CONCEPTUALIZING THE ‘ARTIST’ -I (interpolating the premodern)

This article was written in 2004 as the concluding chapter of my Masters dissertation, and a version of this was published in the Nandan Magazine - Shantiniketan-  2005. I bring it here as the first part of a two part essay on Conceptualizing the artist) 

“A good artist is one who reworks tradition and explores new territories.”

                    Lulu Singhania.

A small article may not be the best medium through which to challenge a maxim. Thankfully I am not even trying to be audacious. However, well settled maxims can be static theories waiting to be thrown into chaos in order to re ascertain their validity, specially in contexts out side the value systems where they originate from.

A hundred years have passed since a certain class of object from Indian antiquity got recognition as objects of art (if one takes E.B Havell’s Ideals of Indian Art –1905) as a landmark). However, the frames of the window and its location so often determine what we see. As a result of this, what objects constitute Indian Art, and what are the criteria for determining a great sculptor, architect or painter determined from view points rooted in frameworks rooted in Euro- American modernist locations. The great Indian middle class is its close and influential ally. A substantial part of this influence comes from our dominance over research institutions and universities. This article on one hand tries to chop off the branch the branch that supports me, and a plea to render such huge supporting branches obsolete.

 From early days of Indian art history, scholars have been looking at the roles of artists’ of pre- modern India (or trying to determine the roles). Works on brahmanical royal monuments have focused mainly on the royalty-religion combine (in most cases the focus has been on the ‘intrinsic development of style) in attempts to conceptualize and analyze stylistic changes in brahmanical royal monuments.

I propose to introduce ‘innovation’ as a category………… defining  ‘innovation’ as changes arrived at to meet the changes in the value system in which art is produced in a particular society. These changes may or may not be lead to anti hegemonic expressions .I this article I would like to briefly theorise on the role of silpins in the context of medieval Bramhanical royal monuments. This work is an attempt to dwell upon the complexity of bringing in the agency of the Sthapati (Architect^*), Vardhiki(Sculptor) and the Takshaka(wood carver/ carpenter) in formulating the semiotic shifts in the royal temples.

 Though hegemony as a concept is considered to rest as much as in the ‘bottom’ as in the ‘top’ creating a dynamic interrelationship. In some villages in not very far from New Delhi people who have been voting on a regular basis, since the last thirty years, still think that Indira Gandhi is the Prime Minister. This view comfortably exists, even though in the context of the state not only is Indira Gandhi dead, the Congress-I was out of power for nearly a decade and there has been a tremendous shift in governmental policies, electoral equations and a new hegemonic order is struggling to be instated.

This is not an isolated phenomenon (though our urban educated sensibilities tend to urge us to dismiss it and consider the debate on American foreign policies). From Rajpath to remote interior villages, within a politically demarcated boundary across gender, class, caste, sexuality, ‘we are all subjects of the Indian State’. However, some have highly prized brown sugar delivered at their doorstep by the police with a quality assurance, whereas some have to flee at the very sight of the police just because they are born into the ‘denotified tribes’.

 It is quite possible to imagine that during a period of drought, a person from the village (which by and large still thinks that Indira Gandhi is the Prime Minister) will go to the city (lets assume Delhi), take up a job as a construction worker and work on the façade of India’s next parliament building. He returns home and still can’t enter the village moneylender’s house, crouches outside the choukhat his knees carrying the burden of his untouchability. Karan Grover wins the ‘Bharat Ratna’ for this architectural wonder. As a discipline how do we theorize it? At least hundred years from now, if a member of this discipline analyzes the parliament and finds the name of the carvers eulogized in the foundation inscriptions; he/she will not get a textual reference calling/assigning the carver/ stone mason as an untouchable.

The key to understand the agency of the Sthapatis and Shilpins in the construction of cultural forms, where innovation can be located as organized shifts in semantic value which embody and perpetuate the changing mechanisms of hegemony maintenance, is to develop an understanding about the location of the Shilpin guilds/workshops within the hegemony. I choose to collapse the Sthapati and the Takshaka primarily because I don’t have the methodological tools to analyze their agencies at a differentiated level. Moreover the kind of alienation I conjured (when I indulged in a bit of story telling about the hypothetical villager from a real village) was more polemical. Though the relationship of the peripheries with the center was equally (if not more) vast, the extent of ‘alienation of labour’ represented, has been definitely exaggerated if viewed in the pre-modern context.

The Varaha panel at the Udaigiri Hills , coming from the age of Bramhanical revivalism (5th Century A.D)

Another potent way of locating the agency of the Shilpin is provided by R.N. Misra in his under recognized ‘against the grain’ reading of the Udaygiri Varaha panel.[1] Reading the first recognized neo-Brahmanical articulation of political hegemony through plastic art, Misra argues for a political pun. The accepted art historical reading of the panel is in terms of a political allegory celebrating Chandragupta II’s heroic subjugation of the Sakas (fig:33). Citing the figures of Ganga and Yamuna, Misra proposes that the Shilpin purposefully locates Madhyadesha in eastern Malwa. The Shilpin suggests the shaky control of a vulnerable king, who was forced to leave his capital and extensively camp over a newly conquered territory for the sake of political hegemony.

Like in most cases both the methods (I can think of) will probably work best if used together. If one follows Guha’s model of dominance and subordination, then (by the available historical material) the Shilpin community by large would have to be located as the subordinated (in the context of the royalty and the Brahmanas). Further by his model collaboration and resistance together would affect the agency of the artist (though in the diagrammatic representation of the model Guha appears to structurally polarize the two).[2] Again I back out, using both the approaches together requires a methodological finesse, I am not capable of at this stage. Instead, I will try to locate the Shilpins within the hegemony, and explore their social mobility.

Any engagement with the pre-modern Sthapati-Shilpins has to negotiate through the questions regarding anonymity and the seminal contributions by R.N. Misra.[3] Important contributions by Misra, Bolon, Settar have gone a long way in lifting this veil of anonymity. If the alleged anonymity of pre-modern south Asian practitioners of Shilpa bothers us so much because we are hunting for Renaissance style masters, being ashamed that south Asian pre-modern history does not give enough recognition to the ‘individual artist’ which we have hegemonized as natural to a ‘high Civilization’, then I opt out of the quest. For me the inscriptional evidence naming or eulogizing artists is crucial in the context of an oral society where writing/inscribing was a highly contested terrain embodying and perpetuating contestations over knowledge.

The historical time, which this dissertation focuses on, is engaging for anyone interested in the location of Shilpa and its practitioners. Textual, inscriptional and material sources combine to give out completely confusing signals. The pre-Islamic medieval period witnessed a high increase in the number of sculpto-architectural projects undertaken under the expanding hegemonies of feudalism and neo-Brahmanism/proto-Hinduism. This period yields the greatest concentration of inscriptions mentioning Sthapati, Shilpins either by the patrons or by the practitioners themselves. It is in this period that all the major Shipashastric texts were authored. The spirit of the inscriptions and the texts contradict each other. While the inscriptional evidence clearly signals a growing notion of a ‘master’ and Sthapatis or Shilpins are sometimes mentioned (by the patrons or themselves) almost as ‘brand names’, the Shipashastras continue to follow the Dharmashastric practice of labeling the entire community as Shudras. Only when they took up an assignment of temple construction were they considered ritually pure.[4] (The villager working on the parliament facade had fallen down and broken his leg. This accident happened due to lapses in safety measures and he was given RS. 5000 as a compensation. A year later his brother killed his family and committed suicide due to repeated crop failure). I have already discussed in chapter-2 the kind of tight noosed dictations the Shipashastras preached.

 

The Mallikarjuna temple at Pattadakal built during the grand dynastic age of the Chalukyan Empire (7th Century A.D)

If one views the Virupaksha and Mallikarjuna inscriptions (eulogizing Gundacharya and Sarvasidhiacharya, conferring titles and giving a guild judicial autonomy)[5] against the spirit of the Shilpashastras then we clearly see a power struggle. This power struggle needs to be studied carefully. The monarchy, the Vedic Brahmanas, the Pujari Brahmanas, the Sthapatis were all parties and perpetuators of this conflict. Thus, we have Guha’s model being complicated, wherein dominance works in fragments allowing the subordinated to indulge in a shifting of collaboration and resistance for upward mobility of his social position. 

The department where I have received training in the discipline of art history (the Department of Art History, Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda), has in the recent years been giving a lot of attention to guilds and their movements in order to explain shifts in style. Though this is a liberating way of studying influences, at the same time we also need to theorize how does our understanding of ‘style’ and ‘guild’ work together. Are we to assume a model of a hierarchical authorial role joining the Sthapati and the Takshaka vertically? If so, is Gundacharya equivalent to Karan Grover? Unless we resolve the similarities and differences between Sthapatis and architects we shall never be able to equate the movement of styles with guilds, because such a notion inevitably attaches a signatorial value to style. Can we have stylistic differentiation of Lintas advertisements versus Clarion advertisements as we can differentiate Karan Grover against Louis Khan? However, we can have stylistic differentiation of Surf advertisements and Rin advertisements. This confusion is crucial to me when I attempt to locate style with guilds-patrons. However we will gain if we constantly keep in mind that neither ‘Karan Grover’ nor ‘Rin’ operate as free agents. They have their own subject locations, which limit and influence their actions.

In such a situation it is the notion of ‘value’, that we need to engage with. If one defines ‘value’ as ‘institutionalized’ social codes which are regarded as something that must be sustained (or sometimes contested), then the next step is to analyze the location of the notion of ‘authorship’ in the context of sculptural/architectural style in royal Brahmanical temple building. To be able to do that we also need to be able to imagine the ‘individual(s)’ in the time-space we are dealing with.

The Brihadeshwara temple and it's mighty dwarapalakas (Built during the zenith of the Chola empire - 9th Century A.D )

When the Chola court decreed to construct the Brihadeshwara, what kind of exchange must have taken place between the concerned agent of the court and the Sthapati?   . Did someone nearly pre fabricate the monument for the execution of the Sthapati? May be yes, may be no. If we take ‘yes’, then we have a model in which the Chola court would employ a temple planner who would be a hands off ‘visualizer’, and being close to the power center, would be a perfect articulator of hegemonic requirements of the center. Considering that the annual payment of the Sthapati was half of the amount received by the ‘assistant accountants’,[6] the ‘yes model’ seem useable. If we take ‘no’, then we could imagine that the Sthapati was close enough to the center to be able to imagine and articulate the hegemonic requirements of the center. In the context of the Chola time space it seems that the Shaivite Bhakti poet/singers occupied this space, may be not the Sthapati.[7]

Koranganatha Temple Srinivasanallur built during the early Chola period (8th Century A.D)

However the ‘no model’ may be more applicable to Virupaksha and Mallikarjuna. The court acknowledgement of the Acharya titles, the eulogizing, the heavy monetary rewards and the granting of jurisdictional freedom to the community (as a reward to the Acharya), definitely point to a much closer association with the court (than receiving half the salary of a temple clerk). The mention of the Sthapati in the Brihadeshwara inscriptions seem just for the sake of keeping administrative records, while the Virupaksha and Mallikarjuna inscriptions go much beyond records. Infact from the Chalukyan time space we have enough information to suggest that the value system allowed for notions of Sthapati/Shilpin authorship. Narsoab’s self-eulogizing inscription from Aihole and Baladeva’s from Mallikarjuna and Papanatha support this view.[8] There are no such evidences that comedown to us from the Chola time space (even though there is a greater density of epigraphical material).

The ‘no model’ is closer to the mainstream disciplinary notions about ‘authorship’; hence, I shall not elaborate on it. I am spending a little time over the ‘yes model’.

Before joining the discipline as a student, I used to work with a small advertising agency in Kolkata. After my small training period I was appointed as a ‘visualizer’. In those days (1994-95) only the big agencies had computers. We had a small studio where a very skilled gentleman would do a wide array of works. After meeting my client and working out a visual strategy with him/her I would come to the office and work out various basic layouts etc. I have a very bad hand-brain combination when it comes to writing, drawing etc. Eventually I would march up to the studio with a bunch of clumsy sketches in my hand and (try to) explain what I wanted. Communication was made easy by the visual culture we shared and a basic understanding of the market. However, when it came to slightly complex things like neon signboards a lot of my models had to be changed because of technical requirements. When it came to large commissions the technical feedback from the studio were more important. Technical feedbacks do not come without aesthetic suggestions. “Because of this, that is not viable, but if you want to retain the effect you might want to think on those lines”. Eventually what came out of the studio was ‘my design’. Our gentleman in the studio earned as much as our office clerk.

The dvarpalas of Brihadeshwara fall within the tradition of Chola dvarpalas yet have a monumentality that cannot be explained just by their size. Can we imagine that the Sthapati and his guild had to present a sample to the court for approval and make changes accordingly? Yes, we can imagine but I am not going to push for conclusions.

The archival material one engages with, often give multiple directional indicators …… almost as a message that no single interpretation should be privileged. The worth of the Sthapati’s salary and the casual administrative reference to him had allowed me to imagine a particular relationship with the activity at Brihadeshwara (a royal monument embodying and perpetuating a ‘new’ centralized mechanism of hegemony maintenance). However the temple clerk’s name is not mentioned in the inscriptions but the Sthapati’s is. Thus I need to admit that there is something beyond the ‘causal administrative’ in the reference to the Sthapati.           

          A monument like Brihadeshwara is not easy to construct. It is not just taking a monument like Koranganatha Swami or any previously built ‘middle Chola’ monument and enlarging it six to seven times. Complex weight bearing and structural articulation problems had to be negotiated.[9] A simple calculation can tell us that Brihadeshwara is about six times larger than Koranganatha Swami. However, can we imagine the complex calculations needed to ascertain how much the relatively proportionate projections and recessions needed to be, in order to retain the clarity of design? This is the terrain of knowledge and knowledge formation which must have been totally alien to a ‘hands off consultant’.

*****

          The difference between ideology and hegemony is the difference between formulating an idea discursively and experiencing a state of consciousness. The semiotic content of the monuments, I have engaged with, might be viewed as articulations of or ideologies of governance. Nonetheless they operate within ‘visual culture’ and hence are an interlocking space between the discursive and the lived. It is here that the role of a Sthapati, Shilpin becomes important as an agent of the interlock between ideology and hegemony. To view them as unintended social actors would not amount to a lapse back into the ‘anonymity’ zone. We are all unintended social actors in most of our day to day activities. However dominant groups seek to shape and dominate consciousness through the cultural production, legitimization, control and diffusions of values, symbols and meanings creating a sense of reality that reinforces, ethicizes and neutralizes social practices that position social actors in relation to each other. In the context of royal Brahmanical temples, the Sthapati becomes a key player in materializing attempts of the dominant to shape consciousness. Locating the Sthapati is crucial to our understanding of these monuments as expressions of hegemony maintenance.    

            

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[1]  R.N. Misra, Perceptions of India’s Past, Tradition and the Artist, (ed.) Catherine B. Asher and Thomas R. Metcalf, Perception of South Asia’s Visual Past, Oxford and IBH, Delhi, 1994. 

[2]  Ranjit Guha, Domination without Hegemony (ed.) Ranjit Guha, Subaltern Studies VI Delhi, 1999.   

[3]  R.N. Misra, Ancient Artists and Art Activity, Indian Institution of Advanced Study, Simla 1975. 

[4]  Stella Kramrish, Traditions of the Indian Craftsman, (ed.) Barbara Stoler Miller, Exploring India’s Sacred Art, Philadelphia 1983.

Vaijayanti Dilip Shete, Expressive Theory of ‘Catur Varnya’ Outlining the Texts. (ed.) Shivaji K. Panikkar, Abha Sheth, Art and Social Relations, Baroda (forthcoming).   

[5]  George Mitchell, An Architectural Description and Analysis of the Early Western Chalukyan Temples, London, 1975. 

[6] V Balambal, Chola Administration, : Administration of the Brahadesvara Temple at Tanjore during the period of Rajaraja I JOIH, Vol. LXII, Part 1-3.

[7]  R. Nandakumar Nair, The Bhakti Movement in South India. Its Impact on the Sculpture and Painting, M.A. Dissertation, Dept. of Art History, M.S. University of Baroda, 1980.

[8]  Carol Radcliffe Bolon, Op. Cit. 

[9]  Pierre Richard, Tanjavur Brhadisvara An Architectural Study, Delhi, Pondicherry, 1995. 

[*] Used in approximation