Diwali is fast approaching. While sacred for Hindus, it offers visual delights for non-Hindus. As I await the viewing of the annual motorcade with some enthusiasm, I think about Hindu art and the intrinsic deliberateness in making objects and images to aid in devotion. I think about the richness of the iconography of Hindu art whether in a representation of Lakshmi or another god/goddess. I also think about the Ceylonese/Sri Lankan scholar Ananda K Coomaraswamy (1877-1947) whose research and writing upturned Western pejorative notions about Hindu art and consequently paved the way for Western understanding and its occasional influence on non-Hindu art and art practices.
Trained in Geology and Botany, Coomaraswamy’s early professional years spent in Southern India resulted in his landmark text History of Indian and Indonesian Art (1927). Years later he returned to India, this time spending time in northern India where he collected art. His collection eventually found its way to the United States of America. After it was refused by the authorities in colonial India, Coomaraswamy took the collection with him to the United Kingdom. However, according to his son Dr Rama P Coomaraswamy, Coomaraswamy refused to serve in the British army during World War I while India remained a colony and was exiled from Britain and the British Empire. Subsequently, the collection and Coomaraswamy found residence in the United States, where he served at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston from 1917 until his retirement in 1947 as Curator of Indian and Oriental Art. Following his retirement and shortly before a planned trip to India to begin Sanyasa (material and worldly detachment in favour of spiritual pursuits), he passed away. Coomaraswamy’s ashes were returned to the Ganges.
Coomaraswamy’s writings were my entry point to Hindu art. According to Coomaraswamy, the purpose of the image maker of traditional Hindu art was neither self-expression nor the realisation of beauty. The image maker was/is viewed as a messenger of God and as a yogi. Many scholarly texts concur that traditionally, the ‘artist’ must perform ceremonial purification, then proceed to a solitary place to perform certain acts including meditation to enhance purification and spiritual awareness. According to Coomaraswamy, “Only then should [the ‘artist’] invoke the desired divinity by uttering the appropriate seed-word and should identify himself completely with the divinity to be represented. […] the divinity appears visibly as in a dream and this is the artist’s model. The work of art is completed before it is physically realized.” Thus, Hindu art follows prescribed processes and outcomes.
Art in this context is not an individualised expression for individual release of angst or joys. Art, therefore, is the vehicle through which devotees are aided in their journeys towards moksha (release from the samsara cycle of birth, life, death, rebirth). And, if there is beauty in the work it is incidental and not intentional.
In A Pen Sketch written by his youngest son Rama, we are told that “[Coomaraswamy’s] knowledge of both the Vedas and the theological writings of the Catholic Church fathers was phenomenal, not just knowledge, but understanding. This enabled him to translate the Sanskrit texts using proper equivalent theological terms such as the most modern Christian theologians are unfamiliar with. Thus his writings in this area are a boon both to Western scholars and to Indians who are seeking to understand their own roots. AKC had no interest in being original, for he was only interested in seeking out the truth which is to be found in these ancient sources, and which are as true today as ever they were.”
…Diwali is fast approaching and my mind flits to a too-distant time of a Guyana childhood when Hindu and non-Hindu alike partook in the lighting and maintenance of the diyas; with and without puja, a symbolic invocation was made for wealth and prosperity. Now with greater guarantees of the provision of electricity and perhaps waned anxiety about its (in)stability, diyas are fewer and electric Christmas-type lights which are sometimes kept in place year-round and reused at Christmas time now seem more normative than extraordinary. Thus, a Diwali night drive around the city or along the corridors into and out of Georgetown are a disappointment because even the Christmas-styled lights are few and the diyas fewer.
But my mind is not solely preoccupied with the symbolic use of colour, the iconography of Maha Lakshmi, or appreciation for the work of Coomaraswamy. No, my mind is preoccupied with a formulating question: Is our construction boom symptomatic of something more than an economy on the move? I think about the fact I see concrete box after concrete box replacing the bushy overgrowth on recently remembered family plots or the long-forgotten timber constructions of yesteryear. I think about the Modernist steel and glass constructions that are interspersed with concrete straight-line facades. Our man-built environment does not announce Guyana. Generic internationalism seems to be winning. We are replacing colonial construction and aesthetics with North American aesthetic and material imports. Where is Guyana? I think about the innovations of construction that may be possible here and are emerging elsewhere as others move away from concrete. My mind is also pulled away from the beauty and hopefulness of Diwali by the ugliness of my village roads being interminably loaded with mounds of sand that never seem to decrease, stone that breaks the monotony of sand, and the occasional spread of building debris occupying parapets along the narrow roads.
I want to think that despite our obvious divisions, Diwali will mean something to us all – the victory of our essential goodness over our inclination to speak and act from places of evil. Evil has no variant big or small. Thus, inconsiderateness has a stench too. So does bias and nepotism. They wreak! I think what a Guyana this may be if we regard others as we wish that they may consider us.
And of course, I’m thinking that as Guyana grows in material wealth and prosperity how wonderful it would be if we each could share in this good fortune equitably without the warranted cynicism that grants will mean unjustified and unscrupulous hikes in everything thereby setting the majority of us further back in our attainment of material ease and comfort. But alas spiritual wealth and prosperity is required from us all and that is why, I believe, we each are here with our path to walk in the murky waters of the material world.
