The arts, in past tense

While Kutch's silver-work, woodcraft and embroidery are renowned, its painting and architecture are little appreciated. ZERIN ANKLESARIA looks at a publication that meant to celebrate the region's arts, is now a sad memorial to a vibrant heritage lost for ever.

FROM very ancient times, Kutch has been seen as "a place apart", unique in landscape and topography. Likened in shape to a tortoise (kachhapa) from which perhaps it gets its name, it is described poetically, but inaccurately, in the Mahabharata, as a "cardamom-like island". Cut off from the subcontinent by forbidding wastes of swamp and desert but blessed with an extended coastline, its secular art owes more to the West than to Indian influences. While its silver-work, woodcrafts and embroidery are known the world over, the painting and architecture are little appreciated. With the publication of this book, the Editor hopes to fill the lacuna.

The earliest temples, aptly described as "symphonies in stone" in the opening chapter, were built in the Maha-Gurjara style in recessed tiers, with richly carved and honey-combed exteriors and slim rounded turrets. Those dedicated to Shiva and the Sun are fine examples dating back to the 9th and 10th Centuries.

Two mosques and a shrine at Bhadreshwar are the oldest Islamic buildings in India, preceding the Qutb Minar by 34 years. In a scholarly essay, M. Shokoohy shows how these structures, unlike the Persianate ones at Delhi, are stylistically linked to Syria and North Africa, and are proto-typical of early Muslim settlements along the western coast, particularly in Kerala. Built by peaceful Arab traders, they are not emblems of conquest like their Northern counterparts, and owe far more to vernacular traditions. This line of inquiry, conspicuously missing in Bianca Alfieri's recent study titled Islamic Architecture of the Indian Subcontinent, is particularly welcome here.

The palaces of Bhuj are the main repositories of the curiously hybrid Kutchi tradition. The Aina Mahal was built circa 1750 by the multitalented ruler Lakhpatji, poet and critic, renowned as much for his bravery in battle as for his performances of classical music. His master craftsman Ramsingh was equally versatile. A humble tribal who went to sea, he was ship-wrecked and rescued by a Dutch vessel, and lived in Holland for 18 years.

There he learnt clock-making, stone-carving, tile production, enamelling and much more. Glass blowing and mirror-work were his special skills, and his patron acquired a passion for them, filling the palace with Venetian style chandeliers, glass paintings of Chinese inspiration, and mirrors everywhere ranging from full-length to tiny half-inch circlets. The effect was one of overpowering opulence, a deliberate display of wealth meant to cow the unruly Jadeja nobles into subservience.

The interiors of the palace were crammed with "Europeanerie", a craze among the nabobs and princelings of the time. One can still see the ceiling, doors and pillars of the royal bedchamber covered with mirror-work and gilt wood-carving, and the huge bed with legs of gold surrounded by no less than 27 outsize mirrors in Baroque-style gilt frames. To our attenuated taste this seems excessive, but it is nothing compared to the famous collection of the Nawab of Qudh who owned the world's largest mirrors, 12 by 6 feet, custom-made in London, each costing œ8,000 (Rs. 5,60,000).

Pictures in the European mode were highly regarded, and the Aina Mahal had a curious hotch potch including Hogarth's The Rake's Progress and a portrait of Catherine the Great cheek by jowl with those of Kutchi worthies. An Englishwoman who visited the palace in 1830 remarked on the "motley and incongruous melange of ornament" in a single room, where, among jelly glasses and old vases, she found half a dozen musical clocks, all playing at once, by the light of large candles burning at mid-day.

Prag Mahal was built a century later by H. St. Clair Wilkins, architect of some of Mumbai's public buildings, in the Italian Gothic mode. Its outstanding features are the bell tower soaring to a commanding height of 150 feet, and arcaded corridors featuring pointed arches and slender columns with richly carved capitals. The basic material was brick-red local stone, alternating with the jet black, yellow-brown and varicoloured marble for which Kutch is famous. Costing well over Rs. 20 lakh, it was considered one of the finest mansions of western India.

Painting as an art was unknown here until Lakhpatji introduced it, evidently to enhance the mystique of kingship. In a series of formal portraits, darbar scenes and professionals the ruler appears, aloof and dignified, surrounded by his subjects in stiff, ordered ranks. A striking example in this genre can be seen in Aina Mahal, now the State Museum. In a 15 metre long scroll painting the Maharao of the day rides a decorated elephant, preceded by drummers, a standard bearer and foot soldiers coming, as their clothing indicates, from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Here is a colourful tour de force which serves as a unique historical resource of the period.

Landscape painting came in with the craze for European prints, from which native artists learnt the use of receding planes and linear perspective. The strangeness of the Great Rann, with its dry surfaces and windswept vistas, its clear air and rolling sand-hills, is captured with genuine feeling in pale earth colours and shades of grey-blue. A charming instance shows a tiny encampment beside a pool of water, dwarfed by the immensity of the plain surrounding it. A few trees grow at the edge of the pool, and bushes are dotted sparsely about, while a winding path takes the viewer's eye in a wide arc to the bare, undulating peaks in the far distance.

The cross-cultural nature of the Kutchi heritage is more evident in the crafts than in the formal art. The world-renowned silverware began as a clone of its Dutch counterpart, with decorative motifs of trailing vines and bunches of grapes. Later, under Portuguese influence, animals - domestic, wild or mythical - appeared amid the foliage; and lacy floral patterns were copied from Mughal tracery windows.

The woodcraft is equally eclectic. In an erudite essay Jyotindra Jain shows that, though the upper castes prefer the Gujarat style, the nomadic carpenters who roam freely over the Thar desert into Sindh and Rajasthan have evolved a native idiom with strong Central Asian overtones. Carved wooden chests in the form of single-storey houses, complete with "arche", "columns" and "balustrades", are found throughout the region and as far afield as Swat and Afghanistan; and the decoration is floral or geometric and without cultic significance.

As this review comes to an end the earthquake has hit the headlines. Of the tragedies without number that have overtaken hapless Kutch, the fate of Dhamadka, home of Ajrakh block- printing since medieval times, is particularly poignant. Amid the devastation only one house stands, and the surviving printers, their families decimated and their lives shattered, wonder when, if ever, they will revive their ancient craft.

With the hardy resilience of those habituated to catastrophe the other artisans will eventually return to their traditional skills, but what of the art and architecture? The beautiful Maha- Gurjara Shiva temple that has defied the ravages of time for a thousand years is now a heap of stones, and the historic Bhuj has crumbled. The Prag Mahal, built to resist earthquakes, stands tall amid the wreckage, but the Ranjit Vilas palace, home of the scion of the erstwhile ruling family, has collapsed and, at the age of 64, this descendant of Lord Krishna must depend on charity for his immediate needs. The Aina Mahal too is in a shambles, its priceless paintings, its idiosyncratic glass collection, its superb textile exhibits ground into the unforgiving earth. And this book which was meant to celebrate the arts of Kutch is now a sad memorial, as much to nature's cruel caprices as to part of a vibrant heritage lost for ever.

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