intensive use of detail and highly inventive manipulation of space. The emphasis on detail subtly shifted attention from the effects of verisimilitude (i.e. cast shadows, local colour, linear perspective, etc.) it had partially begun to appropriate and the predetermined format of the picture plane to the revelation of a microcosm made visible through animated minutae. Each form repeatedly rendered by several hands,14 gleamed with delicate sensuousness, the contours and surfaces bristling with intimate, personal sensitivity. The process of the formulation of details from notational scribbles to jewel like tangibility and radiance was likened to the excavation or churning of amorphous space to illuminate the entire field of vision with glittering discoveries. The details, often packed and charged with hidden animation, quite literally grew from inside outwards, inducing the rectangular format of the picture plane to open its edges for the bursting forms. Thus the space generated by the animation of details on the picture plane was resilient, open-ended and proliferative, and somewhat at variance with the uniformalising holistics of easel painting perceptions that the Mughal painters had now been exposed to through European prints and perhaps oils. While the norm of proportionate scale of human figures in relation to environment was adopted, the portrayal of giants and demons several times the size of humans necessitated introduction of dimensions quite opposed to naturalistic conventions.15 Crucially, the use of multiple perspective demanded a reinterpretation of the very rationale of linear perspective. The panoramic vistas the Akbari chronicles were set into enabled the painter to introduce vast distance in clear visibility that the naked eye would be unable to grasp or encompass in a single glance. He therefore garnered several points of viewing to open upwards from the bottom of the picture to the distant horizon at the top. This was achieved by successive lifting of the picture planes corresponding with figures placed upon them at different operational levels. Designed as a gradually unfolding rather than a static backdrop, the landscape served to counter the illusionistic rationale of the ‘arrested moment’. The vast area it encompassed made it imperative for the viewer to discover it by tracking its spaces alongwith the figure – in an extended viewing in time. So that narrative taking place in such spaces which seemingly focussed on a single event, in effect incorporated several movements – quite evidently using the devices of continuous narration. While this method of spatial articulation invented continuously shifting horizon lines on a single plane, its true achievement lay in linking the mobile vision in an imperceptible continuum. In a startling and radical dislocation of naturalistic perspective in ‘The Boat Scene’ by Miskin (Illus. 5) two disparate views are combined in an inextricable spatial bind. The naturalistic landscape, yet, of a far smaller scale ratio, placed below (read ‘in front of’) the river carrying a large boat effects a mutual transformation of both the scenes. It looks as if the woman being lowered from the boat is aloft in the zone where waters could assume the

proportions of a sky. This spatial juxtaposition, conscious as it is, is clearly intended to transform the ordinary into the out-of-ordinary and a real into a magical event.

To the magic of discovering the world afresh through enumeration of detail and multiple perspective was added the heightened use of colour. Raising the tenor of colour followed dispensing with cast shadows and a restrained use of chiaroscuro. Using the principle of colour as light gleaming and radiating out of the contours of forms in contrast to the enclosing nature of shadows and chiaroscuro the painting worked the narrative out to the viewer as a chromatic kaleidoscope. Such possibilities enabled the Akbari painter to approach the Ramayana or Anwar- I-Suhayli or for that matter the Kathasaritsagar16 without the restraining exigencies of continuous narration. In the process of achieving tangible materiality through naturalistic means, these portrayals gained a substantiality without losing the magic the texts demanded. The saturated iridiscent hues of precious stones and intensity of fired pigments as in ceramic and porcelain; tonalities and translucencies of ivories and pearls; textures of silk and gold and transparencies of layered muslins encountered and transferred metaphoric sensations of flowing water, perfumes and body-smells to sublimate the tenor of a historical ‘worldliness’ into a nazara, a vision. Even the odd, more ‘realistic’ portrayals like ‘Altercation in a Market’ or a suicide scene brim with metaphoric or other than realistic references.17 The alchemy of minutae in heightened chromatic scales added an incredible sensuous seduction to the surface. The eye was invited to caress every form as it tracked the visual trajectory. The entranced viewer was within the narrative before he knew about it.

Thus the advent of naturalism with Akbari painting was not necessarily a definitive change: it served as yet another device receptive to the artist’s needs. In the process a unique form of naturalism seerviceable to indigenous concerns evolved. The later Rajasthani schools of Amber, Bundi, Bikaner, even Mewar and more specifically the Pahari schools of Guler, Nurpur and Kangra used it with great flourish. This variant of naturalism – shorn of appurtenances of illusionism – was resilient enough to embrace a variety of non-naturalistic perceptions. Narrative being part of a larger concern, a weltenschauung could absorb such radical intrusions including changing perspectives of reality and unusual linguistic means. What was narrated earlier through relatively non-naturalistic means remained equally possible within the ambit of this indigenous naturalism.

For the Rajasthani painter, the hashiya was a restrictive device, despite his attraction to this and other methods evolved at the Mughal court. While adopting the margin he included it within his scheme to make it inseparable from the picture itself. In fact the varying dimensions and colours of margins provide room for a number of interpretations. The wide, often deep red margins of many Mewar folios serve multiple functions of framing and opening, and of heightening the colouration of the internal enclosure. Or else, as in the sahibdin Ramayana mentioned earlier, overflowing imagery takes over the margins. In later traditions the idea of story within a story is articulated in the interchangeable relationship of the enclosure and the margin: the Pichhavai format plays the sthayi and sanchari (or significant and minor)18 in a variety of combinations. The large iconic image of Shrinathji might be surrounded by numerous narrative instances which function by enhancing each other but also when need be, by switching roles. In the Manoratha pictures19 the conceptual image of Shrinathji would alternate with the likenesses of living Gosains and the devotees; so thus the mythical alternates with the historical, or the fabulous transmutates into the tangible.

It is self-evident that narrative in the tradition can not be apprehended in exclusive categories of visual, literary and performing. Each art tradition had room for the other, within each is implicated the germ of transgressive growth. The division of the desi and margi20 or traditions of the tongue and the text too is at times like extracting the jiva (life-substance) of the Brahmana from the Shudra’s body and vice-versa as each has almost continually tresspassed the other’s territory. Rather than an a priori conditioning of stylistic modes, the improvisatory inventions

drawn from either or other sources guide the narration. The Patuas of Bengal area a case in point. They use different linguistic means in response to the demands of tales composed for the tribals and the rural-urban audience. The creation story of the Santhals is devised in a looser, more open space format and without any indication of horizon line, thus set in an undefined primeval time, while the Ramayana set in specific time and in the locale of rural Bengal is painted in episodic sequences of rectangular format of an otherwise vertical scroll. The Satyavan-Savitri scroll (Illus. ) on the other hand attempts to portray the mythic and ‘modern’ times simultaneously. By alternating physical dimensions of the lord of death, and mortals Satyavan and Savitri, it mixes up with considerable elan celestial and mundane planes, lending it the somewhat droll theatricality of a Jatra performance. It is another story how the clever Patua uses the same visuals for the stories of Satta Pir and Satyanarayana told to Muslim and Hindu audiences respectively. In the role of the Patua – being painter, composer and performer rolled into one, there are multiple possibilities of transgressions from the bonds of styles.

It is now well known that association of prose rendition with narrative is of relatively later origin: most narrative was composed in verse or sung, or cast in a verse-prose champu form. Students of literature speak of the Mahabharata as a kavya rather than a katha. In the visual tradition similarly, isolating narrative from the poetic and iconic would prove to be equally misleading. The Jatakas of cave 1 at Ajanta are interspersed with grand iconic images of the famous Padmapani and Avalokiteshwara, and the multiple evocations of the little Buddha image (represented by the miracle of Shravasti) are like magnified and continuous chantings of his name. Elsewhere large female figures rise over the stories and slow down the narrative pace. Such detours are integral to continuity and not seen as interruptions. As in the literary narratives these periodic deviations like poetic extolling of the divine or the sensuous are viewed as recesses between narrative proliferation.

Thus, unquestionably the definitive of narrative in Indian art and life is in the multiple. Singularity itself contradicts bot the sources and embodiment of narrative in India, and implicates closures. Traditional forms were not viewed in isolation as individual entities in themselves, they functioned in the company of each other and were brought alive in participatory interaction with the audience. Contamination and intermingling as a means of sustenance made the notion of purity alien to the context. Each tradition carried elements of the other and functioned in the twilight zone of sandhyabhasha21 arousing multiple association simultaneously. A painting used colour to resonate musicality and rhythm and the refrain to punctuate and recollect points of departure and take off. A poem bristled with images ready to emerge at the slightest conjuring, renditions of music were not meant for ear alone. This made traditional forms reticent to the demands of fullscale naturalism or illusionism. Neither did the Gandhara nor the Mughal artist endeavour to achieve ideals or ‘realism’ (as naturalism is erroneously referred to). A fasting Buddha from Hadda or a foreshortened figure in an Akbari folio are more likely demonstrations in matching skills rather than avowed ideals. Basawan could not resist the temptations of changing the perspective of a European engraving while making a ‘faithful’ copy.22 Perhaps this reluctance lies in the fact that naturalism claims to present a complete view of the retinal world leaving little room for the viewer to add or improvise. While illusionism includes the viewer in its field of vision by fixating his retinal gaze at a particular point in time and space, the easel painting which became the vehicle of illusionism keeps the viewer outside the peripheries of its frame. Perhaps illusionism puts a high premium on retinal superiority over other sensory perceptions which left the Indian artist uneasy with its use.23 The history of Company Painting to Ravi Verma exemplifies that unease.

One would then be tempted to emphasise the other, non-retinal, non-linear ideal of a narrative as fundamental to Indian tradition as indeed many commentators from Coomaraswamy onwards have sought to establish. Logically speaking, this would have produced a thoroughly ‘spiritual’ tradition in its sublime and vacuous variants, which incidentally (and mercifully) is not the case.24

following the terms of divyamanushchesta used to describe the nature of divyakatha in Kathasaritsagar the larger tradition however chose to mingle the miraculous with the believable. The scenes of Krishna’s lifting of the Veil (of Maya) to make the cowherds have a glimpse of the celestial Vaikuntha or Akrura’s vision of Krishna;s divinity in the Kangra Bhagavatapurana25 are all set in a recognisably Pahari terrain.

Narrative in its essence was a device to regain and reshape memory, to overcome amnesia that time piles up on a peoples’ psyche. While poetry can appropriate accretions of lost time it deals with essences which makes it accessible to connoisseurs – rasikas, whereas narrative in its collective aspect uses substances of day to day life to materialise memory and scatters it in and around the territories of art taking in its fold the lay and the learned alike. To relieve an experience by reshaping memory ensures continuance of life through ritual regeneration. Every enactment, recital or visualisation carries elements of the characters being reincarnated into the present. The device of continuous narration served as ideal means to evoke and recycle archetypes most effectively. In introducing the triple actions of Rama looking at, lifting and breaking the Shiva’s bow in Manohar’s ramayana (Mewar 1650 A.D.) the enclosed space gets enlarged with continuous animation. The magnified anger of Parashurama personified unexpectedly through his colossal image beside his normal one, similarly changes the space-time relationship to assume miraculous form. Amazingly unusual and most tender is the representation of the amorous tale of Rishi Alambush and his beloved doe (the parents of Rishashringa) in multiple moods and events of union and separation (Illus. 7). The love of a man to an animal is portrayed with such delicate tenderness that it evokes extra-sensory perceptions and transcends the notion of the ‘perverse’. Here the image within a single ‘frame’ reflects its after-image in successive repetitions to activate the deep maroon space of the ground with pulsating sensations. Unusual too, is the representation of absences, illusions and mirages. The invisible Nala in the Kangra Nala-Damayanti set is shown to the viewer through the convention of preliminary drawing while the ladies in the harem recognising movements of an invisible being, are unable to grasp his ambivalent materiality. The duality of drawing and not completing it with colour.26 In the Chandod murals the demon Maricha in the guise of golden deer tricks his pursuer Rama with the quick silver animation of the dual postures of grazing and turning back to look. The same event portrayed in the ‘Shangri’ Ramayana uses another device: the pale, metallic gold of the feeling deer set against an identically pale, matt, mustard yellow ground melts as the two are camouflaged but shines as a revelation as the folio shifts in the hand. (Plate 4). Entranced by the mirages of Maricha materialising and disappearing the viewer shares the golden space of the pursuer. And in the less divine, more worldly alternatives retinal illusions of mirage are as effectively portrayed in the large hunting scenes of late Mewar School.27 The unblinking gaze of the hunter in the clustered tree-forests near Udaipur, heightened by the increasing heat in atmosphere finds a tiger in the distance with its golden reflection in what appears to be an illusion of water. The long and arduous tracks and prolonged wait on the machan to spot a tiger or a leopard camouflaged in the vast forest arena – at once quiet and turbulent – serve as a basis for enacting these extended, if not actually epic, tales of hunts (Plate 5). The landscape sprawling with an incredibly reasonating pattern of trees in various shades of greens seems to spill out of the borders and the multiple movements of the beasts of prey in partial or full sight in the forest changes in into a universe in itself. The meaning of naturalism is turned upside down by the means used to render the temporal movements of the beast. In the movement of the leopard portrayed in twelve junctures of emerging, turning, roaring, being shot, fleeing and falling into the triangular ravine, the fearsome and grisly sight of the hunt turns into a vision. Sometimes finding himself in the eyes of the hunter and sometimes with the hunted, the viewer views the scene face to face with a miracle. A divyakatha is unfolding.

October 1990

Notes :

1. The Kathasaritsagar was composed by Somadeva Bhatt to entertain queen Suryamati of between 1063 and 1081 A.D. after Gunadhya’s Brihatkatha compiled around the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D. during the reign of the Satavahanas. Kathasaritsagar, translated in Hindi by Pt. Kedarnath Sharma Saraswat, Patna, 1974.

2. Vidyadharas : Supernatural spirits with magic powers to traverse various worlds.

3. This seems to be a general assumption about narratives of similar genre like those of the Arabian Nights and Bocaccio, etc. Wonder that was India, A.L. Basham, 1961.

4. Parakayapravesh : Power to enter and revive a dead body.

5. Alaukika : Term used in poetics to describe the elevated, ‘disinterested’ state of poetic experience according to Abhinavagupta.

6. Rasasvada : Literally ‘Savouring of Rasa’; the inner substance or sentiment in a work of art according to Bharata’s Natyashastra.

7. Lorca, Penguins, 1962.

8. Asian Variations in Ramayana, ed. K.R. Srinivas Iyengar, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 1983.