Sense and Sensibility

We reached Cuttuck on the night of March 10, checked into a hotel and made frenzied calls to Bombay to try and get the telephone number of my friend in Bhubaneswar. By late evening we had established contact with him, an art conservator who headed the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage’s Indian Conservation Institute’s Orissa Art Conservation Centre, Anupam Sah. His parent body was better known across the country by its acronym Intach.

Orissa was our main destination. It was the one Indian state I had not visited. So when Ladakh became out of bounds, Orissa sprang up naturally in my mind. Orissa is the wretched man of India. The state has a concentrated blob of unimaginable but well televised poverty, an unusually rich tradition and heritage, with links to its old glories still visually springing up in the form of well-kept temples several centuries old.

Poverty is not the only claim to infamy that Orissa has. The state has had annual visitations from every single misery let loose from Pandora’s box, visitations that seem to zero in on the state and its hapless people almost as if it had earned the vengeance of all the gods everywhere. Either flood or cyclone wrecked, Orissa is a state that has had destruction written into its very destiny. The last time the media wrote of Orissa was when deaths were reported. Families had died in a remote village in Orissa because of the poisonous kernels of the mangoes that poverty had forced them to eat. Orissa’s grotesque exotica did not stop there, for before that there were reports of how several villagers in the state had taken to hunt rats for food.

Anupam was not an intimate friend. He was a far off relative of a very intimate college friend of mine. But he was a very interesting man by profile. He was a Kumaoni from Nanital, had a hill school education, then did two years in a Hindi medium college, before clearing India’s sexiest test for teenagers, the entrance for the Indian Institute of Technology. He rejected that to join the National Museum in Delhi to do a course in art conservation.
After that, he spent another two years in Florence, Italy, pursuing his vocation. He then landed up in Orissa to save the state’s precious heritage, ancient palm leaf manuscripts and engravings, wall paintings, and textile paintings.

He had, in the last six years in Bhubaneswar, started to work with artisans of a village called Raghurajpur, where he taught the artists to use traditional colours, textiles and treatment of those textiles with the locally available material. To be sure, these were what had been used originally, but corruption had swept in so monstrously that few in the village even remembered the original medium they used.

Raghurajpur, I discovered on my visit there with Anupam, was a village like none other. Here foreign faces evoked no special interest. They were used to foreigners. And foreigners as the word means to most Indians, white Caucasian. Their traditional crafts and paintings have been receiving major international and national promotion thanks to the wayward and extremely moody spotlight of national heritage culture vultures having caught them in its beam some time in the eighties or nineties. Every home in Raghurajpur housed artists, painters who drew on palm leaf or painted on textiles. They were all pattachitra, which was textile painting, and taad patra, which was painting on palm leaf, artists.

When Anupam went off for his work of surveying the village for wall paintings that needed to be either conserved, or empty wall space that he wanted them to paint in their traditional form using the original materials, he left us to tour on our own.

The first house Rohan and I entered belonged to Sudhakar who showed us a largish painting he had just completed. It had the traditional motifs of Oriya pattachitra paintings. They were characterized by dividing the entire canvas into square or rectangular columns which were filled with illustrations from Jayadeva’s Geet Govind. The Geet Govind is a 12th century work by Orissa’s favourite poet-saint, Jayadeva, and has some of the most erotic poetry about the romance of Krishna and Radha. It is a confluence of Sufi and Bhakti influences and Barbara Stoler Miller’s masterly English translation of the Geet Govind, Love Songs of the Dark Lord published by the Columbia University Press has a palm leaf inscription from an earlier date on its cover. Other paintings had illustrations from the Mahabharata and the Dasaavatara, the ten incarnations of Vishnu from the Hindi Trinity.

Sudhakar’s painting was very bright. It had a kind of blinding lustre that natural plant and rock pigments could not have. I asked him if he used natural pigment.

“No. I use colour from the bazaar,” said Sudhakar.

It figured. That was the reason Anupam was among them. The rush of tourists, the advantage of spasmodic official patronage that saw several Raghurajpur artists stamping their passports to Paris and Washington, had brought about this corruption. They preferred to cash in on this instant demand for their exotic folk art forms, and eventually they discovered the virtues that these well heeled buyers look for. They look for brightness. They look to alter their motifs to more recognizable and easily identifiable forms. The tourists had the money. Soon Raghurajpur artists learned to supply the demand. They did this by simply painting with regular wall paints sold in the market, on textiles treated with Arabic gum. This saved them the labour of treating their textiles with the paste of boiled tamarind seeds, and preparing natural pigments over laborious weeks.

Sudhakar then took us to the house of Bhaskar. Another traditional painter, but I was to learn later from Anupam, a far more successful one than Sudhakar. Bhaskar had actually taken his canvases to Washington, Paris and London. He had also taken piggy-back rides on occasional cultural jumborees where Indian consulates showcased the “rich and varied” heritage of India. It was evident from Bhaskar’s works that he was also a more accomplished artist than Sudhakar. He showed us several of his works on palm leaf as well as textiles. All of them were not too different from the regular in content, but unlike Sudhakar’s work, Bhaskar’s canvases were more ambitious in size, intricacy and scope. It was obvious that Bhaskar was both a man of greater talent, and more easily responsive to the demand generated by the urban market. I asked Bhaskar whether he ever experimented with the traditional motifs.

“We make these paintings in the usual traditional Oriya style. But I also make different paintings if a customer specifically commissions it.”

Since most of the paintings were depictions from Geet Govind and the Vaishnava pantheon, I asked him if on any of his tours where he exhibited his work, somebody had asked him to paint the same thing differently.

Bhaskar broke into a wan smile.

“Yes. At Delhi’s Pragati Maidan. A lady asked me whether I could depict Krishna and Radha in forms and actions other than what I had ever done. I said yes. So she said, okay do it. I told her to suggest what action she wanted me to draw them in. And she said to depict Krishna bowling to Radha, while Radha was batting.” Bhaskar was almost blushing.

“Did you do it?”

“Yes.”

His answer suggested that he did it because he did not want the lady to think he was a traditional folk artist incapable of illustrating urban imagination even in his own medium. The affirmation had in it the contemptuous satisfaction of the underdog; happy with the very act of defiance however ineffective, against a much bigger enemy. In Bhaskar’s case, he also had the intelligence to recognize that he needed the patronage of “the enemy.”

Bhaskar had samples of all kinds of work. Like Sudhakar, he too was part of Anupam’s project to revitalize the original art form, retrieving it from the predilections of its tryst with much needed commerce. And Anupam had got Bhaskar a commissioned project from a director of the European Commission. Bhaskar showed us works in the original done by his deceased father. He then got up and got a large roll down.

“Saab, you were talking about different styles. This is one such. It is for the European Commission.”

Bhaskar rolled out the piece. An unusually large canvas still to be completed, a work in progress. It was full of small rectangles. And each rectangle had sexual positions very crudely inspired by the Kamasutra. It was obvious that Bhaskar was flush in the throes of a severely conflicting emotion; on the one hand he wanted to show off the fact that he had risen to the challenge of “modernizing” his traditional skill. On the other, he was still not sure if I belonged to the camp that believed that “modernizing” meant pandering to the dilettantish quasi exoticism of touring whites.


Bhaskar had evidently been superficially introduced to the debates on modernism, but as a semi-literate young ethnic artist his response had been limited to delivering the demands made on his skills. As a somewhat literate Indian, my questions had excited him, but he was also anxious that he did not read me too wrong, for then he would expose himself to the clichéd charge of selling out. He had reached the stage when this anxiety would spring in his heart because he had both the pedigree as well as a relative success in the current art mart.

There was obviously many a problem. Bhaskar was stretching the 64 sexual positions to fit into his 24 panels of two dimensional textile canvass. There were were omissions, since not all the positions involved two lovers, or even three, and the oversimplifications and repetitions made the canvas a gory piece of curio as far as its merits as a pattachitra went.

Later that night we were at Anupam’s tastefully done house, sitting outside in the kitchen garden, chatting over beer with his wife Ruchi, with their five year old son Adi doodling away unconcerned. Anupam started talking about how it must have been thrilling travelling around on a motorbike. Rohan took over, narrating some anecdotes and experiences along the way. Conversation then turned to conservation. I asked Anupam to tell us what exactly he did.

He was in the business of training locals to restore old palm leaf manuscripts discovered in old neglected houses, or to retrieve similar palm leaf manuscripts and engravings stashed away and forgotten in government libraries.. Many valuable and antique texts and engravings have been destroyed due to neglect and wrong storage.

Was it entirely charity work?

“No, we are a no profit no loss organization. We have an organizational set up and staff. We also raise money by offering to restore similar heritage works of corporate and government institutions and also restore paintings for private and corporate clients for a fee.”

Anupam, it turned out, was used to running an open house. And that was a considerable strain on his wife Ruchi. Or so I gallantly thought. But Ruchi seemed least perturbed by the oddball dysfunctionals and overly worried foreigners who waylaid her home. One such was an Italian friend of her husband’s who lived on pasta and mineral water for the three weeks of his stay in India with them, and was so untouched by even cursory intellectual curiosity that the colourful spices and condiments of Ruchi’s kitchen actually mortified the man!

The next day we were to be taken to the various temples within a 12-kilometre radius of Anupam’s house in a relatively upper middle class residential locality of Bhubhaneswar. A ten day, nearly 1500 kilometre journey on a motorcycle had taken its toll on both Rohan and me. We had become tanned “beyond redemption,” as Rohan thought. I had also managed to burn my face in several strategically placed patches, so to expect a civil reception anywhere might be a case of overvaulting ambition if not delusional vanity. I had often chosen to liberate my head from the constraints of my helmet, which Rohan almost never took off unless he was not riding; that was twice every day after he donned it in the morning, and a few short smoke breaks.

So when Anupam told us he had to go to office for a short while and that he would return late afternoon, he was giving us what we had almost prayed for. It was arranged that he would come from work, we would have lunch together, and then as the sun started to weaken we would set out for the temples. As things turned out, a lazy lunch left both Anupam and Rohan deep in slumber through the evening.

So it was only later in the night that we finally set out. Only to discover that it was the night of Shivaratri. Anupam said that the Shivaratri festival was a great opportunity to go to the Lingaraja temple. Keeping in mind the night’s revelry and crowds, we decided to take our bike, while Anupam led us on his Scooty, with his manservant and cook, Nandu, in tow. As we approached the temple, crowds congealed into a mass of inextricable Sargasso.

Outside the temple there was a stage erected, and a vocalist was singing away old Hindi film bhajans on Krishna, and the crowd in a state of universal motion stood listening. We parked our bikes, and Anupam said it was best not to get inside the temple, since it would be too crowded to appreciate the exquisite temple sculptures. He instead suggested a vantage point, and Rohan, camera slung over his shoulder, Nandu and I followed Anupam to a gate of the temple that is usually closed, but opened tonight to facilitate better crowd management.

We did not enter the temple premises. Instead, we took a flight of stairs that led right from the gate, and turned left to a balcony, almost like a plume of the elaborately carved temple gate. The steps were wide, and we saw several women police constables without their footwear, long hair wantonly pulled into their caps. They all looked tired, after long hours of duty. They did not look so much like alert policewomen in the middle of perhaps the city’s biggest public gathering. They looked rather like exhausted picnickers from a school picnic.

We trundled up to the balcony, to find an excited gaggle of old white tourists.
They probably did not go into the temple premises because non-Hindus were not allowed. However there is no exclusive Hindu privilege that a man or woman cannot pocket for a few tens or a couple of hundred rupees. An excited Rohan started to click away at the temple, a magnificent complex of many small shrines, and an imposing main temple. The whole complex was lighted up for Shivaratri. And the complex was full of small and big huddles of people; men, women, children. They all had earthen lamps in front of them, and also small earthen pots which had food cooked for the occasion in the temple kitchen. A dignified and ancient piety ruled those huddles of people staying awake on the holy night, keeping alive the flame of their small lamps as much a divine witness as a kind of watchdog of their efforts to keep sleep at bay. In and around them, and throughout the temple complex, we saw the famous Indian inability to be sensitive to civic sense; the temple’s hallucinatory piety carried with it the miasma of a vast litter of irresponsible picnickers.

As Rohan moved from one spot to another to take the temple’s carved and illuminated spires, I heard one of the old white tourists hissing as it were, under the strain of observing decorum and bursting blood vessel.

“We just paid you!”

The group filed out of the balcony, and the hissing was by the elderly lady caught in the classic predatory guide’s trap of targeting those isolated from the flock while bringing up the rear. The luckless predator was a young man with a fool’s cap notebook.

I did not know what he wanted, or what the old tourist had paid for. I looked at Anupam with my questions all writ in Large Times Roman font size 90 on my face, he was holding a smile on his face, observing with intensity the whole argument.

When Rohan finished the roll in the camera, we started down. We had reverentially removed our shoes at the landing that connected the balcony with the stairs. After wearing our shoes we made our way down the stairs, carefully weaving our descent through pious but tired women constables and exhausted elderly men and women who were taking a breather. The youngster with the notebook followed us and approached Anupam. They were asking for a donation.

What followed was a firm lecture, with a smile constantly playing on his lips, to the young pandas, the Brahmins who were part of the temple’s administration, and whom these youngsters claimed to represent. Anupam was well known there too, thanks to his conservation work throughout the city’s richly strewn and badly abused monuments. He asked them why they wanted money, and they promptly said it was for the maintenance of the temple, and the welfare of the Brahmins who take care of the temple.

Where are the receipts for the donations?

“We maintain a register of donors here,” said the youngster already giving up on any hopes of money.

“Why do you ask for charity if you charge visitors for using that balcony to view the temple from the outside?”

“How else will we raise money for the upkeep of the temple?” the notebook panda’s more ebullient companion retorted looking for an argument.

“Who are you?” Anupam asked, smiling, but by now his smile was looking more teasing and sceptical.

The whole conversation was partly in Hindi, partly in Oriya. Anupam then let them have a piece of his mind. If you want to charge, charge everybody equally. And give them receipts of the temple’s trust.

This kind of fleecing of the visitors is the reason we are in such a mess.

“This is the reason outsiders like me have to come here and work to save these monuments. This kind of unaccounted fleecing is keeping tourists away from these beautiful temples. We should be proud about them and maintain them, instead we beg and constantly cajole visitors to part with money. This is why Orissa has lagged behind. See Gujarat, the state is back on its feet after the earthquake. We are still begging for aid after the cyclone.”

The youngsters slunk away, duly chastised. I noticed another aspect of Anupam’s personality, that of social consciousness. I was also struck by the fact that he had mentioned Gujarat’s massive rebuilding exercise. The Gujarat rebuilt of concrete was crumbling under the worst state abetted communal pogrom. It once again underlined to me how money was always the only indicator of health in Gujarat. The cynical social re-engineering in the state was abetted by a vast majority of these very people who so willingly rushed to the economic rebuilding of Gujarat after the natural calamity. And once again money was a good indicator of where the sympathies of a majority of these Gujaratis lay; months later there was an embarrassing trickle for the rehabilitation of the riot affected compared to the literal deluge of dollars from non-resident Gujaratis for the earthquake affected.