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Time and Space: Mutuality in the Arts

Noted literary critic Sitanshu Yashaschandra traces the history of affiliation between poetry and painting against the backdrop of a group show at the ABS Red Earth Gallery, Baroda, curated by Himanshu Joshi, where the twenty participating artists wrote their own poems and made corresponding visual works.

An age of isolation seems to have set in our culture. One of the symptoms is the insularity in various arts. The times when Indian poets, painters, filmmakers, musician and architects knew each other personally and interacted with each other's work, in craft and creativity, appear to be waning - except in commercial cinema and in the massive industry of advertisement. At those locations, their cohabitation amounts to a fratricide or a pact for collective suicide. How, then, to begin a new and creative interactivity?

If painting is seen as an exploration in space, and poetry (its own music and its linguistic structurality) is heard as an exploration in time, then their interaction could be understood better in both its possibilities and problems.

Some recent instances of such an interaction are worth knowing: Two Gujarati poets of the Gandhian period, Sundaram and Rajendra Shah, have composed their raginimala poems, responding, with creativity and skill, to Indian miniature paintings of raga and ragini. In both scale and detail, the poems produce their temporally unfolding form that suggests the spatial form of lines and colours in the miniature paintings.

Atul Dodiya's recent show, titled, with a certain smile, the "Antler Anthology", explores subtle and powerful ways of such interaction. All the poems in this "anthology" are by contemporary poets known personally to him.

The present exhibition, resulting from a perception, decision and action of Himanshu Joshi, brings together the many and several ways in which contemporary Indian painters respond to poetry. The space that he has thus produced for contemporary artists is marked by a commitment (to interact with a poem) and freedom (to choose a poem from anywhere) offered by him to the painters.

Poetry and painting together could either become like the Pandavas and Kauravas or like Krishna and Arjuna (sequencing open in both). It depends. But the family relations persist.

One art (either poetry or painting) could restrict our experience of the other, and often does. But it could also provide a stimulus for the other art. The stimulant then the leaves its alluring trace in the product. When this happens, we (as viewers or readers) are able to discover temporal rhythms in a paintings, as our eye moves, over a period of time, from one point in the canvas or on the wall to another. Similarly, we sense spatial structures in a poem, as we briefly step out of the flow of time and watch, in stillness, the visual within the poem.

Meeting of the two is not always so productive: "Poetic" titles pasted on the walls of unfortunate art galleries, intrude like thorns in the sides of paintings hanging helplessly next to them. (Is it quite wrong to say that painters of pastels and impressionist oils tend to be fonder of sentimental versification?) On the other hand, in my long career as a literary critic, I have personally chased away some awfully artful illustrations that were leering at some nice, innocent poems spread out on the pages of popular magazines.

Painting and poetry could become Mater Texts to one another. One could turn, so to say into, Colonial Subjugator of the Other!

Historically, poetry, painting and sculpture have developed an ennobling, democratic and productive relationship in Indian culture. Millions (yes, millions) of illustrated manuscripts of Sanskrit, Persian and Gujarati (and some other modern Indian languages) are stored or scattered today all over India, on the handmade paper of which, the verbal and the visual enhance each other. Sculptures and paintings on the walls of temples, palaces and havelies, all over South and South East Asia (and Tibet), show how painting, sculpture and poetry could and did interact creatively. Dr Devangana Desai's studies on the Lakshmana temple in Khajuraho show how poetry and sculpture (and architecture) related to each other in pre-modern India. Past could burden the present with rituals, but it could also hand over insights and skills developed over a historical time.

Himanshu has, through this exhibition, helped us explore beyond the illustrative, different relations and interactions between poetry and the graphic arts, between movements of human mind in time and space. Let it surprise us.