Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Long silence

Been away from the blog scene for over a month now. It has been a month since I left Mumbai to be in Delhi. June 08 for me was a month of inconsequential meetings, discussions and ominous telephone calls but also of incidental discoveries about self and common sense. Since I had some time to myself I decided to reconnect with friends and acquaintances. I made certain professional decisions during those meetings and helped others make theirs. I also experienced an unwanted insomnia for three very long nights in June. During one of the three nights that I spent struggling with my mind, coaxing and coercing it to sleep, I listened to Pandit Jasraj. The tireless mind that I was anxious to sedate began imagining the beautiful and solacing Ragamala paintings that I had once researched. After a long hiatus from my art-history days, I began to think of the colour pallette, characters and props in the early Mewar and Chawand paintings that I have had an opportunity to study closely. The artists (who probably were rasiks themselves and knew music) used a unique colour scheme, props and themes to represent the musical notes. These combinations of colour, theme, and positioning of characters became established as an acceptable iconography of ragas and raginis. As a student of the history of art, you can easily identify these painted Ragas and Raginis on the basis of, well, a kind of list. Soliatary woman with a deer/buck; lady with snakes in seclusion; the hot sun and a man on an elephant. Most later artists followed an established set of icons. It was much later that expansion and addition in the repertoire was made. But what has always amazed me is the initial process of visualization that the early artists undertook and the challenge that they must have facedd in transforming sounds into pictures.

As I tried hard that night to concentrate on the color gradations in these images I could not think anymore; my heavy eyes were falling into an abyss of darkness and just before Morpheus could finally take over my phone rang. It was a lady's voice I recogonized and in her classy accent she asked me if I would be interested in looking at a set of Raagmala paintings that she was researching into. It was 5.30 a.m. and I could no longer pretend to sleep. I left for a nearby park to get some exercise. The birds sounded as restless as I was at that hour. I sat observing a tall jamun tree; its freshly bathed leaves hung from drooping branches and its squashed fruit carpeted the soil around it. As I looked closer I noticed a swing hanging from one of its knotted branches. Just then a melodious voice blew toward me from a nearby Gurudwara. My yellow night dress fluttered around me as I swung through the air to the music.