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.
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).
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.
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.
(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)
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’,
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.
 |
| 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.
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. 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.
