Animals in Indian Art

Subject: [world-vedic] indian artDate: Sun, 29 Sep 2002 12:20:48 +0530From: "sanjeev nayyar" Reply-To: vediculture@yahoogroups.comTo: Columnshttp://www.newindpress.com/sunday/sundayitems.asp?id=SEC20020913062144&eTitle=Columns&rLink=0 CreationsAnimals in Indian artNanditha KrishnaThe response to my previous article "Are we civilized?" (NSE, September 1) was overwhelming. I am thrilled that so many people are concerned about animals, and relate the growing social violence to the general lackadaisical attitude towards cruelty and violence. One letter said that kindness to people came first and would automatically ensure kindness to animals. Of course. Neither precedes or succeeds the other. A humane person is always humane.Ancient India protected animals in the same way it protected all of nature, by creating an aura of sanctity around them and celebrating their dignity. Some animals were the vehicles of the gods. Others, such as the elephant-headed Ganesha and Hanuman, the monkey devotee of Rama, became gods themselves. There is probably no other culture in the world that has been so consistently associated with plant and animal life as the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions of India.So, we were taught to treat animals well. I remember when I sat with my feet on the warm fur of my Alsatian dog; my grandmother would scold me, saying I was stepping on Lord Bhairava himself! At every meal a small bowl of boiled rice was kept out for the birds. And the kolam had to be drawn outside the house every day, in rice flour, for the ants had to be fed. Thus respect and kindness to animals was ingrained in our daily lives.Indian art, which was used to allegorise values and moral beliefs, honoured the dignity of animals. Hermits and saints were always depicted living in harmony with nature. Cave paintings express a primeval fear, a need to subdue and subjugate as people hunted. Probably, as people moved from hunting to food production, the need to kill for food receded, and they could sit back and appreciate the qualities of the animals that were once their antagonists. In the Indus Valley seals, animals such as the humped bull and elephant were particularly popular, while the rhinoceros, tiger, antelope, eagle and snake appear to have some significance. The Vedas invested gods and animals with divine parentage. In the ten incarnations of Vishnu we have divine manifestations that are equally animal and human.Early Indian art portrayed animals with human qualities such as love, jealousy, sacrifice, resentment and more. They were given a status of equality, with scenes of Boddhisattvas preaching to animals and rishis teaching a multi species audience. The Jataka tales are replete with stories of the Buddha's many births in various animal forms. Ancient India loved its forests and animals.At Mamallapuram, the scene of the cow licking its calf in the Govardhana cave and the gentle, loving animal families in the rock-cut penance of Arjuna are some of the greatest works of sculpture. Scenes of hunting were unavoidable, as the patrons were kings, but the artist sent out his own silent message when he depicted the pain and agony of the wounded deer, the elephant cringing as he was attacked from all sides in the midst of a war and the desperation of the tiger when it was cornered. "Is this valour?", was their message.The lion capital of Ashoka, with the majestic Asian lions in Persepolitan style, proclaimed the might of the king, and is now the emblem of the Government of India. In contrast, at the base of the same capital, are frolicking animals, nature at its free and untrammeled best. Ashoka selected four animals to represent the Buddha: the elephant symbolised his birth, the lion his clan, the horse his renunciation, and the bull his zodiac sign. The lion represented might, a symbolism that continued all through Indian art history, as late as the Pallava and Vijayanagara periods. This probably saved the Asian lion from extinction.The animal that appears most frequently in Indian art is the elephant, the mount of kings and heroes. As a sequel to the story of Maya, mother of the Buddha, who dreamed that an elephant entered her womb before the birth of her son, the elephant represented the Buddha and Buddhism in sculpture and painting. The elephant was the mount of Indra in the Western Indian rock-cut caves, and is represented in the Jataka tales. He appears in scenes of Gajendramoksha. Vishnu on his mount Garuda swoops down to rescue the elephant from the mighty snake Naga. And, of course, he is Ganesha, the elephant-headed deity who keeps away obstacles (Vighneshwara).Ungulates are prolific in art. The bull represented nobility and stature. It was also the capital of an Ashokan pillar from Rampurva (Bihar). The bull accompanies Shiva, standing at the entrance to Shaivite shrines, while depictions of Uma Maheshvara (Shiva and Parvati) are prolific in the Maratha paintings of Tanjore. The cow was, of course, go mata and Kamadhenu, a representative of Goddess Lakshmi. Unfortunately, the buffalo alone, representing the demon Mahisha destroyed by Durga, came to represent ignorance, slothfulness and evil, and became a much maligned and sacrificed animal.The advent of the horse in India has been the subject of much debate, irrelevant here. Suffice to say that terracotta horses from Sar-Dheri (2500 BC), Lothal, Rangpur and Kayatha (Ujjain) indicate its presence in the proto-historic period. It was in the Mauryan, Kushana and Gupta periods that its representation took on dynamism, for it was associated both with royalty and the chakravartin or universal ruler. The Vedic description of the sun with his flying steeds was personified by the Sun God Surya on a solar chariot driven by seven horses, magnificently depicted in the Sun Temple at Konarak. The deer represented peace and serenity, the meek and the oppressed, sacrificing its life to save another, and appears in delightful scenes of forests and nature.Birds were used to express human emotions. The swan represented morality and clean living, being the vehicle of Brahma and Sarasvati, while the crow was a messenger. The eagle-hawk (Garuda) and similar large birds of prey symbolised speed, strength and the sun. It was the enemy of the snake, feared yet respected and worshiped in the Naga stones of rural India. Several animals represented the waters, such as the elephant, snake, crocodile and tortoise, the last two symbolising the rivers Ganga and Yamuna respectively.The change came after the Sultanate period. The paintings of Vijayanagara and the Mughal and Rajasthani schools became more realistic, and animals were no longer symbols. Akbar commissioned painters to reproduce the animals recorded by his grandfather in the Babar Namah, while Jehangir's period is known for the remarkably realistic paintings, by the artist Mansur, of rare and common animals stripped of all spiritual overtones. Unfortunately, this period also saw the celebration of scenes of the hunt, a throwback to prehistoric painting. Earlier, scenes of hunting were generally accompanied by scenes of renunciation and remorse.Paintings of Krishnadevaraya hunting at Lepakshi, Babar's mass killing of deer and tigers, trapping of birds and animals and Rajput rulers hunting characterise the mores of the age, and set them apart from earlier Indian art, although the Ragmala paintings and scenes of Krishna's life still treated them with sympathy. The elephant, tiger and rhinoceros were hunted to extinction in the Indus Valley, which had celebrated them on its seals. The corollary came in the British period, when photographs were taken with large numbers of tigers, leopards, cheetah, deer and elephants killed for sport. In one stroke the new rulers of Hindustan wiped out what India had cherished for millennia. More important, they changed attitudes. Hunting became a sport', dead animals became trophies' and destruction became an entertainment'.Art still carries a message, especially for the illiterate. The symbols chosen by political parties are a good example. I will never forget a woman who told me that she voted for the rising sun symbol because it represented the Sun God, giver of life, little realising that the party it stood for (DMK) preached atheism. When the AIADMK led by Ms Jayalalithaa had the rooster as its symbol, it led to gory instances of cruelty towards the bird by the opposing party, till Chief Election Commissioner T N Seshan mercifully banned the use of animals as election symbols.In contemporary Pakistan, animals as election symbols undergo great cruelty. Advertising is a use of art to propagate a message, then and now. Artists of ancient India sent out a message of kindness and harmony through animals, using stories and symbols understood by the masses. We need to revive the use of art as a means of propagating the same values today.Nanditha Krishna is Director, The C P Ramaswami Aiyar Foundation, Chennai