My Family and Other.....

“.....And your cousins, and your aunts. Especially your cousins, whom you reckon up by dozens and your aunts”[i]

 Over the years, over countless cups of tea, I have often pondered over the history of my father’s family who came to India from Pakistan. I have been curious about how much this has influenced mine and it was in November 2012, when I went to Bombay, sorry Mumbai, for my cousin Nanna’s[ii]daughter, Namrata’s wedding that I reflected upon their personal history, culture and more. There was a lot of dancing during the three-day festivities that I attended but, recovering from a sprained ankle of the left foot and a broken toe on my right foot, I was an observer, taking photographs instead. Actually, dancing is not my thing so I was quite happy clicking pictures of everyone else dressed in their finery, jiving to disco beats and peppy Hindi film songs.

 

Through this rather more reflective stance, I realised that not only was there a lot of food, loud music and dancing but that one needed a large family to celebrate a wedding in this style. My father was one of eight siblings - three sisters and five brothers. Three[iii] have passed on and the rest are in their 80s and 90s. Each had two or three children, except for my eldest bhua[iv] who had five daughters and a son. Most of my cousins have married and have children from young teenagers to those who have children of their own or, are on the threshold of marriage. So, there were lots of people around to participate in this big fat Punjabi wedding. 
 

The ceremonies commenced with a Puja in Aunty Gyan’s home on Pedder Road. She is my father’s sister, a little older than him, and Nanna’s mother, which makes her Namrata’s naani[v]. She was widowed when Nanna was just ten and has maintained a keen interest in religion and spirituality.  

There was some partying that evening and the next, but I reached Mumbai on the day of the Sagai[vi], which was followed by a Sangeet[vii] hosted by the Chaddhas - Ankesh’s family [boy’s side] at the Taj Hotel on Land’s End in Bandra. After settling into Rohini’s home and meeting her children and my nephew Vivek [Meenal’s son], whom I had not seen in years, I dressed and went for the boy’s Sangeet. It was wonderful to see familiar faces, meet aging aunts and uncles still game for the hulchul[viii] of a large family wedding. Jugnu [Preminda] and Coco [Brinda] live in the US and their brother Mickey [Pankaj Prem Nath] and his wife Ramal are doctors in the UK. Their parents live in a Railway colony in Gurgaon as their father, Prem Uncle, had worked in and retired from the Indian Railways. 
 

My father is no longer alive. He died of cancer in 1989, but I recollect him recounting that Prem Uncle, who is his older brother, was slated to go to the UK to study chartered accountancy. His berth on the ship had been booked and the course fees paid, when he decided to join the Indian Army and my grandfather instructed my father to do the course instead. It was a strange story which stayed in my head. I have always pursued ideas that I wanted and cannot imagine what it must have been like to opt for a life-long career like this. But my father did and was successful as a financial man, even though his life was almost three decades shorter than most of his siblings’.  

 

Papa was born in 1922 in Montgomery, which Prem Uncle says is a town on the railway line from Lahore to Karachi, about a hundred miles from Multan. [I guess for a railway man everything is in relation to the railway lines].  Prem Uncle was born there too. The family roots were in the fortress town of Multan but Pitaji, my grandfather, was transferred every three years, so not all of his eight children were born in Multan but, they would return to their ancestral home once a year. Pitaji, Rai Bahadur Gyanshyam Das[ix] [Matreja[x]] was a civil judge. He would stay with us in Delhi sometimes and I remember him as a stern man who spoke little and always wore a solar topi[xi] when he went out. He had retired from active service when he migrated with his family to India in 1947. His surviving younger brother stayed on in Pakistan. No-one knows what became of him because relations were strained and he had no children. Prem Uncle recounted that he had married a Muslim and converted to Islam, then left his wife and reverted back to Hinduism.
 

Prem Uncle chose to join the Indian Army rather than pursue a career in accountancy because civilian jobs were hard to come by then. He later joined the Indian Railways. During partition, being a Major in the Indian army, he was able to travel to Multan in that highly tense phase and on 13^th August 1947, he escorted my grandmother, Mataji, and his youngest sister Shallo, to Mumbai. Vishu Uncle, my father’s eldest brother, had recently returned from studying in Cambridge and was working in Bombay so Mataji went to stay with him. Pitaji was still in Pakistan and Dindi Uncle[xii] with him. Pitaji had been appointed a custodian of Hindu property and to oversee safe evacuation of Hindus from Pakistan so he flew to Bombay just before Partition. There were limited seats on the flight so he put Dindi Uncle on a train from Multan to Lahore - a traumatic journey he was fortunate to have survived. From Lahore he then travelled on a safe train. under government supervision, to Ambala where Prem Uncle was posted. He later joined the rest of the family in Bombay where most of my father’s family have since settled. My two sisters and I were also born in Bombay, but our family later moved to Calcutta and eventually settled in Delhi. 

My father and three of his brothers had left Multan before August 1947 and Gyan Aunty was already married and settled in Bombay. His parents and two younger siblings came to India just before Partition but his eldest sister and husband with five children, one a babe in arms, made the journey from Jhung [100 miles North of Multan] in November 1947. Prem Uncle travelled by bus from Ambala to meet them in Amritsar and counted 18-20 dead bodies for every mile - Muslims slain by Hindus and Sikhs. He recounted one Sikh waving a bloodied sword, shouting out loud: chuha nussriya si, maar ditta [xiii].

Urvashi Butalia in her research interviews[xiv] has spoken of the brutal atrocities that came to pass where daughters and mothers were drowned or burned alive, ostensibly to protect them and one has read of violence that was perpetrated at this time but, to hear it from family members who saw and survived it, sends shivers down my spine. 

In my family, Partition and life in Pakistan is not much spoken of and if the siblings had spoken amongst themselves in Multani, I wouldn’t have understood. This whole episode only came to light in early 1980s. I was a student in London and there was a revival of interest in all things Indian, especially the British Raj. Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi was screened and Paul Scott’s Jewel in the Crown televised, which led to my own exploration of this era. On a visit home to Delhi, I questioned my father and was told of the evacuation duties and Dindi Uncle’s train journey from Multan.
 

At an earlier wedding three years ago, I had stayed with Dindi Uncle and Shanta Aunty in their apartment on Altamount Road and gingerly broached the subject. Then, Dindi Uncle revealed something I cannot get out of my mind: as a teenager of seventeen years he travelled alone and the single most important thing for him on that journey, from Multan to Lahore, had been to find a safe place to hide, inside trunks or some such, during the night, fearing for his life.  The mood was savage and each night people were massacred on trains crossing over to India and Pakistan. These are things one has heard and read and since Punjab was divided, it’s obvious my family from Multan would have been affected but, they never really shared much of this experience.   

Psychiatrist that are studying the consequences of  events surrounding Partition  say that, “regardless of the books written and films made about Partition, to a great degree Indians and Pakistanis have never worked through this monumental guilt, nor the other complex, concurrent   emotions. Rather, we continue to love and hate each other through petty sibling rivalry and dangerous wars.”[xv] 

I do believe such experiences must have affected the emotional and psychological landscape of individuals who underwent them, regardless of the degree of trauma. And, unresolved issues and emotions do tend to get passed on, directly and indirectly, to subsequent generations so I wanted to record a full-fledged interview with Dindi Uncle but he never got around to answering my written questions. His other siblings have also been reluctant to speak much and whatever information I have, has been prised through various informal conversations.

 

Dindi[xvi] Uncle is my father’s youngest sibling and has always been the live-wire of our family. When my elder sister Bunty got married in 1978, he began the tradition of dancing at family weddings with a glass full of Scotch Whiskey on his head. This time too, at 81 years of age, a year after suffering a stroke, he tried doing the same again.

The best part of the wedding festivities for me was to see the dress parade. The backs, or rather lack of them, of the lehenga-choli’s[xvii] and saree blouses were daring to say the least. My younger sister, Deepika, was here from Princeton, and carried off this spectacular chooridar[xviii] outfit where the kurta[xix] was virtually backless. Priyanka, Meenal [Nanna’s elder sister] and Nanna too, wore blouses that were exceptionally revealing. Each outfit the bride wore for the functions was more ostentatious than the last. At the Mehndi[xx] ceremony, bejewelled and dressed in a bright orange, elaborately embroidered lehenga, her hands and arms covered with henna, Nammu reclined on saffron and pink cushions placed on a stage, against the backdrop of a glass wall with water cascading behind it. The scene was definitely filmi[xxi] with an air of royalty about it. Her mother jokingly claimed that Nammu had even asked her friends to press her legs as she reclined on the cushions. 

 

Punjabis like to eat, drink and be merry and are generous hosts. My mother once narrated an incident when newly married; she had been reprimanded by Mataji for not being hospitable enough, because in her new family it was considered impolite for guests to eat unless you asked at least five times! On another occasion, a Punjabi friend married into a Bengali family, was bored at a recent family wedding in Kolkata so started singing Punjabi tappas[xxii]  with her daughter, which inspired their Bengali brethren to dance, uncharacteristically, on the streets, till the wee hours of the morning. My sisters and many cousins are NRI’s[xxiii] but game to travel and attend all, if not most, family weddings. As I write, Meenal’s daughter Priyanka just got married in Thailand and most that were at Nammu’s wedding were jiving to desi beats at the Shangri-La Hotel in Bangkok, just few months later.

There was a lot of preparation that went into the festivities for Namrata’s wedding. Nanna had even organised a professional choreographer to train her various cousins, siblings, nieces, nephews and children to dance to various Bollywood numbers for the Mehndi and Sangeet. As mother of the bride she did the honours with current hit song ‘Ooh La La La’, from Vidya Balan starrer ‘The Dirty Picture’, to loud hooting and cat calls from the rest of us. I recollect that when my cousins and sister married in the 1970’s, there was no such fanfare. Usually family members sang at weddings, led by some aunt or other. A dholki[xxiv]  was the only prerequisite and everyone sang and danced as best they could. The standard Punjabi songs like ‘Kala doria or ‘Sooe vacheera’ were popular. These traditional Punjabi wedding songs playfully teased the bride and groom and various relatives were part of the cheda khani[xxv] too. Sangeets then were more intimate and informal. Things had changed a lot. 

 

Punjabis are known for dikhava – pomp and show. They are emotional people and known to grieve with as much passion as they celebrate and have a tendency to live larger than life.  And when they are merry, they are very, very merry, with no scope for anything but merry making. The music and revelry is so catching that no-one comes away from a Punjabi wedding feeling anything but merry. 

As a photographer-observer of this wedding, while editing the photos I relived the revelry and meeting of aged relatives. I noted the lines that etched their faces with memory and experiences and wondered how they had not seemed to let these get in the way. Each was apparently successful in his/her chosen endeavour. Everything had been left behind in Pakistan and whatever moveable’s Pitaji had entrusted to an aide of Prem Uncle’s, to bring to India, had been looted en route, so all they had to rely upon was their education and the meagre belongings they managed to carry with them on that hostile journey.

I realise that what my family underwent was a fraction of what many others experienced. And it’s possible that their personal trauma took a back seat in the face of the national catastrophe that Partition became, but how does anyone put such experiences behind them?  How much of it has been resolved or reconciled with and how much of this lies buried beneath the rigour of getting on with living? Or for that matter how much has been subconsciously passed onto us by omission or commission are questions that keep coming up. But the naach-gaana, band baaja baarat[xxvi] continues. 

“What is history? If you mean ‘personal history’, it is perhaps what one would most like to forget”

                                                                                                                                            Thomas Merton
 

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[i] From HMS Pinafore – Gilbert and Sullivan

[ii] Vinita

[iii] My father, his eldest sibling Shiela Aunty and his eldest brother Vishu uncle

[iv] Father’s sister

[v] Maternal grandmother

[vi] engagement

[vii] Song and dance event

[viii] Goings-on

[ix] Born 1884

[x] Sub-caste of Khsatriya

[xi] hat

[xii] Father’s youngest brother

[xiii] The mouse was scuttling away, I killed him!

[xiv] The Other side of Silence

[xv] The Psychiatrist's Partition - Anirudh K Kala, Alok Sarin and Sanjeev Jain

[xvi] Devinder Nath

[xvii] Skirt-blouse - gown

[xviii] Tights

[xix] Knee length dress worn over chooridar or shalwar

[xx] Henna

[xxi] Inspired by Hindi/Bollywood films

[xxii] Wedding songs that tease the bride and groom with rhyming verse

[xxiii] Non-resident Indians

[xxiv] drums

[xxv] Playful teasing

[xxvi] Dance, song, band, music, groom pageant

[xxvii] Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

 

A Season for Tears

It was sometime in the middle of September, a year ago, on a Friday, around 4.00pm. I’d just had a cup of Earl Grey tea, edited some pictures on Photoshop and done some mundane stuff on the internet before I headed down to the swimming pool. I recollect seeing the sky in the far distance looking very dark and grey but it was at the edge of my landscape, in the far horizon and I did not really dwell upon it. The sky had been overcast most days since July but it had only rained in dribs and drabs. In any case, an overcast sky was not something to cause concern, especially not in the monsoon season. 
 



 

The water in the pool looked as deliciously aquamarine as always. It is a colour I am particularly partial to and reminds me of my Caran d’Ache colour pencils, through which I discovered my penchant for this hue many years ago. Zohrawar, a neighbour’s two year old was trying out his new motor-boat. Once I came into the pool he went to play with his toy in the kiddie’s pool, so I had the larger pool all to myself. I did a couple of lengths and then saw grey clouds rush overhead. I paused, hung onto the edge of the pool to watch this spectacle as the sky darkened. I was enchanted by the shades. How many shades of grey can there be, I thought? And for every five that I counted, nature added another two, or so it seemed. I stopped counting and just watched enthralled. 

 

 I wondered if it would rain today. I’d often hoped it would rain when I was in the pool but it always would begin raining only after I had swum, changed and was ready to go back up again. But my luck changed today. The coach and swimming pool attendants ran inside leaving me with the clouds, the now darkened shade of aquamarine water in the pool and leaf green Ficus hedges around the pool, waiting in anticipation. Even the pigeons had taken shelter, hiding in crevices and windows of the building; some, perched on a cable wire suspended high up on the thirteenth floor. Five of them appeared to be either jostling for space under the eaves or to maintain balance on the cable TV wire hanging precariously from one window to the next. 

At first, it just drizzled. It looked like little steel pins were piercing the water, radiating perfect circles around each point of entry, falling all around me. I thought of those days in school when we used a compass to draw circles for our geometry classes; piercing the paper with one end of the angular tool while a pencil took its cue from this and drew a large or small circle depending upon how wide I stretched the two straight lines of the compass apart. But here, there was nothing other than a delicate raindrop piercing the centre. The rest was a matter of course. The circles radiated out and then vanished as each rippled into the other, blending almost seamlessly with the larger mass of blue-green. 



 

And then I could hear loud plip-plops as larger droplets fell from the sky. I watched with delight as the aquamarine around me which, I am told, also represents the colour of the heart chakra, was jumping up to catch the drops. As the rain intensified, the water from the pool rose up higher with each drop that fell into it. And the heavier the water that fell into it or the larger the droplets were, the whiter the rising splashes seemed.  

Then the rain poured out of the sky and a refreshing, transparent, vertical curtain of water dashes fell upon me. It was heavenly to watch millions of pearly drops dance on the surface of the pool. There was no question of swimming now. I could not take my eyes off this mesmerizing scene.

 

The sky grumbled and lightening tore into the layers of darkening greys that had built up in preparation for this downpour. As the sky darkened even more, electric lights were switched on in many apartments inside the building. People, birds and even the stray dogs stayed away as I stood alone in the aquamarine water, watching nature’s tears dancing with joy at meeting each other in the pool. 

I love to cry. No, I am not a manic depressive; I just find tears very refreshing. I’d rather cry any day than deal with the stress of feeling frazzled and angry and all the rest of it. I know that crying is not everyone’s cup of tea but I find it hugely cleansing, especially when the tears flow effortlessly. But sometimes things get very intense and crying seems like such a luxury, so I envied the joy these rain droplets seemed to reflect in their relief at being able to surrender to the inevitable. 

There is lightness in being able to surrender. I have even experienced weight loss when I can fully express myself. There is this wonderful oral folk-tale “Tell it to the Walls” which A. K. Ramanujan has translated from Tamil into English. I first read it in 1993 and have re-visited it many times since. It speaks of the cathartic function of unburdening oneself, even if it is to a wall, and of the relationship between obesity and keeping one’s sorrow to oneself.

As a young girl, well into my thirties, I used to be plump/fat. I would hardly eat. It seemed that if I smelt food or just looked at it, I would put on weight. I was brought up on the ideal that it was not considered good to speak of the unpleasant things that happened to one, especially not to anyone outside the family. The old adage – “laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and your cry alone” - was the mantra one was encouraged to chant. Or, grin and bear it, because someone else had a far tougher life and sometimes it seemed everyone else’s woes were greater than mine. Until one day, about 20 years ago, when I could bear it no more and everything I had been through just started to tell its own tale. I could not stop myself from speaking. I lost whatever inhibitions I had earlier and also lost twenty-five kilos in less than three months.



Everyone was majorly concerned, but I had never felt better. I let the doctors do all their tests and when I was asked to have a CT scan done as they could not find anything wrong in the numerous tests already conducted, I drew the line and refused to go through another test. And then I read this folk-tale and was reassured.

Ever since I have tried not bottle things up again and have more or less maintained my weight. I relish my tears. It is not easy to face the pain one is feeling but I know that it’s better than adding pounds and the dip in my morale when I see this on the weighing scale. I love old Hindi movie songs. The words and music are so moving, and I love singing the sad ones or watch them on TV and cry. When life gets crowded and the pain becomes an ache in the shoulder or back or some other part of the body, it’s harder to feel it emotionally, and at those points, I often resist these measures too. There’s too much work to be done, how can I cry, I tell myself. My brain screeches overload and then the silliest thing will bring it on. I feel lighter and often get a lot more done than when I was trying to be brave pretending that things were under control. There is so much relief in surrender if one can come to that point, and the exultant dance I witnessed was inspiring me to revisit this state. Nature has a season for tears; surely there is something to be learned from this? 

As the rain abated, the pigeons came back to the water’s edge and their dull grey feathers took on the reflection of the pool’s aquamarine. This was an everyday occurrence but when the sun is shining bright, the shade of blue they reflect is different. It’s delightful too but it was this atmospheric, deeper shade of blue along with the greyness of their feathers reiterated by the clouds in the sky, which charmed. I had watched the rain, shared in her joy at finally being able to descend the angry skies. I saw a million liquid pearls dance before my eyes and wondered if this was how the oysters caught the jewels we humans adorn ourselves with. I have often considered my own tears as jewels to embellish my life with. Not literally but through my creative expression; However, while this is refreshing it is not quite the same as being able to cry.

Later, as I walked through the garden passing by the gleaming green bushes, I heard a whispering of relief among the leaves. And the sensuous fragrance of the Champa flowers too had been heightened by the refreshing rain. 

 

The Pattern of Guns

One of the first things I learned in art school was to make a pattern. I recollect how we were instructed to study flowers, leaves and vegetables and then abstract the shapes by repeating the forms across the page in different ways. This above all aspects of designing textiles has fascinated me. I love pattern; the idea that anything, even an innocuous vegetable like Bhindi [okra], when repeated can become an attractive design, something to adorn your body or environment with, is a fabulous thing.

 

 

 

The desire to decorate is instinctive in mankind and even the most primitive of societies have demonstrated this tendency. The history of ornamentation began with primitive man observing and translating the harmonies he saw in nature into tattoos. From this they progressed to wearing or stamping their bodies with animal skins. This was followed by weaving of straw and strips of bark and then we developed the skill to carve, to decorate weapons of defence after which comes architecture, followed by the sophisticated means of embellishment we now call design.  

 

 

A pattern, generally speaking, is formed when a single unit called a motif is used collectively and then repeated according to a geometric system. In other words when decoration is made by repeating a combination of specific form elements [for instance, the Bhindi] according to a pre-determined scheme they form a motif. When these motifs [or motives] are used collectively they become ornament, which when combined and repeated according to a specified geometric format they form a pattern. In textiles most designs are repeated in half-drop, brick laying or mirrored formats. I remember how we use to make one inch square grids in these formats to draw in the Bhindi motif to see which would be the most complimentary pattern that emerged.

 

 

Textiles patterns are what I have been absorbed in creating and studying for decades. The other day, however, I saw a contemporary, water-colour drawing by an Iranian artist, in the style of a Persian miniature, where the traditional four-sided border that finished the composition was not made up of filigree and flowers but of rifles lined up one after the other, to form a border.  The resultant effect was a repeating pattern. One rifle joined the other with equal spaces between them, the same part protruding and touching the next rifle at the same point across the length of the border. Hundreds of tiny guns were thus uniformly drawn.  

 

 

Now the idea of a rifle becoming a pattern, such that I have learned to imprint on fabric is a frightening thought. But that aside, what interested me, was how something mechanical, with associations of murder, terror and violence could appear almost benign.  The artist had not sought to abstract its form. The rifles that looked like AK 47s were drawn with all recognizable detail and facets. The artist has also constructed medallions with pistols and knives and these formed parts of the extended border. This concept, that anything which becomes a pattern could find acceptance was even more daunting when considering the associations attached to a gun. But there was also something profound going on here, because I did not recoil, but went right up to the painting, to take a closer look.

 

 

In the emotional dimension of being, seers are constantly telling us to break patterns of thought or habitual ways of thinking that limit our perception of people, places and things. As I reflected upon my response to the painting, I was reminded of this. In addition, the paradox of pattern as being both attractive and non-desirable was also coming into play. There are certain things that I do, which I like and some that I dislike. Not so much in the doing but often what happens after. So naturally, I jump to the conclusion that it is the ones that I do not like the consequences of which I need to dispense with. But the rifle border made me pause and reconsider this, because it also showed me that what I think as unacceptable also has the possibility of becoming palatable when it becomes a repeating pattern. In other words, by implication, when you keep repeating something it loses its hurtful associations to acquire an attractiveness you would not generally associate with it? Can that be possible?

 

I wonder. Does this mean that guns, with all their associations of killing, become acceptable as part of life and therefore acquire a quality that attracts us rather than makes us recoil in fear? They have been used for centuries to hunt for food and even game but, these days, they are being used to kill fellow humans in rage, out of revenge, and in the name of religion. None of this is for basic survival, as I understand it. Perhaps the notion of survival has changed because our values have changed and food alone is not enough. We need a sense of self that goes beyond this. While this argument could be plausible, I considered how it could ever legitimize the violence perpetrated by a gun.

 

As I finished breakfast, settling down with a pot of tea, I scanned the post and right on top of the pile of unopened letters was ‘The World Wisdom Review’. I turned to the ‘Book of the Month’ page to read an extract from ‘A Profound Mind’ by the Dalai Lama entitled ‘Identifying the Self’. The passage outlined that “to know and experience the nature of self correctly is to experience nirvana”, but “to know the nature of self in a distorted manner is to experience samsara[i]” thus suggesting that it is imperative to devote ourselves to understanding the difference between self as ‘me’ and the permanent, unchangeable or ever-changing self, distinct from the mental and physical parts of the human being. Where as a ‘Yogi’ engaged in profound, analytical, meditative investigation, we can experience ‘me’ as inherently real, to eventually negate this and merge with the permanent unchangeable self.

In the same newsletter Swami Nikilananda Saraswati of the Chinmaya Mission added that this state of enlightenment cannot be attained by non-performance of action. Meditation, he says, is about transcending action through knowing. “We have to go through each experience, doing whatever we must with a certain watchfulness, to be able to transcend the emotional disturbance that identifies ‘me’ as the doer, towards ‘doing’ with detachedness, because “action is the very nature of nature.”

 Hmmm, so it seems that, in experiencing the world, we encounter a distortion of the spirit and guns and violence are as much a part of this as anything else. And the pattern I saw, which made them look more attractive than my association with their function, seems to fall into this thinking. It is a part of living today, and acceptance without judgment, seems to be the key to transcending it.

 

 

I don’t like violence of any kind, even in film or on TV. And when I encounter any episode or film that disturbs I either cover my eyes with my hands or turn off the TV. More so, I dislike firing guns: saying things that diminish someone’s sense of self. I wish I did not have to get involved in telling someone that what they do or don’t do matters to me and that I do not like it. So I try and avoid saying anything but end up hurting myself because I have not transcended the anger and am curtailing it because of inhibition. When and where it matters, when others diminish your sense of self by their pattern of behaviour, I guess the missives need to be fired. It’s about survival, where identity is still an issue. 

 

Decoding emotional patterns of behaviour is an uneasy subject, but the way the human mind devises patterns both physical and intellectual is a fascinating facet. Take for instance the intricate jaalis[ii] of the tomb of Itmad-ud-daullah[iii] on the outskirts of Agra or the geometric and arabesque patterns of Islamic art as seen elsewhere in the world. When I look at these patterns, the mind boggles.

 

 

It is said the Koran bans figurative representation and thus Islamic art was built upon pattern generation through intricate interlacing of geometric forms. However, the evolution of this ideal is complex and interwoven with Christian Neoplatonic ideas. Geometry was important in the Islamic world as its figures and constructions were imbued with symbolic, cosmological and philosophical significance. The Greeks developed this knowledge and manuscripts containing this were widely dispersed and available to the Arab world by end of eighth century.

 

Revelations of the Koran affirmed a divine unity and Plato’s ideas were significant in reconciling this with Classical and late-Classical philosophical systems. He believed that number and form were keys to a deeper understanding of the universe and was sympathetic to the Islamic perception of the gross material world as a place of corruption and illusion. Plato also had a very low regard for the art of representation, seeing this as ‘a copy of a copy’, removed from the ‘truth’. True beauty could not be conveyed by representation or imagination. It had to express at least some of the eternal quality of his ‘Ideas’, which he found some sense of only in geometry.

The Neoplatonists, who conveyed Plato’s ideas to the Islamic world, had elaborated his philosophical system into a complex cosmology of their own, influenced by Pythagoras, Aristotle as well as Plato. In its later development, it also absorbed Jewish and Christian precepts. In time, Muslim scholars were able to separate out the older Classical philosophies from later accretions and made their own interpretations of the original material.

However, It is interesting to see that the Neoplatonic ideal influenced by many religions and great minds, imbibed and applied by Islam, in whatever stages and interpretations, also reflected ideas that both the Dalai Lama and Swami Nikilananda also spoke of, citing ancient philosophies of Buddhism and Hinduism which correlated with Plato’s sympathetic perception of the Islamic idea of the gross material world as a place of corruption and illusion and affirming the transcendent ideal of divine unity as delineated in the Koran.

Is there a pattern here through which we can transcend that of guns and words firing missives in self-defence? It seems to be a way forward, towards understanding the underlying pattern of existence. Through this could we dissolve those illusionary boundaries defined today by dogmatic religious identities? Ironically, even a cursory study of the basic principles on which each religion is based shows that they all sought to inspire devotees to transcend identity to merge with divine unity of the permanent unchangeable self. But paradoxically, as Swami Nikhilanada suggested, we have to go through each experience, doing whatever we must with a certain awareness, to be able to transcend the emotional disturbance that identifies us with “me” before we can comprehend the subtler realities.

Guns continue to be fired in all parts of the world; on demarcated borders that define countries and at unspoken borders in relationships and more, but are we doing it with the requisite watchfulness to arrive at the point of transcendence? The rifles in the water-colour miniature were neither attractive nor non-threatening but their pictorial form allowed scope for thought which a gun pointed at my face would not. Thus the artist’s voice and vision as the conscience of society gains relevance because this border patterned with guns did not make me recoil in horror, its finessed presentation made me think. It must therefore have made many other viewers think too.

 

And that means there is hope. The ideal may be eons away. It may never be reached but it is hope that keeps us going, aspiring for a better life, greater happiness and a better world.

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[i] The world

[ii] Carved stone trellises

[iii] Lord Treasurer and Noor Jehan’s father’