Cosmopolitanism and Imagination in Nayaka South India

Cosmopolitanism and imagination in Nayaka South India: decoding theBrooklyn kalamkariGommans, J.J.L.

CitationGommans, J. J. L. (2020). Cosmopolitanism and imagination in Nayaka South India: decodingthe Brooklyn kalamkari. Archives Of Asian Art, 70(1), 1-21. Retrieved fromhttps://hdl.handle.net/1887/3201026 Version: Publisher's VersionLicense: Licensed under Article 25fa Copyright Act/Law (Amendment Taverne)Downloaded from: https://hdl.handle.net/1887/3201026 Note: To cite this publication please use the final published version (if applicable).

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Cosmopolitanism and Imagination in Nayaka South India: Decoding the Brooklyn Kalamkari

Jos Gommans

Archives of Asian Art, Volume 70, Number 1, April 2020, pp. 1-21 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

[ Access provided at 12 Oct 2021 09:25 GMT from Leiden University / LUMC ]

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/762530

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/762530

Archives of Asian Art 70:1 April 2020

DOI 10.1215/00666637-8124961 © 2020 Asia Society

Like all other facets of the mind, the imag i na tion must have a his to ry. And like all his to ries, there are many ways to tell, or to con struct, the sto ry.—shulman, More than Real, ix.

Introduction

For de cades, schol ars have been puz zled by an extremely rare piece of handpainted, mor dant, and re sistdyed cot ton tex tile known as a kalamkari (Figure 1). It dates from the early 1600s and was pro duced in South In dia, most prob a bly in the north ern Tamil shat ter zone of the Tontai ar ea, which surrounded the po lit i cal cen ters of Senji and Chandragiri, the latter of which was the cap i tal of the rem nants of the Vijayanagara Em pire.1 The unique ness of this kalam-kari, now housed in the Brooklyn Museum, de rives from its ex traor di narily cos mo pol i tan char ac ter, depicting as it does seven dif er ent courtly scenes from around the Indian Ocean. Unfortunately, at some point (and for an un known rea son) the piece, which as a whole mea sured ap prox i ma tely 275 by 95.9 cen ti meters, was cut into seven pan els, each panel representing

one court scene. By care fully ex am in ing the fringes of each panel it has been pos si ble to re con struct the origi nal se quence of the pan els.2 In do ing so, we are confronted with a col or ful—red, in di go, green, brown, and yel low—set of pan o ramas that do in deed re flect a highly cos mo pol i tan mindset, one keen to vi su al ize “the oth er” on the ba sis of sur pris ingly ac cu rate ethno graph i cal knowl edge. Although dated to the early 1600s based partly on prevailing fash ions in Europe (knee breeches, for ex am ple, in panel 2) and the IndoIs lamic world (the short jama in panel 1), we should bear in mind that, given the ste reo typ i cal cloth ing represented, these court scenes seem to be less neatly his tor i cal—courts at this time prob a bly looked more eclec tic—and more broadly em blem atic in na ture. The scenes de pict au di ences at var i ous royal courts, yet all

Cosmopolitanism and Imagination in Nayaka South In diaDecoding the Brooklyn Kalamkari

JOS GOMM A NS

ab stract Questions aris ing from the so-called Brooklyn kalamkari, a sev en-pan el, hand-painted cot ton tex tile, have confronted art his to ri ans for de cades: what do we see, who pro duced it for whom, what does it mean? With royal court scenes from all over the In dian Ocean world, the Brooklyn kalamkari rep re sents a uniquely cos mo pol i tan world view from ear ly-sev en teenth-cen tury South In dia. In this es say I dis cuss the mak ings of this par tic u lar world view in the con text of early mod ern pro cesses of glob al iza tion and state-for ma tion. By en gag ing with the work of In dol o gists Johan Huizinga, Jan Heesterman, and Da vid Shulman on In dian king ship and the ater, I then at tempt to de code the lo cal and the glob al, as well as the seen and un seen, mean ing of this tex tile.

key words Renaissance, glob al iza tion, cosmopolitanism, Vijayanagara, South Indian kingship, the ater, clowns, pineapple


are situated in what seems to be a re al is tic, lo cal, and in deed more eclec tic set ting, com bin ing Islamicate arched niches, bat tle ments, and domeshaped pa vilions (chhatries) with In dic shikhara roof tops. Interestingly, with the ex cep tion of the middle panel (panel 4), all of the scenes show veiled la dies looking down from the roof tops. Furthermore, the pos ture of mu dras—in most cases sym bol iz ing ad mo ni tion—taken by some of the kalamkari’s main fig ures gives a de fin i tively Indic, ar gu men ta tive at mo sphere. In other words, the em blem atic global scenes are situated in a lo cal his tor ical set ting that is rem i nis cent of a South In dian pal ace, such as the Raja Mahal of Chandragiri (Figure 2).

Although the mak ers of these tab leaux seem to have been very well in formed about the royal courts they depicted, among pres entday schol ars there is no con sen sus re gard ing the ac tual lo ca tions of those courts. As al ready not ed, the uni for mity of the costumes sug gests that the scenes do not de pict any specific con tem po ra ne ous royal court but in stead symbol ize eth no graph i cal ste reo types. As such, there are scenes that can be rec og nized as Mus lim (panel 1), Eu ro pean (panel 2), Ja va nese/Malay (panel 5), and

lo cal Nayaka (panel 6). The remaining three pan els are less clear, and there is on go ing de bate about whether the scene depicted in panel 3 rep re sents Vijayanagara or Siam/Ayutthaya, and whether that of panel 7, which looks Central Asian, is ac tu ally East Asian.3

So far, how ev er, the panel in the mid dle, panel 4, has gen er ated the most con fu sion, which is un for tunate as it seems to be the key pan el: as well as be ing in the cen ter, its main male char ac ter tow ers over the other pan els. This sug gests that un der stand ing this panel could re veal the mean ing of the kalamkari as a whole. However, con sid er ing the sparsely clothed, “trib al” peo ple who seem to be roaming some kind of wil der ness within it, it is also the panel that is the most chal leng ing to sit u ate in both time and space. Colleagues study ing the Americas might be lieve that the tribal fig ures are Native Amer i cans, per haps taken from a six teenthcen tury print like those by De Bry.4 However, sim i lar con tem po ra ne ous fig ures are depicted in the Lepakshi tem ple, which rep re sents a hunt ing scene from the Mahabharata in which Shiva ap pears as the wild hunter Kirata.5 Nevertheless, compared to the oth ers, the mid dle panel is cer tainly less

GOMMANS Cosmopolitanism and Imagination in Nayaka South In dia 3

quin tes sen tially courtly and ap pears to have more of a nar ra tive con tent in its scenes.

Most of the re search on the Brooklyn kalamkari has been of an arthis tor i cal na ture, fo cus ing pri mar ily on the six courtly scenes at the sides and on the Muslim and Eu ro pean scenes in par tic u lar, as they seem to be the most his tor i cally con crete. In what fol lows, I do not re visit the main icon o graph i cal ar gu ments that have been put for ward re gard ing these court scenes. Instead, I fo cus ex clu sively on the neglected but central panel 4 (Figure 3) and ex plore its mean ing in the con text of the time and place of its pro duc tion, that is, ear lysev en teenthcen tury South In dia. I sug gest that the kalamkari fits the spe cific cul tural con di tions at the South In dian Nayaka states, more spe cifi cally that of the late Vijayanangar ruler Venkata II (r. 1586–1614) at Chandragiri.6 In or der to bring this point home, I first briefly de scribe the ev erexpanding ho ri zons of the re gion by discussing the cos mo pol i tan con text of these Nayaka states as well as the in ter re gional network of Chetti trad ers that they supported. This will set the scene for a rap idly glob al iz ing world that had a huge cul tural im pact in the place where Nayakas and

Chettis met: the South In dian court, ex em pli fied by that of Chandragiri. I then spec u late on the pos si ble mean ing of the mid dle panel by ex plor ing the var i ous ways it could rep re sent the his tor i cal and/or imag ined worlds of the re gion. Finally, I sug gest one pos si ble read ing of the kalamkari, while leav ing other op tions open for fu ture re search. Beyond its ob vi ous icon o logi cal ob jec tive, the wider aim of this ex er cise is to further our un der stand ing of the pro cess of glob al iza tion, which af ected South In dia as much as it did Europe, and to pro vide one spe cific South In dian way in which that pro cess was made man i fest.

The Real World: Historical Events and CircumstancesChetti and Nayaka Cosmopolitanism

The world as depicted in the Brooklyn kalamkari was re al. Around the year 1600—the time the Brooklyn kalamkari was pro duced—South In dian trad ers connected the Coromandel Coast with var i ous parts of the In dian Ocean, and Southeast Asia in par tic u lar. This was hardly a new phe nom e non, though, as South In dian trad ers had frequented the “lands be low the

Figure 1. Hanging, 7 Pieces [“Brooklyn kalamkari”], South India, 1610–1640. Kalamkari; cotton, drawn and painted resist and mordants, dyed, 275–277.5 × 95.9–97.8 cm. Brooklyn Museum, Museum Expedition 1913–1914, Museum Collection Fund, 14.719.1–7. Artwork in public domain.


winds” since at least Pallava times (midfirst mil lennium ce). Yet it seems that in the fifteenth and sixteenth cen tu ries those con tacts in ten si fied as part of the more gen eral com mer cial up swing that the his torian Anthony Reid has de scribed as an “Age of Commerce.”7 By the turn of the six teenth cen tu ry, the over seas trad ing ac tiv i ties of a diasporic South In dian trad ing com mu ni ty, the Balija Chettis, encompassed such dis tant places as Arakan, Ayutthaya, Mergui, Pegu, and Sri Lanka, as well as Perak and Kedah in the Malay Peninsula.8

A rel a tively wellstud ied ex am ple is Achyutappa Chetti, a typ i cal port fo liocap i tal ist—some one who was in volved in both trade and pol i tics.9 During the first de cades of the sev en teenth cen tu ry, he not only served as an au ton o mous com mer cial bro ker for the newly ar rived Dutch East In dia Company (the VOC), he was also a po lit i cal me di a tor at the lo cal courts of Chandragiri, Madurai, and Senji, and even be yond, at the courts of Co chin and Arakan.10 It is dif cult to as cer tain the ex tent to which the po lit i cal en gage ment of such over seas en tre pre neurs was re ally some thing new within the re gion. In the past—and as recorded in nu mer ous in scrip tions—com mer cial groups tended

to in vest their profi ts in expanding land cul ti va tion through tem ple en dow ments. This should be un derstood in the con text of two other changes. First, it in volved the ar rival of Eu ro pe ans—ini tially the Por tuguese and then, in the early sev en teenth cen tu ry, primar ily the Dan ish, Dutch, and En glish—who started to tap into the existing trad ing cir cuit by exporting South In dian tex tiles to Southeast and East Asia. Although in tro duc ing noth ing new to the re gion, their pres ence led to a sig nifi cant in crease in the quan tity of pre cious met als imported from South America (and later from Japan, through Dutch chan nels). This stimu lated the com mer cial i za tion of the re gion as a whole and, as a re sult, in creased both the fis cal base and the bu reau cratic ef fi ciency of the state. The emer gence of port fo lio cap i tal ists in states that were com pet ing with each other more than ever be fore for the in creasingly liq uid wealth should be situated within this context. Second, al though their newly de vel op ing states were far from sta ble, the Nayaka rul ers represented the most suc cess ful of the Tel u guspeak ing war rior lin e ages from the Deccan and the north ern Carnatic who had traded their sig nif i cant mil i tary ca pa bil ity for landbased power in the more south erly and more

Figure 2. Rani Mahal, Chandragiri, Andhra Pradesh, India, possibly early seventeenth century. Photograph: Archaeological Survey of India, 1894. Source: British Library, London: www .bl .uk /onlinegallery /onlineex /apac /photocoll /f /019pho0001008s2u00273000 .html.


Figure 3. The middle panel of the Brooklyn kalamkari illustrated in Figure 1.


pro duc tive ag ri cul tural re gions of South In dia. Some other re gional lin e ages, such as the Damarla, Matla, and Velugoti clans, did not man age to be come kings but also be came rooted in the re gion and helped limit the Nayaka rul ers’ ac cess to ag ri cul tural wealth.11

It was within this con text of in creas ing com mercial i za tion and mil i tary gen tri fi ca tion that many fragile states, each seem ingly end lessly crum bling and be ing re built, were to be found. The cul tural cor ol laries of these de vel op ments for the Nayaka states have been an a lyzed in Symbols of Substance, an im pres sive mul ti dis ci plin ary study by Da vid Shulman, Velcheru Narayana Rao, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam.12 This is not the place to dis cuss fully their pioneering and thoughtpro vok ing anal y sis, but it seems safe to conclude that, over the course of time, ideas of king ship in these par tic u lar states be came less de pen dent on the rit ual sanc tion pro vided by tem ples and Brahmans. Furthermore, the dis tinc tion be tween the temple and the court was erased as the war riorking took on the rit ual role of the Brah man and, in creas ing ly, nonBrah man po ets de vot edly started to praise their pa trons as gods. Velcheru Narayana Rao even speaks of a “rev o lu tion ary reconceptualization of king as the god Vish nu.”13 Hence, we ar rive at a model of In dian kingship that de parts from that of the clas si cal, con tra dictory al li ance be tween king and Brah man, and in stead ap proaches that of Hocartian di vine king ship in which the king acts as the main sac ri ficer (yajamana) and the Brah mans merely as sist him in this role and keep him from rit ual pol lu tion.14 One par tic u larly clear way in which this new view of king ship was made man i fest was through the king’s grow ing ob ses sion with sensual en joy ment (bhoga) of food and sex; this was not an ex pres sion of con spic u ous and he do nis tic con sumption but an al ter na tive form of “selftran scen dence” in or der to achieve “con nec tion with the di vine and the ul ti mate re al.”15

Vijayanagara Renaissance at Chandragiri

The three au thors of Symbols of Substance clearly wanted to evoke the no tion of a South In dian re naissance, one that was quite dif er ent from that of Europe but which did have cer tain sim i lar i ties, as may be seen in the king’s in creas ing ob ses sion with his own per son al, sen sual ex pe ri ence of life. For the mo ment, set ting aside the wid er, global ram i fi ca tions of the cul tural de vel op ments that oc curred at the Nayaka courts, it is safe to ob serve that, de spite its dis in te gration, there was at least an at tempt to re vive the idea

of the Vijayanagara Em pire. This po lit i cal and im pe rial re nais sance was fo cused on the em pire’s last ves tige in Chandragiri.16

Following the bat tle of Talikota (1565), which saw the de feat of the Vijayanagara Em pire by a co a li tion of the Deccan sul tan ates, much of the em pire’s po liti cal power was taken by var i ous Nayaka suc ces sor states whose cap i tals were situated close to the western and south east ern coasts of In dia. What sur vived of the em pire, un der the Tel ugu Aravidu dy nas ty, moved to ward the Coromandel Coast, first to Penukonda, then to ward Chandragiri in 1585, then to Vellore in 1604. It was dur ing the rel a tively long reign of Venkata II (also Venkatapatiraya; r. 1585–1614) that the idea of em pire gained a new—al beit tem po rary—lease on life. With the help of var i ous lo cal war rior lin e ages, Venkata II man aged to ex pand his power over the bor der lands, keep ing the forces of both the Deccan sul tan ates (Bijapur and Golkonda) and his main Nayaka ri vals (Senji and Tanjavur) at bay. After his death, though, ev erything was lost, the re sult of one of the fre quent succes sion strug gles in the re gion. This, in turn, gave rise to a fur ther round of state for ma tion, one in which Yachama Nayaka, with the help of Tanjavur and the Por tu guese, was able to carve out his own small kingdom to the east of Vellore. With the end of the Aravidu dy nasty a de cade or so lat er, the Vijayanagara Em pire com pletely disappeared, al though the idea of em pire lived on in the var i ous foun da tion myths and courtly rit u als of the var i ous Nayaka states.17

Yet, for Venkata II, the em pire was an on go ing presence. According to one of his land grants (at Vilapaka), his was a Ra malike rule of the world, with five ex tinct but clas si cal tribes serv ing as the gate keep ers: the Rattas (in the west), Magadas (in the cen ter), Kambojas (in the north), Bhojas (in the south), and Kalingas (in the east).18 Apart from such rhet o ric, what gave Venkata II a truly im pe rial per spec tive was the highly cos mopol i tan, in tel lec tual at mo sphere at his court, which is rem i nis cent of the con tem po ra ne ous Mu ghal court of Akbar (r. 1556–1605) and the Bijapur court of Ibrahim Adil Shah II (r. 1580–1627). There are two im por tant par al lels be tween those courts and Venkata II’s court that I would like to high light here be cause they are crucial for my un der stand ing of the deeper mes sage of the Brooklyn kalamkari.

First of all , all three courts pro moted de bates among peo ple of dif fer ent in tel lec tual and re li gious back grounds. By this time it ap pears that some in tellec tu als were starting to ques tion the re ceived wis dom that underscored existing claims to re li gious and phil


o soph i cal truth as well as the po lit i cal au thor ity that it used to sup port. One could even ex pand this per spective to in clude rul ers in other parts of the world. In the Eu ro pean con text, for ex am ple, we see that, amid ev erdeep en ing re li gious con flict and epis te mo log i cal un cer tain ty, kings sought new foun da tions for their rule. Such is a par a dox of that era. On the one hand, there were fierce re li gious and phil o soph i cal clashes along in creas ingly sharply de mar cated fault lines guarded by a wide range of fun da men tal ist schol ars. On the other hand, there were at tempts to over come con flict through a uni ver sal iz ing par a digm that in corpo rated the an tag o nism in a South Asian ver sion of a philosophia perennis that paid trib ute to an cient wisdom while also in cor po rat ing new ob ser va tions. Thus, fol low ing an other wave of in ten sive glob al iza tion, and in the midst of in creas ing epis te mo log i cal and on to logi cal un cer tain ty, there is no doubt that around the year 1600 many of the royal courts were in volved in in tense in tel lec tual de bates about the mean ing of truth and re al i ty. As in tel lec tu als and art ists car ried out their own “con quests of re al i ty,” im pe rial rul ers in par tic u lar had a stake in this as part of their ef orts to find new, uni ver sal ideo log i cal un der pin nings for their rule.19

As a re sult of this uni ver sal iz ing agen da, Venkata II—not un like Akbar and Ibrahim Adil Shah II—had a par tic u lar pre di lec tion for cos mog ra phy and mathe mat ics. Like Akbar, Venkata II in vited Je su its to his court to share in for ma tion about the cos mos and the world. One of them, the math e ma ti cian Antonio Rubino (1578–1643), even made a Tel ugu trans la tion of a cos mo graph i cal sur vey. Its map contained an ex tensive de scrip tion of the prin ci pal king doms, the four el e ments, and the twelve con stel la tions. According to Rubino, it astonished the court to see “how dif er ent our doc trine is from theirs.”20

In the same way that fierce theo log i cal de bates raged in Europe as a re sult of the Reformation, South In dia seems to have been just as deeply im mersed in such in tel lec tual po lem ics, whether the more theolog i cal ones be tween Shaivas and Vaish na vas or the more phil o soph i cal ones be tween du al ist (Dvaita) and mo nist (Advaita) schol ars.21 Whatever the out come of those de bates, it seems that in South In dia, Vaish nava and Shaiva “sec tar i an ism” as well as Advaita Ve danta mo nism were on the rise.22 This com bi na tion was made pos si ble by a highly seg mented pub lic sphere in which each re li gious com mu nity was allowed to per form its own de vo tional rit u al. At the same time, we wit ness a grow ing con ver gence be tween mo nist thought and Tantric rit u als that fo cused on the wor ship of lo cal god

desses through imag i na tion. One of the most domi nant groups in this pe riod is that of Shrividya Tantrism, in which the dev o tee “as sumes the form of the di vine by iden ti fy ing with the god head’s man i fes tations, par tic u larly in im ages and icons, sound for mulae (man tra), and cos mic di a grams (yan tra) which are then rit u ally iden ti fied with one’s body, speech and in tel lect.”23 Hence, South In dia at this time witnessed the re vival of both Shankara (ca. eighth c.) and Kalidasa (ca. fifth c.) to even tu ally be come the rep re sen tatives of, re spec tive ly, clas si cal In dian mo nist thought and clas si cal In dian dra ma. According to the in sight ful re cent work of Elaine Fisher, this rel a tively peace ful, seg mented co ex is tence of in creas ingly di verg ing theolog i cal brands and de vo tional per for mances de vi ates from the mo nism of NeoHindu uni ver sal ism but repre sents a par tic u lar South In dian ver sion of early modern re li gious plu ral ism.24 Although we should be wary to make too much of this, the seg ment ed, em blem atic char ac ter is tic of the Brooklyn kalamkari in deed seems to sup port this idea of mul ti ple pub lic zones within one lo cal space.

Zooming in on Chandragiri again, a com bi na tion of Shaivism and mo nism is represented most con spicu ously by the Tamil Brah man Appayya Dikshita (1520–1593), who not only worked at the Chandragiri court, but also served at the courts of Vellore (un der the Bomma Nayaks) and Tanjavur. He is of ten presented as hav ing been on a mis sion to rec on cile all creeds, cults, and phi los o phies. When serv ing Venkata II, it seems that this poly math’s mo nism was so strong that it could even trump his Shaiva creed, mak ing him em pa thize, for a time, with the dom i nant Vaish nava lean ings of his pa tron.25 Indeed, Venkata II him self re vived de votion to Venkateshwara—one of the forms of Vish nu—at the fa mous Venkateshwara tem ple in Tirumala, as is seen in many of Venkata II’s grants as well as on his coins.26 Meanwhile, South In dian mo nism even started to afect the im por tant re li gious cen ter of Benares, in north ern In dia, and from there even influ enced the Mu ghal court.27 From Benares, it made the French physi ciancumtrav eler François Bernier (1620–1688) com pare its phi los o phy with that of the Neo pla tonic and Hermetic think ers of his home land.28 It was the all in clu sive brand of Hindu mo nism that min gled so well with the dom i nant cos mo log i cal, Neo pla tonic mood at the con tem po ra ne ous Mu ghal and Bijapur courts

However, the most dom i nant in tel lec tual fig ure at the Chandragiri courts was not a mo nist but the Shri Vaish nava guru Tatacharya, who had also anointed Venkata II, while two of his an ces tors had converted


the Vijayanagara em peror Virupaksha to Vaish navism. Tatacharya was not only a rit u al ist and in tel lectual but also the man ager of var i ous tem ples, and in that role he wielded sig nifi cant po lit i cal and eco nomic pow er. On sev eral oc ca sions Tatacharya appeared to be a fa nat i cal de bat er, whether against Je su its, Appayya Dikshita, or, as shall be seen be low, the witty court jester Tenali Ra ma.29 Yet, de spite his own pref er ence for Vaish na vism, Venkata II’s court should be viewed as a highly cos mo pol i tan in tel lec tual cen ter, one that saw a great deal of schol arly cu ri os ity in the midst of in creas ing po lit i cal and in tel lec tual un cer tain ty.

Coming to the sec ond par al lel, as at the contemporary Mughal and Bijapur courts, it seems that the height ened on to log i cal ob ses sion of the time also di rectly im pacted the Venkata II court’s in ter est in the vi sual rep re sen ta tion of re al i ty, some thing that can be seen in the rul er’s fas ci na tion with Eu ro pean paintings.30 The Je su its, hoping that this could help con vert him, had sent two paint ers, both laybroth ers, to the court. The first was an En glish man named Alexander Frey, who was there be tween 1599 and 1602; he was followed, in the years 1607 to 1611, by an Ital ian named Fontebona. Venkata II’s in ter est was piqued af ter he had been shown sev eral small por traits of the Por tuguese king Dom Sebastião (1554–1578) and some of his pre de ces sors. On his ar riv al, Frey gifted Venkata II two paint ings, one of the Three Magi and one of the Blessed Virgin with Child. Then, en cour aged by the stu pe fied king, he started to work on an other piece, one that showed Christ’s de scent into Hell. Even more suc cessful at the court was Fontebona, who painted the king’s por trait and even be came his in ti mate friend. One of his paint ings—of the Ma donna with Child, with John the Baptist at her side and Saint Joseph in the rear—was hung fac ing the throne.

Unfortunately, noth ing of these paint ings survives, nor does any other such work that can be de fini tively shown to have come from Venkata II’s court. However, we do have Venkata II’s stat ue, which, quite tell ing ly, is in the Venkateshwara tem ple in Tirumala (Figure 4). Its rounded forms sug gest the con spicu ous con sump tion of food and as such it per fectly rep re sents—Venkata II be ing a Tel ugu Nayaka himself—the new kind of he do nis tic roy alty as discussed in Symbols of Substance. His pas sion for Eu ro pean paint ing was part of a more gen eral ob ses sion with

Figure 4. Statue of Venkata II at the Venkateshwara Temple, Tirumala, Andhra Pradesh. Copper or brass, somewhat smaller than life-size. Source: Archaeological Survey of India, Annual Report, 1911–12. Photograph provided by Crispin Branfoot.


vi sual cul ture, confirming the ex is tence of a courtly cul ture that ex pe ri enced a height ened re cep tiv ity to sen sory per cep tion, es pe cially that of sight. In a sit u a tion where court and tem ple are merged, such as oc curred at Venkata II’s court, the vi sual signifies more than it de picts; as the at mo sphere of the court be comes in fused with the fra grance of di vine ser vice, its vi su alizations re flect a hid den or in ner mean ing that is be yond the vis i ble, some thing that is “more than re al.”31

The Enigmatic Middle Panel: A Wilderness of Comic ChaosVisualizing the Exotic

So to what ex tent can the Brooklyn kalamkari as a whole be said to rep re sent the real world? Or, perhaps more im por tant, to what ex tent can we see new el e ments—el e ments that were not part of the preexisting re gional rep er toire—pen e trat ing conven tion al, if not clas si cal In dic ico nog ra phy? In other words, to what ex tent was such ico nog ra phy able to ac com mo date and in te grate new peo ple and ob jects that were be com ing known in the sub con tinent as a re sult of glob al iza tion?

Answering those ques tions for these six courtly scenes is not eas ily done. For ex am ple, al though the Eu ro pean scene in panel 2 (see Figure 1) looks fairly re al is tic and eth no graph i cally ac cu rate, the over all im pres sion is em blem at ic. Depictions of Eu ro pe ans were not un usual at this time in In dia, and there are sim i lar im ages on other kalamkaris that represented both real events and real in di vid u als who were in the re gion at the time, as well as re pro duc tions of Eu ropean paint ings and prints. In the Brooklyn kalam-kari, the Eu ro pean cloth ing seems to have been univer sal ized in or der to make the panel as a whole em blem atic and thus more rec og niz able as an ethno graphic cat e go ry. Most likely these fig ures were meant to make an ex otic im pres sion, al though it was not re ally nec es sary to exoticize fur ther something that was al ready con sid ered ex ot ic. Although slightly less rec og niz able as a ste reo type, other ethno graphic categories in other kalamkaris are also dis tin guish able by their cloth ing, as in the case of a Chi nese male and a Turk ish male in a Deccani piece that seems to de pict the four cor ners of the world (Figures 5 and 6). Indeed, one might won der whether the seven scenes of the Brooklyn kalamkari rep re sent the myth i cal seven worldcon ti nents of tra di tional San skrit and Tamil cos mog ra phy.32

Figure 5. Detail of the Deccani kalamkari illustrated in Figure 6, showing a Chinese male and a Turkish male.

Figure 6. Deccani kalamkari, Golconda region, ca. 1640–1650. National Museum, New Delhi, Kalamkari: cotton, drawn and painted with resist mordant, 89 × 74 cm (with lining). National Museum, New Delhi, 48.7/103. Source: © National Museum, New Delhi.


Focusing on panel 4, what is de fin i tively ex otic within it is the re peated de pic tion of pine ap ples, which peo ple are car ry ing and prob a bly of er ing to the king and queen. Since it is known that the pine ap ple had been in tro duced to In dia from the New World by the Por tu guese some time in the pre vi ous cen tu ry, we are presented with a very ear ly—if not the ear li est—In dian de pic tion of what must have been per ceived as an ex tremely ex otic fruit, one that ap par ently made a deep im pres sion in this part of the sub con ti nent.33 It re curs as a mo tif in var i ous con tem po ra ne ous kalam-karis from the Deccan sul tan ates and may even have in spired the stan dards (ʿalams) that were used for the Mu har ram pro ces sions there (Figure 7).34 Interestingly, the afore men tioned Deccani kalamkari de picts an as cetic wear ing a ti ger skin who is ex am in ing a pineap ple, per haps con tem plat ing its deeper, pansemiotic sig nifi cance in the eye of its Cre a tor (Figure 8).35

Figure 7. Left: Standard, made in India, probably Hyderabad, Deccan, late seventeenth–early eighteenth century. Brass, H. 96.5 cm; W. 30.5 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2013.37. Right: Ceremonial standard (‘Alam), India, Deccan, 1601–1800. Brass with pierced and engraved decoration, 91.8 × 42.7 × 7.4 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, Russell Tyson Fund, 1981.189. Artworks in public domain.

Figure 8. Detail of the Deccani kalamkari illustrated in Figure 5, showing a yogi contemplating a pineapple.


Discussing the small king dom of Vizianagaram in Andhra, Don Handelman, M. V. Krishnayya, and Da vid Shulman elab o rate on this di chot omy when they stress the “depth” of the wil der ness:37

Depth is flu id, la bile, and in depth there is the flu id ity that is trans for ma tion, the flu id ity of forming and forms that take shape through one an oth er. Change is the con di tion of depth. What is of ten re ferred to as “wil der ness” in In dia, sup pos edly on the pe riph er ies of “civ i li za tion,” is where depth ex ists in its nat u ral cos mic con di tion. Put dif er ent ly, wil der ness is a greater con cen tra tion and in ten si fi ca tion of depth. In or close to re gions of greater depth—seas, lakes, streams, and for ested moun tains full of caves, whose flu id ity or in wardturn ing of form curves them more nat u rally are the abodes of depthspe cial ists: fish ers, hunt ers, heal ers, and of course, goddesses.38

For Handelman, Krishnayya, and Shulman, the goddess is the most im por tant per so na. In their Andhra at least, ev ery king needs a god dess, al though, as they add, not ev ery god dess needs a king. “A king needs a god dess who is a sis ter to him, comforting, con sol ing, protecting, and sav ing him with out ask ing ques tions, with out set ting con di tions. The god dess who is (like) a sis ter to a king is a god dess to king dom and kingship pre cisely be cause she is (like) a sis ter. Kingship needs nur tur ance; it needs to grow, or gan i cal ly, from depth into depth, from depth out of depth, like a field

The Wilderness in In dian Trope

Coming to the mid dle panel (see Figure 3), its over all set ting and nar ra tive mode dif er en ti ate it from the other six. To start with the set ting, we find our selves in the midst of a trop i cal for est. Three of the five layers show hunt ing scenes, which in volve both male and fe male hunt ers chas ing a ti ger (sec ond from the top, far left), two deer (in the mid dle, far right; Figure 9), and two deer and two hares (at the bot tom, far left and right, re spec tive ly). Hidden amidst ex tremely lush veg e ta tion are var i ous other an i mals that fit well in the nat u ral en vi ron ment depicted.

The dis tinc tion be tween the set tled world and the wil der ness is a very wellknown In dic trope; it is pres ent in the main ep ics, the stories about the Buddha, and in var i ous plays. We re peat edly see princes re nounc ing the world, mov ing to the jun gle, un dergo ing hard ships, meet ing gods and goddesses, gaining strength, returning to the world, and then taking up power again, usu ally af ter a round of ex ces sive vi o lence. The va ri ety is end less, but the over all theme re mains the same: le git i mate king ship re quires an on go ing, end less in ter change be tween the set tled world and the wil der ness.36 The jun gle con veys a deep and tragic sense of sep a ra tion, most of ten from one’s be loved. Furthermore, in Tamil Sangam lit er a ture, the waste land (Palai) evokes this sense of sep a ra tion, and the for est (Mullai) evokes a sense of pa tiently waiting for re union.

Figure 9. Middle frame of the middle panel of the Brooklyn kalamkari illustrated in Figure 1, showing a hunting scene in the wilderness.


Oh my fate! I am tired of be ing friend to this king addicted to the hunt! “Here is a deer”, “there is a boar”, “there is a ti ger”—in this man ner we wan der about from for est to for est, in the midst of rows of trees, their shade thinned by sum mer. We drink hot, foulsmell ing wa ter from moun tain streams, as trin gent from their mix ture with leaves. We get our meals, mainly consisting of meat roasted on spits, at ir reg u lar hours. And even at night, I do not get enough sleep as my joints are dislocated by rid ing on horse back [dur ing the day]. Then, at the crack of dawn, those sons of slave girls—the fowl ers—wake me up with the noise of tak ing the for est.43

The fig ure of the vidushaka nec es sar ily be longs to the In dian the ater, and has attracted sig nif i cant at tention from In dol o gists. He is the ug ly, nar rowmind ed, yet loyal and goodnatured com pan ion of the king. According to the Dutch In dol o gist Johan Huizinga, his ste reo typ i cal na ture is, in es sence, fixed, and it is domi nated by three main char ac ter is tics: pet ti ness, clumsi ness, and gourmandizing/in do lence.44 The clown’s he do nism is earthy and thus con trasts sharply with the bhoga at the Nayaka courts.

By far the most im por tant—and for us also the most rel e vant—study of the vidushaka is that by Da vid Shulman.45 Shulman un der stands the vidushaka through his re la tion ship with the In dian king, and, re gard ing the king, he fol lows in the foot steps of an other Dutch In dolo gist, Jan Heesterman.46 For both Heesterman and Shulman, In dian king ship is fun da men tally per meated with am bi gu i ty, con flict, and trans for ma tion. The main rea son for this was that the king con tin ued to act

Figure 10. Top frame of the middle panel of the Brooklyn kalamkari illustrated in Figure 1, showing two vidushakas (on the left and the right).

of rice.”39 Therefore, when kings hunt deer in the wilder ness they are also chas ing this cos mic depth, here assisted by a god dess. Such can not be achieved when kings sit idly in their courts, hold ing au di ences. Hence, the con trast be tween the mid dle panel and the oth ers is not par tic u larly strange; in fact, it is quite con vention al; the wil der ness helps cre ate a unity that oth erwise would be miss ing. I must em pha size, how ev er, that I do not wish to im ply, through these lit er ary con sid er ations, that the ex is tence of the wil der ness was ir rel e vant for the real world; kings re ally did go hunt ing, and in many parts of In dia, un til mod ern times, the wil der ness did in deed give ac cess to real pow er.40

The Clown in In dian Theater

As well as the three dy namic hunt ing scenes, the middle panel has two oth er, more static frames. The top one shows a tow er ing, kingly fig ure sit ting on a hill top, while the hunted ti ger be low him seems to be reflected as a kind of prey in his head gear. There is also a queen or god desstype fig ure in the mid dle of the frame second from the bot tom. Zooming in fur ther on the top frame in the left cor ner, some what hid den from the main scene, we see a com i cal, dwarftype fig ure who seems to be hit ting a plant or a snake (Figure 10). How should this fig ure be interpreted? Could this be an In dian clown, known as a vidushaka? Is this, per haps, show ing the wellknown scene in which the clown mistakes a rope for a snake?41 Intriguingly, the much taller fig ure im me di ately to the left of the main male fig ure also possesses the tra di tional at tri butes of a vidushaka. As well as wear ing the sa cred thread to show that he is a Brah man, he is also limping, has bent legs, uses a curved staf (kutila), and has his hands tied with a cord; that com bi na tion of el e ments de mands that he be iden ti fied as a typ i cal vidushaka.42 The same fig ure also seems to ap pear in the mid dle scene of the panel (see Figure 9)—as the sec ond fig ure on the left—where he is part of the hunt. The dwarf who ap pears in two other scenes may also be as so ci ated with the vidushaka (in the right cor ner in both the sec ond from the top and the sec ond from the bot tom frames, both in Figure 3). Indeed, his dis in ter ested pose re minds one of his skepti cal at ti tude to ward roy als and their “stu pid” hunt ing hab its in the In dian the at ri cal tra di tion. See, for ex ample, this hi lar i ous ci ta tion from the sa tir i cal ac count of a royal hunt given by the vidushaka Mathavya:


as a sac ri fic er, one who had to per ma nently re new his king ship through re nun ciation—some thing hinted at ear lier in the dis cus sion of the wil der ness as the main set ting for such. Possessing no per ma nent le git i macy of his own, he depended for his au thor ity on the Brahman, who would per form the re quired rit u als. Yet the Brah man him self is also a prob lem atic fig ure be cause his rit u als would be valid only if he could also transcend the world through re nun ci a tion. Thus, we have the two main char ac ters within nu mer ous plays—the king and the Brah man—con stantly mov ing their backs to ward both each other and worldly pow er.

In the Sangam con text of Tamil South In dia, the perpetuum mo bile be tween the set tled world and the wil der ness—that is, be tween the im ma nent and the tran scen dent—is trans lat ed, in a lit er ary sense, into a ten sion be tween, on the one hand, the in ner world of emo tions and fan tasy (akam), and, on the oth er, the outer world of ac tion and kingly deeds (puram).47 However, which ever met a phor i cal reg is ter is used, this con stant, deeply tragic backandforth be tween two contrasting worlds also leaves much room for the ob ser va tions of the amused clown. With his com i cal com mon sense, he stands as a gate keeper on the bound ary of the two worlds, re peat edly reminding the main ac tor(s) of the ab sur dity of their ex is tence. In fact, the clown “dis solves, un rav els, and un der mines per ceived re al i ty.” His sim plest yet most pro found truth is that what ever is per ceived as real or com mon sense is, in fact, both lu di crous and false. The over all re sult is that the king moves back and forth be tween the two phases of the royal par a digm, which are symbol i cally represented as the trag ic and the com ic modes of king ship. For Shulman, South In dian king ship is sym bol i cally situated at the in ter sec tion of or der and nec es sary dis or der, and it is the lat ter di men sion—“the wil der ness of comic cha os”—that il lu mi na tes the king’s ca reer from with in.48

But how real is all this? Is this not a fartooliterary, highly struc tur al ist per spec tive on In dian king ship? Importantly, some In dol o gists have questioned the ex is tence of the vidushaka in real life; for Shulman, for ex am ple, it is ex tremely doubt ful. Thus he elab o rates on the fig ure of the court jester in Tamil and Tel ugu folk tales, and re fers to an other fic tive fig ure, called Tenali Rama (or Tenali Ramalingam),49 who is pri marily as so ci ated with Krishnadevaraya (1509–1529), the greatest of Vijayanagara kings, but is also iden ti fied as the court jester of Venkata II. According to the Span ish

Je suit his to rian Henry He ras, Tenali Rama be came a Vaish na va, to please his pa tron, and changed his name to Tenali Ramakrishna. He was thor oughly disliked by the afore men tioned or tho dox Tatacharya be cause he out wit ted the lat ter through play and mock ery.

According to one an ec dote, Tatacharya used to visit a cow stall early ev ery morn ing, blindfolded, and take hold of a cow’s tail and un cover his eyes in or der to see the an i mal’s ex cre ment. This mer i to ri ous habit was interrupted when Tenali Ra ma’s na ked body replaced the cow, enraging Tatacharya, who complained to the king. The king sen tenced Tenali Rama to death by having him bur ied, with only his head out of the ground, which was then to be tram pled on by some el e phants. After the burial but be fore the tram pling, Tenali Ram was able to call to a humpedbacked wash er man, and falsely told him that he, too, suf ered from hav ing a hump but that a sage had told him that he could get rid of it by bury ing him self in such a man ner. Eager to see the re sult, the wash er man freed the jester and saw, to his ut ter amaze ment, that, in deed, Tenali Ram had been cured. The wash er man asked Tenali Rama to have him sim i larly bur ied in the soil. Sometime lat er, the king was in formed that the jester had been tram pled by the el ephants. When Tenali Rama appeared be fore the king, he told him that a god had resurrected him. Duly impressed, the king prom ised to for give the first hun dred crimes that Tenali Ram might com mit in the fu ture.50

Although the comic role of Tenali Rama com pares well with the vidushaka of In dian the ater, the for mer is defi nitely more pow er ful than the lat ter. In the folktale the king can not sur vive with out the jest er, who be comes the cen tral ac tor and normally tri umphs over the king. The jester or ches trates the ac tion with his comic in ge nu i ty, laughs at the king and, equally im portant, at the Brah man as well. Something quite sim i lar is dem on strated in the per son of Birbal, the fa mous clown at Akbar’s Mu ghal court, whose wit attracted the an ger of or tho dox Mus lim ju rists.51 What makes Birbal dif er ent from Tenali Ra ma, how ev er, is that we know he re ally existed.

Apart from the Mu ghal par al lel, the iconic In dian clown is clearly rem i nis cent of the court jest ers of Renaissance Eu ro pean the ater, who con stantly questioned re al ity on stage. Here, too, they act as gate keeper fig ures for the au di ence, explaining what is hap pen ing on the stage (Figure 11). In the fas ci nat ing global compar a tive study of the clown by Be atrice Otto, Fools Are Everywhere, we see the En glish court jester quite eas ily


u a tion ap proaches the mod ern Western one in which the stage jester re mains a no ta ble phe nom e non but his coun ter part at the real court has disappeared.54

Reading the Middle Panel through In dian Theater: Bhavana-purushottamaAd fontes

What we are looking at in the middle panel of the Brooklyn kalamkari (see Figure 3) is in deed very much a wil der ness of comic cha os. In ad di tion to its set ting, this panel has a dy namic nar ra tive mode that seems to dis tin guish it from the other six, which are more stat ic. Nevertheless, it may also be viewed as a court scene. And in view of his tiger crown, could it be Shiva sit ting on Mount Kailas at the top of the panel? Yet the presence of the vidushaka makes this un likely and forces us to look in stead for a more suit able the ater set ting. In so do ing, we should take into ac count the view er’s fa miliar ity with the ep i sode be ing depicted; its im por tance lies not in tell ing a story but in evok ing the view er’s re call and reex pe ri ence of it, which should oc cur in the prop er, em pathic mood (rasa).55

This im me di ately raises a prob lem. Can one re ally ex pect a twen tyfirstcen tury Dutch his to rian to bridge the huge cul tural gap be tween ear lymod ern In dian the ater and his own world? Was it not Johan

trans muted into a stage ac tor who serves as a bridge be tween the char ac ters in the play and the au di ence. He was part of the play and of ten had a cen tral role in it, but he was also de tached, and his fre quent asides could make it seem that he was aware of the pres ence of an au di ence, un like any of the other char ac ters. This, for Otto, is ex actly what court jest ers did in real life—they could be at the cen ter of the ac tion, and then suddenly stand out side it and make dis pas sion ate ob serva tions. The jest ers at both the the ater and the royal court were ad ept at si mul ta neously be ing in volved and de tached, liv ing at the very heart of the ac tion while remaining, in a sym bolic sense, pe riph er al. In the words of Otto, the court jester be came “the harbin ger of on go ing re new al.”52 Such a com ment could al most have had come di rectly from the In dian con text as de scribed by Shulman.53

As far as the the ater is concerned, such global paral lels make sense. However, when deal ing with the real life of the clown, the In dic courts ap pear to have been unique. Not only in Europe, but in China, too, stage and court jest ers existed side by side. In England, the stage jester had a ca reer as brief as it was glo ri ous. After the midsev en teenth cen tury there is lit tle sign of him; the real En glish court jester had disappeared over a cen tury ear lier (al though he has reappeared in modern Western dra ma). Hence, if cor rect, the In dian sit

Figure 11. Shah Jahan and his four sons by Willem Schellinks (1623–1678), Amsterdam, ca 1668. Oil on canvas, 69 × 87 cm. Musée Guimet, Musée national des Arts asiatique, Paris, MA1909:J3676. Source: © RMN-Grand Palais (MNAAG, Paris) / Thierry Ollivier. The court jester is in the middle of the scene, just in front of the stage.


Huizinga who, even though he wrote his dis ser ta tion on the vidushaka, de cided that he lacked the in tuition—or the “his tor i cal sen sa tion,” as he called it—to be able to con tinue his In dian stud ies?56 What makes the is sue even more com pli cated is the fact that we are deal ing with hun dreds of plays, most of which have disappeared or, if still ex tant, are only in man u script form, un translated and hid den away in the most ob scure places.

However, some times one has to be lucky, as is the case here, thanks to the pioneering work of Da vid Shulman on the South In dian the ater tra di tions. Taking all the in gre di ents discussed above—Tontai ar ea, for est, clown, king, hunt ing, and goddesses—as points of de par ture, one ar rives at a piece that could be a very good can di date: the Bhavana-purushottama, an al le gori cal play in San skrit by one Ratnakheta Shrinivasa Dikshita.57 Hence I will add an other pos si ble in ter pre tation of the Brooklyn kalamkari by inscribing this play into its vi sual scenes, in par tic u lar those of the middle panel, in the hope that this will serve as an in ter pre tative ex er cise to dem on strate the im por tance of tak ing an emic per spec tive on In dian vi sual cul ture, one that se ri ously takes into ac count the in tel lec tual mi lieu of a cer tain time and place. I am very much aware that such can suc ceed only on the ba sis of deep phil o log i cal anal y sis, and my in ter pre ta tion has been pos si ble only thanks to the phil o log i cal spade work of Da vid Shulman and some of his col leagues.

The tem po ral and spa tial co or di na tes of the proposed Bhavana-purushottama seem to fit. The au thor was born in Tuppul (near Kancipuram) and served as a court poet of Surappa Nayaka, the midsix teenthcen tury ruler of Senji.58 As well as be ing an im por tant Advaita phi los o pher, Ratnakheta Shrinivasa Dikshita is also known for hav ing had two fa mous sons (Rajachudamani Dikshita and Ardhanarishvara Dikshita) and a soninlaw who was even more fa mous—the great Appayya Dikshita, discussed above. Apart from be ing fol low ers of the Advaita school of Ve danta philos o phy, these Shaiva Brah mans can also be as so ciated with the Samaya branch of Shrividya, the Tantric cult men tioned above, which fo cused on de vo tion through men tal vi su al i za tion.59 The play wright Ratnakheta was also called Pratidinaprabandhakarta, mean ing “au thor of a book a day,” which suggests that Bhavana-purushottama is just one of many works he com posed. In fact, we know that he wrote eigh teen dra mas and sixty ep ics, as well as sev eral works on rhet o ric and a large num ber of com men tar ies. The Bhavana-purushottama could cer tainly fit the scenes

in the kalamkari. The fol low ing ex plor ative ex er cise builds on Shulman’s ex ten sive sum mary of the story as well as my own imag i na tion.

Imagination

Although the main char ac ter is a he roic prince called Vish nuPurushottama (lit. “Best of All Males”; here after VP), a dis guise for Vish nu, the play ac tu ally cen ters on the im por tance of imag i na tion, represented by the in vis i ble Princess Bhavana (lit. “Imagination”), the daugh ter of King Jivadeva (“King Lord of Life”) of Navadvarapura (“The Town of Nine Gates”). Although VP and Bhavana can not see each oth er, through the me di a tion of a wan der ing as cetic woman—one Yogavidya (“Knowledge of Yoga”)—they fall in love. Bhavana sees VP in a por trait pro duced by Yogavidya, who also has sent a mes sen ger—Hamsa, a goose—to VP to tell him about Bhavana’s vir tues.60 Most of the sub se quent ac tion in the play deals with VP’s quest to find the in vis i ble Bhavana. VP and his followers—both male and fe male—move into the wil der ness, seek ing not only Bhavana but also a deer called Dharma (“Order”) and a doe called Kamana (“Desire”). All of this has been planned out by Yogavidya, who then sends her dis ci ple Sattvashuddha (“Purified by Truth”) to en ter the deer and thereby lead the royal party to the shrine of the god dess Tulasi on Anjana Mountain (which is, in fact, near the tem ple of Venkateshwara at Tirumala) to meet Bhavana. Arriving there, VP takes the form of a hu man hero while his ea gle (Vainateya) is turned into a vidushaka. Later in the sto ry, the comic shapeshifting is con tin ued when the vidu-shaka changes into a mon key; at the end of the first act, this same vidushaka mis takes a dark TamalaSala tree for a ghost and starts cry ing out of fear.

VP fi nally man ages to see Bhavana through her re flec tion in a glossy moon stone. Mistaking the im age for the real thing, he finds him self in “a tan ta liz ing house of mir rors,” where he re peat edly and des per ately tries to em brace her. Suddenly, though, when he is distracted and starts to dream of an other wom an, Bhavana be comes en vi ous and, full of dis tress, de cides that she wants to re nounce the world. At that very mo ment, VP (“the Lord of All the Worlds, fourarmed Ocean of Compassion, with the kaustubha jewel on your breast”) re veals his true self (Vish nu). The two rec og nize each other and de cide to get mar ried, al though this can only hap pen af ter a long pro cess of test ing—a svayamvara or bride groomchoice cer e mo ny—in which VP has to


prove his met tle at the court of Bhavana’s fa ther. There VP is chal lenged by a large num ber of oth er, high lycom pet i tive can di dates from faroff places. Shulman men tions Cheras, Cholas, Pandyas, Huns, and peo ple from Gandhara. In the fifth and fi nal act, Bhavana fails to rec og nize VP among the suit able can di dates. Luckily, VP is saved by the god dess Tulasi, who throws her gar land around his neck, af ter which he emerges as the vic tor.

The story pro vi des a won der ful il lus tra tion of the key im por tance of Bhavana—that is, how imag i na tion gives ac cess to a world that is be yond the real and which is, as Shulman puts it, “more than re al.” Looking at the play, we are confronted with a re flec tion on the sheer power of imag i na tion in deciphering the var i ous lay ers of ex is tence in or der to fa cil i tate aware ness of the very highest level of be ing. Indeed, this ob ses sion with imag ina tion as a tool to un der stand the real links up quite well with the on to log i cal de bates that oc curred at the Nayaka courts men tioned above. Some of its heated spirit is reflected in the svayamvara com pe ti tion, in which var i ous “her e tics” (pashanda) com peted for Bhavana’s hand, only to be beaten by the one and only Vish nu.

To what ex tent can this par tic u lar story be seen in our kalamkari? The key re mains the vidushaka, be cause he in di cates dra ma. As al ready men tioned, this play has the right tem po ral and spa tial co or di na tes—al though, of course, for a piece of the atre this is not es sen tial for our test. The hunt ing scenes are most clearly rem i niscent of the events in the play, al though I do not think they de pict real events but rather are meant sim ply to pro vide the proper mood or at mo sphere (rasa) for the view erscumwor ship pers.

As men tioned, the ac tion in the hunt ing scenes con trasts with the more static scenes, in the top and sec ondfromthebot tom scenes, which seem to be more in for ma tive about the ac tual nar ra tive. If we base our anal y sis on the plot of Bhavana-purushottama, the lady at the cen ter of the lower scene (Figure 12) would rep re sent the god dess Tulasi, the other ma jor fe male char ac ter, who sits on a hilly abode wel com ing the royal par ty. If we look at the lower right cor ner of the scene, there is even room for our vidushaka who—according to the play—is run ning into the bushes, where a woman was hid den to play the vi na for the god dess.

Taking the panel as a whole, the se quence of the play is far from straight for ward. The var i ous hunt ing scenes sur round the main scene in which the royal party meets Tulasi. Each horizontal frame, though, appears to have its own linear narrative. The main char ac ters are not re peated as they are in a con tin u ous nar ra tion, one com mon mode of In dian vi sual nar ration.61 Only at the very top of the panel (see Figure 14) do we see a trail erlike in tro duc tion to the sto ry, with two dif er ent kinds of vidushakas: one small and fat, the other clumsy and tall (see Figure 10). As well as these, who seem like a South In dian ver sion of Laurel and Hardy, there are two male fig ures at the main protag o nist’s left and right who are dif cult to pin down. At his im me di ate right, though, is an ashgray (perhaps fe male) fig ure who looks like an as cetic (Figure 13). In his/her left arm is a bird that very much looks like a goose. If that is cor rect, we are al most cer tainly deal ing with Yogavidya, the wan der ing as cetic wom an, the mas ter mind of the sto ry, who sent VP her goose

Figure 12. Detail from the middle panel of the Brooklyn kalamkari illustrated in Figure 1, second frame from the bottom, showing a female figure sitting on a hill receiving guests. (Goddess Tulasi receiving the royal party of V-P with a vidushaka in the lower right corner?)


to tell him about the won der ful Bhavana. Being on this track al ready, no body should doubt that the cen tral figure who sits at the top of the panel is VP, and that the top frame—by us ing a syn op tic mode of narra tion—serves to in tro duce the nar ra tive by show ing some of the key fig ures and the main events in or der to make it iden ti fi able for the au di ence. The middle panel, then, is not about the whole play, but only the first act.

However, what about Bhavana her self? Where is she, if the two main la dies in the tab leau are the goddess Tulasi and Yogavidya? I sug gest that we sim ply fol low the very mean ing of her name, as well as the gist of the play, and as sume that she re mains un seen, and must be imag ined by an au di ence of dev o tees who can bring her to life only through con tem pla tion. It is very pos si ble that the kalamkari was used as a de vo tional wall paint ing in a tem ple or pal ace, or per haps served

as a mo bile scroll to il lus trate the play while it went on tour. There are plenty of ex am ples of such a prac tice from all over the sub con ti nent.62

If all of this is es sen tially cor rect, how do the other six pan els of the kalamkari re late to the Bhavana- purushottama? In ad di tion to the gen eral ob ser va tion that the wil der ness cre ates co he sion, there are two further pos si bil i ties. One is that, be cause the cen tral panel cov ers only the first act, the other six could be used as the back ground for tell ing the stories of the var i ous com pet i tors who trav eled across the known world in hopes of mar ry ing Bhavana. The six pan els may rep resent countries in that world by anach ro nis ti cally trans pos ing their con tem po ra ne ous im age to the past—some thing not at all un usual in In di an, nor in me di e val Eu ro pe an, vi sual cul ture. Alternatively, we could in terpret the kalamkari phil o soph i cal ly, tak ing up the playwright’s mo nist view point to sug gest that it con veys the idea that imag i na tion—as represented in the Bhavana-purushottama—en ables us to bring unity to a highly di verse world, one that keeps chang ing and expanding. From that per spec tive, the six courts, re al is tic as they are, pro vide a suit able back drop to tell the story of imag i nation. Only with the help of Bhavana can we de tect a unity that is both be yond re al ity and “more real than re al i ty.”

Conclusion

What I have attempted to do in this es say is bring to gether his tory and In dol ogy in or der to help un derstand the Brooklyn kalamkari. The kalamkari itself seems to con vey the con tinu ing gap be tween these

Figure 13. Detail from the top frame of the middle panel of the Brooklyn kalamkari illustrated in Figure 1, showing an ascetic gray-blue figure with a goose (Yoga-vidya and Hamsa?).

Figure 14. Detail from the middle panel of the Brooklyn kalamkari illustrated in Figure 1, first frame from the top, showing a trailer-like introduction to the Bhavanapurushottama.


two dis ci plines: the six court pan els ap pear to be ethno graph i cally ac cu rate—per haps even too ac cu rate, the re sult of their em blem atic na ture—and de pict the royal courts in re al is tic terms; the mid dle panel builds upon the rich imag i na tion of In dia’s pro lific lit er ary tra di tion. As such, it is clear that the his tor i cal con text—that of Chetti and Nayaka cos mo pol i tan ism—does much to re veal the sources that in formed the pro duction of this piece, al though this can tell only part of the sto ry. The world of South In dian the ater tells the oth er, as ar gued above. In my in ter pre ta tion of the middle panel we see some key scenes of the first act of the Sanskrit play Bhavana-purushottama, which were meant to fa cil i tate the view ers’ de vo tion of Vishnu through imagi na tion. One of the chal lenges ahead is to gain a bet ter un der stand ing of the re la tion ship be tween the side panels and the one in the mid dle. What can we make of the re la tion ship be tween imag i na tion and the var i ous layers of the real world? What can the his to rian learn from the fact that the vidushaka remained an im por tant figure in the the ater but ap par ently did not ex ist in the real world of the Nayaka courts? As with the vidushaka, the split king of the In dian Ve das ap pears to have lived on in In dian fic tion, whereas the real kings of sev en teenthcen tury South In dia seem to have followed a very dif erent path. What caused this per sis tence of vidushaka and king in the the ater, and how long did this comic duo continue to be of im por tance in the his tor i cal mi lieu? These are ques tions that still need to be re solved.

As far as the timeframe of the kalamkari is concerned, we have al ready high lighted the re mark able par al lel in the ways that the royal courts of Akbar, Ibrahim Adil Shah II, and Venkata II attempted to deal with the rap idly chang ing times. All three sought to at tract and ex ploit new knowl edge to con struct cos mog raphies that fit ted the in clu sive and uni ver sal na ture of their em pires. The “late and long” six teenth cen tury (1550–1650) was an age of largescale ex plo ra tion dur

ing which enor mous quan ti ties of new in for ma tion about both cur rent and an cient civ i li za tions started to flood into the knowl edge sys tems of In dia as well as many other parts of the world. Although not the first, this was un ques tion ably the most in ten sive age of glob al iza tion the world had ever ex pe ri enced, and it cre ated an al most uni ver sal sense of epis te mo logi cal and on to log i cal un cer tain ty, and the in tel lec tual and cul tural di men sions of this pe riod are underexplored. The fact that glob al iza tion af ected not only the West but the world at large is of ten ig nored, yet in re gions with deep scrip tural tra di tions, such as China, In dia, and West Asia, its cul tural ef ects are visi ble through anal y sis of the in creased pro duc tion of texts and im ages at var i ous royal courts, some thing that was in sti gated by rul ers looking for new rationalizations for their rule. Philosophical mo nism around 1600—whether in the form of Advaita or one of the many branches of Neo pla to nism—ap pears to have been a very at trac tive op tion in this regard. This also trig gered a renewed fas ci na tion with the re la tion ship be tween the imag i na tion/phantasia and the re al.63 While a few spe cial ists have started to per ceive some thing of a world wide Renaissance, the dom i nant im pres sion re mains that the West not only ini ti ated this cul tural glob al iza tion but also ex clu sively ex pe rienced it. As this es say shows, that is far from true.

JOS GOMMANS is pro fes sor of co lo nial and global his tory

at Leiden University in the Netherlands. His pub li ca tions

in clude The In dian Frontier: Horse and Warband in the

Making of Em pires (London: Routledge, 2018), The Unseen

World: The Netherlands and In dia from 1550 (Amsterdam:

Rijksmuseum/Nijmegen: VanTilt, 2018) and, with Piet Emmer,

The Dutch Overseas Em pire, 1600–1800 (Cambridge University

Press, forth com ing). He is cur rently writ ing about Neo pla to nism

in the mak ing of Renaissance king ship in Europe and the

Is lamic world. [[email protected]]

AcknowledgmentsThis es say is based on a pre sen ta tion made at the in ter na tional sem i nar “Cosmopolitan Kalamkaris: Crafting Connections through SeventeenthCentury Figural Fabrics” at the National Museum Institute, New Delhi, on 30–31 Oc to ber 2018, or ga nized by Gerda and Dorien Theuns. I am most grateful for the dis cus sions with them as well as various other con trib u tors to this seminar, and in par tic u lar Lennart Bes, Oman Eappen; and, back home, with Herman Tieken and the COGLO community of PhD students, in

par tic u lar Reza Husaini, Tristan Mostert, Johannes Müller, and Neilabh Sinha. The es say also profited from con ver sations with colleagues, in par ticular with JoanPau Rubiés, at the “Sacred Kingship in World History: Between Immanence and Transcendence” con fer ence held at Brasenose College in Oxford on 25–26 May 2019, or ga nized by Alan Strathern and Azfar Moin. The comments of two anonymous re view ers mark edly im proved the pre sen ta tion of the ar gument. I am also in debted to Petra Smulders of the Royal

Dutch Embassy for de ci sively fa cilitat ing my re search in New Delhi, and to Crispin Branfoot for kindly pro vid ing me with a pho to graph of Venkata’s stat ue. Finally, my re search owes a great deal to Da vid Shulman, with whom I shared my ini tial ex cite ment but who may or may not be convinced by its re sults.

Notes1. The iconographical description of the

kalamkari that follows is based on Irwin, “Golkonda Cotton Paintings”; Gwatkin,


“Brooklyn Museum Hanging”; and Morris, “Enter the Royal Encampment.”

2. Note that the Brooklyn Museum’s accession numbers of the panels do not fit their sequence. My numbers correspond to the sequence of the panels from left to right.

3. Earlyseventeenthcentury Dutch sources mention the annual arrival in Pulicat of ships owned by the Ayutthaya rulers Song Tham and Prasat Thong. Subrahmanyam, Political Economy of Commerce, 307.

4. See Groesen, Representations of the Overseas World. See also the early comments by Culin in “Story of the Painted Curtain.”

5. Gopala Rao, Lepakshi, Plate V and p. 84.

6. More generally, Nayaka refers to the military elites under the Vijayanagara Empire who carved out their own little kingdoms in South India after the sixteenthcentury decline of that empire. Although technically a member of the last Vijayanagara dynasty, the Aravidu, the court of Venkata II fits the characterization of the seventeenthcentury Nayaka courts.

7. Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce.

8. Subrahmanyam, Political Economy of Commerce; Mukund, Trading World of the Tamil Merchant.

9. For the concept of “portfoliocapitalist,” see Bayly and Subrahmanyam, “Portfolio Capitalists.”

10. Subrahmanyam, Political Economy of Commerce, 298–314.

11. Shulman and Subrahmanyam, “The Men Who Would Be King?”; and Narayana Rao et al., Symbols of Substance, 242–64.

12. Narayana Rao et al., Symbols of Substance.

13. Narayana Rao, Text and Tradition in South Asia, 63.

14. For a discussion of the Hocartian view of caste and kingship, see Quigley, “Kings and Priests.”

15. Narayana Rao et al., Symbols of Substance, 67, 82, 168. Two landmark exhibitions in 2015—one in New Delhi and one in New York—have made it increasingly clear that this new focus on sensual enjoyment extended at least as far as the Deccan courts. See Najat Haidar and Sardar, Sultans of Deccan India 1500–1700; and Singh, Scent upon a Southern Breeze.

16. A basic historical outline can be found in the still very useful book by Heras, Aravidu Dynasty of Vijayanagara.

17. Bes, “Heirs of Vijayanagara.”18. Heras, Aravidu Dynasty of

Vijayanagara, 510.19. The term conquest of reality

derives from E. H. Gombrich (see

Kaufmann, Mastery of Nature, 3). Comparisons with the courts of the unruly Holy Roman Empire are the most striking; see, e.g., Evans, Rudolf II and His World; Hammerstein and Walther, Späthumanismus; and Mulsow, Spätrenaissance-Philosophie in Deutschland.

20. Rubiés, “Jesuit Discovery of Hinduism.”

21. Minkowski, “Advaita Vedānta in Early Modern History.”

22. It would go beyond the iconological objective of this article to elaborate on the various Indian philosophical traditions on monism, but basically in monism it is believed that world and souls are ultimately illusory manifestations of Brahman. This is supposed to represent the thought of Advaita Vedanta going back to Shankara (ca. 800 ce). Within the monist tradition, though, one can make a distinction between Shankara’s unqualified nondualism (in which the absolute is the core identity of everything that exists, including the souls, the world, and its products) and qualified nondualism (in which Brahman or Shiva is the fundamental reality yet is characterized by [real] multiplicity and diferentiation). Here I am following the comments of Duquette in his “Is Śivādvaita Vedānta a Saiddhāntika School?,” 37.

23. Brooks, “Encountering the Hindu ‘Other,’ ” 412.

24. Fisher, Hindu Pluralism. To stress the distinction between the two diferent kinds of monism, Allen has labeled the earlymodern variety “Greater Advaita Vedanta”; see Allen, “Greater Advaita Vedānta.”

25. See the contributions to the special issue of the Journal of Indian Philosophy (2014) that was devoted to Appayya Dikshita: Minkowski, “Apūrvaṃ Pāṇḍityam”; Bronner, “Renaissance Man in Memory”; and Rao, “Vaiṣṇava Writings of a Śaiva Intellectual.” In the issue’s introduction, Minkowski raises the peculiar question of whether it is proper for Indologists to write biographies.

26. Heras, Aravidu Dynasty, 517–54.27. Minkowski, “Advaita Vedānta in

Early Modern History,” 85–86, which is partly based on Gode, “Bernier and Kavīndrācārya Sarasvatī.” For the historical context of the Mughals’ interest in Sanskrit philosophy, see Truschke, Culture of Encounters.

28. App, Cult of Emptiness.29. For Tatacharya, see Heras, Aravidu

Dynasty, 304–6, 519, 552; Rubiés, “Jesuit Discovery,” 226; Rao, “Vaiṣṇava Writings of a Śaiva Intellectual,” 46–47.

30. Heras, Aravidu Dynasty, 486–93; Rubiés, “Jesuit Discovery,” 219–20.

31. For this divine atmosphere at the court, see Narayana Rao et al., Symbols of Substance, 164, 185, 187.

32. Ramaswami and Singh, “Nauras: The Many Arts of the Deccan.”

33. Kapil and Bhatnagar, “Portuguese Contributions to Indian Botany.”

34. Najat Haidar and Sardar, Sultans of Deccan, 214–16.

35. For the meaning and early modern context of this pansemiotic view, see Westerhof, “World of Signs.” See also the related idea of an “emblematic worldview” as proposed by Ashworth, “Emblematic Worldview.” Both derive their inspiration from Foucault, Les mots et les choses. Of course, the global dimension of such a worldview is merely suggested here and awaits some further scrutiny.

36. See Heesterman, “Warrior, Peasant and Brahmin.”

37. Handelman et al., “Growing a Kingdom.”

38. Ibid., 117–18.39. Ibid., 116.40. However, this was more in arid

north India than the south; see Gommans, Mughal Warfare.

41. Doniger O’Flaherty provides numerous examples in her Dreams, Illusions and Other Realities, index, s.v. “ropesnake.”

42. Zin, “One Who Was Against the Pavvajjā.”

43. Singh, Political Violence in Ancient India, 447.

44. Huizinga, “De Vidûshaka in het Indisch Tooneel,” 1:60: “kleinzieligheid, onhandigheid en smul en gemakzucht.”

45. Shulman, King and the Clown.46. For Heesterman, see his Inner

Conflict of Tradition.47. See, e.g., Cutler, “Four Spatial

Realms in Tirukkōvaiyār.”48. Shulman, King and the Clown, 292.49. Ibid., 180–200.50. Heras, Aravidu Dynasty of

Vijayanagara, 520, based on the folkstories collected by the Indian anthropologist Subramiah Pantulu.

51. Naim, “Popular Jokes and Political History.”

52. Otto, Fools Are Everywhere, 187–230.

53. Interestingly, as in Indian theater, the jesters in Javanese shadow puppet (wayang) also link the unseen and seen worlds. While the divine and nobility figures speak Old Javanese, which only the puppeteers and a certain class of people understand, the jesters speak the language of the ordinary people, and they interpret what those figures communicate for the audience. In Indian theater, too, the clown is mostly speaking in Prakrit, a stylish vernacular that was meant to contrast with


the more civilized Sanskrit (from which it derived). I am grateful to one of the external referees for drawing this parallel. See also the classic study on this by Becker from 1979, “TextBuilding.”

54. For these global observations, see Otto, Fools Are Everywhere, passim.

55. For this, see Huizinga, “De Vidûshaka,” in Verzamelde werken, 1:88f.

56. See Huizinga, “Mijn weg tot de historie” (My road to history), in Verzamelde werken, 1:32. Huizinga’s dissertation, “De Vidûshaka in het Indisch Tooneel” (The Vidushaka in the Indian theater) was defended at the University of Groningen in 1897, and published by P. Noordhof.

57. This entire section is based on Shulman, More than Real, 232–65.

58. At the time of Venkata’s reign, Senji was ruled by one Krishnappa Nayaka, who followed his predecessor in his zeal for Vaishnavism; see Srinivasachari, History of Gingee, 120f.

59. Fisher, “ ‘Just like Kālidāsa.’ ”60. This falling in love via a picture that

raises the lovers’ imagination and refers to the deeper issue about what is real is also a wellknown trope in the IndoPersian literature of that time (and earlier); see Pellò, “Portraits in the Mirror.”

61. For these narrative modes in Indian painting, see Dehejia, “On Modes of Visual Narration.”

62. For a survey of South Asian mural painting, see Seastrand, “Praise, Politics, and Language.”

63. Interestingly, David Shulman comes close to drawing a parallel with Neoplatonism, stating, “Neoplatonic notions of the imagination have almost an Indian flavor and invite systematic comparison” (Shulman, More than Real, 275).

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Documents

Cosmopolitanism and Imagination in Nayaka South India