OF ANIMALS IN INDIAN ART
[Illustration]
More has been said and written on Indian art than is justified by a right
appreciation of its qualities and defects. In architecture alone can it be
said to claim the highest distinction. The plastic art of the country at
its best was inferior to that of other lands, and the spirit of its
artistic prime has been dead for centuries. Among the Indian collections in
European museums we see casts and photographs of ancient buildings side by
side with representations of the life and customs of to-day, nor is it
until we have lived in India and carefully sought out the truth that we
learn how dead the characteristic art of a vivid faith and life may be
while the faith still lingers and the outward aspect of the life is but
slightly changed. There is a considerable distance between the art of an
Italian town of to-day and that of the Augustan age, but a still greater
gulf between that of a modern Hindu and the Sanchi topes, the Gandhāra and
Amravati sculptures. But the Italian himself has changed far more than the
Hindu. In India the ancient sculptures are still alive and walk the
streets, while if you confront a group of modern Italians with the
personages on a Roman sarcophagus you see at a glance that the marble has
but little concern with the living man. This persistence of certain
elements of Indian life has led some writers to attribute immutability to
all. To those who know the country it is obvious, on a little reflection,
that artistic India is just as liable to change as the rest of the world,
and that in fact there is no country where foreign influences have been
more actively at work. To some it is unnecessary to hint truisms of this
kind, but in Europe it seems to be believed that the Indian people of
to-day have the same artistic endowments and should be required to practise
the same style of art as their long-forgotten ancestors.
But though it would be pleasant to plough the infertile sands of art
criticism (on whose Indian horizons there are some brave mirages), we have
our own row to hoe, and must turn from dreams of what might or ought to be
to that which has been and is in our narrow field.
A comparison of the figures of animals shown on the Sanchi topes and in the
Ajanta Caves with those of a modern Indian draughtsman shows at once how
much difference there is between then and now. The work of the ancient
Hindu painter and sculptor is full of life and variety. Monkeys and
elephants are always good, while buffaloes come next for truth and
naturalness. Lions, tigers, peacocks and swans are conventionalised
according to a somewhat restricting but still consistent decorative canon
with great propriety and admirable effect. Nothing can exceed the freedom
and facility with which elephants are drawn and painted in the Ajanta Cave
frescoes, in every conceivable action. The wonderful suppleness and
acrobatic capabilities of the beast have never since been so skilfully
indicated. Sir Emerson Tennent's book on Ceylon has pictures of bound
elephants wildly struggling after capture, but they give an impression of
contortion rather than of the india-rubber litheness of the animal in
action. In Europe generally, the mere bulk of the beast is all that is
represented, for the old notion that "the elephant hath joints, but none
for courtesy; his legs are legs for necessity, not for flexure" still
survives to some extent. The ancient Hindu artist saw this also, and there
are striking representations of the creatures standing like monumental
mounds among the forest trees.
* * * * *
In old Hindu temples as at Hallibeed and Khajuraho, friezes of sculptured
animals occur in regular sequence. Near the base of the building are
elephants, then lions or tigers, over these horses, then cows, then men,
and lastly, winged creatures. (In India people habitually talk of "winged
things" for birds, a proof, it may be, that more flying creatures than
birds are believed in.) The sequence indicates an elemental scheme in which
Hindus see more than strikes a European observer. The elephant supports the
world, lions and tigers inhabit the jungles of it, the horse is a tamed
wild creature, and the cow, next to man, is his benefactor and half a
divinity, while the bird courses fly above his head, parrots first, and
then swans. The swan (or wild goose) is an accepted image of the soul,
hence its high honour among Hindus, although Brahma, with whom it is
officially associated, is no longer an object of popular worship. It is not
the tame goose however, that is meant, but the flying wild fowl seen far
aloft winging its way to some distant and unknown bourne. A Hindu saying
goes, "The swan (the soul) flies away and none can go with it." A Western
poet has well expressed the sense of solitary flight with definite aim
through--
"The desert and illimitable air,--
Lone wandering, but not lost."
And it is natural that the piety of Hindus should crystallise in its own
fashion the thought in Bryant's mind when he wrote--
"He who from zone to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright."
So we are presented with the under world, the earth, the air, and a hint of
the distant heaven beyond all.
Some Hindus insist that this sequence is invariable. In purely Hindu
countries this may be the case, but in regions where contact with Islám and
other influences have modified Hinduism it is not followed, and indeed is
almost unknown. The elephant's place at the base is a post of honour, but
he ascends also, and is shown in pairs with uplifted trunks pouring waters
of lustration over the adorable Lakshmi or Saraswati, Goddess of learning,
from sacrificial vases. Nothing could be more spirited and natural than the
elephant sculptures, while the friezes above them are merely decorative and
no more like life than are the leopards and wyverns of European heraldry.
The birds have superb tails of fretted foliage faintly recalling some
details of late Gothic sculpture. In an architectural sense nothing is lost
by the want of veracity, but it is curious that the elephant should be
treated with so much feeling for nature, while the equally familiar horse
and ox are always wooden in character.
[Illustration: MODERN ELEPHANT SCULPTURE, FROM THE TOMB OF SOWAI JAI SINGH,
MAHARAJA OF JEYPORE]
On the face of the rock-hewn Buddhist temple at Karli, on the Western
Ghauts, three elephants affront the spectator, and support the hillside
rock on each side of the entrance, with a calm air of competence for their
task. In gold, silver, brass, ivory, clay, and wood, elephants serve a
hundred purposes, and are drawn and painted everywhere. In such modern work
as the tomb of Maharaja Jai Singh at Jeypore, where every detail is treated
in a conventional way, and the creature's ears are fluted as regularly as
scallop shells, there is still a strong sense of his shape and action. A
small pen sketch here given may show this. Centuries had closed down on the
ancient freedom, and the Muhammadan canon forbidding the representation of
life, though never thoroughly accepted in India, had repressed the plastic
instinct. You may hear, when going over palaces in Rajputana, of elaborate
carvings in stone, which on a threatening hint from the iconoclastic court
at Delhi, were hastily covered up with plaster. In other parts of India
recent research has unearthed remains of richly-carved Hindu work,
sometimes lying in heaps of broken fragments and bearing traces of fire.
But though you expel nature with a pitchfork or shut it up like a
jack-in-the-box, it is not to be wholly repressed. Even the Muhammadans
themselves do not always obey the law; the Persian Shiahs have never
considered themselves bound by it, and modern Indian art is mainly Persian.
[Illustration: BORAK. CALIGRAPHIC PICTURE COMPOSED OF PRAYERS]
* * * * *
For pious Muhammadans it has long been a practice of Oriental penmen, who
are often artists, to weave the fine forms of Persian letters into the
outlines of animals or birds. I give an example of the Prophet's mystic
horse, Borak, which contains a whole litany of prayers. An elephant on the
cover, a tiger on the dedicatory page, and the birds over the monogram of
the publishers of this book, are also woven in words of prayer. Every
creature alive can be thus represented, and the piety of the inscription
covers the profanity of the picture. Muhammadanism, like more religions, is
full of ingenious little compromises and transactions after this kind. A
more frank defiance of the laws by which at the supreme moments of their
lives they profess themselves bound, is characteristic of Christians--
"Whose life laughs through and spits at their creed!
Who maintain Thee in word, and defy Thee in deed!"
A curiosity of the time is the way in which those who now follow the craft
of the Persian limner and often boast Persian descent, have adopted Hindu
notions in their work, though still remaining Muhammadan. Some of the best
representations in the popular lithographs sold at fairs of the many-armed
Hindu divinities are the work of Muhammadan draughtsmen. So in the time of
the Mogul power the Court chroniclers were often Hindus who complacently
wrote of the pillage and wreck of the temples of their own faith as
triumphs over idolatrous infidels and officially lauded the deeds of
Muhammadans in phrases of unctuous insincerity.
An official illuminator is attached to most native courts, an artist whose
pride it is to work with "a brush of one hair," and to repeat carefully the
types he has learned. There is a complete series of portraits of all the
dynasties that have ruled at Delhi, Agra, and Lucknow. The persistence of
the types is curious and interesting. The long nose of the Emperor
Aurengzebe and the round face of Nūr Mahal are as familiar and constant as
the characteristic features of Lord Brougham or Lord Beaconsfield in
volumes of _Punch_. The English gentleman and lady were learned a hundred
years ago in high-collared coats, tight pantaloons, frilled shirt-fronts,
gigot sleeves, and high-waisted, short frocks. To-day in drawing English
people the same pattern is faithfully followed. Animals are similarly
sketched in obedience to a strict convention. The tiger is almost
invariably of the short-bodied variety. This occurs in India at times, but
is much less common than the Bengal tiger proper. In the Kensington Natural
History Museum I recognised on a shelf the tiger of the Indian illuminator,
and shortly afterwards met Colonel Beresford Lovett, R.E., by whom it was
presented, who told me that he shot it in Mazanderan, in Persia. Perhaps it
is rash to jump to the conclusion that the Persian artist imported his
peculiar beast into a land with tigers of its own, but it is certain that
the squareness of the Indian limner's tiger is entirely unlike the typical
shape of the Indian animal.
The horse is always fat, with a tremendously arched neck and slender legs,
resembling, as has been noted in another place, the horse of the painters
of the European Renaissance; but lacking his learned display of loaded
muscle. In Dr. Aitkin and Mrs. Barbauld's delightful _Evenings at Home_, a
boy attempts a definition of the horse which has always seemed to me to
embody very fairly the vague Oriental conception: "I should say he was a
fine, large, prancing creature with slender legs and an arched neck, and a
sleek, smooth skin, and a tail that sweeps the ground, and that he snorts
and neighs very loud, and tosses his head and runs as swift as the wind."
Herein, as the instructive book points out, are very few of the vital facts
of the animal, but they have sufficed without much help from actual
observation for many generations of Orientals. Carven horses are rare and
seldom successful either as ornamental creations or as representations of
nature.
The native of India is but now beginning to learn to care for accurate
statements of fact, whether in a literary, scientific, or artistic sense.
The Education Department, which, after all, is only the stress of the time
brought to a point, and represents the will of the upper classes of the
people as much as that of their British fellow-subjects, is determined that
this reproach shall be removed, and imports the illustrated lesson-books
and wall-pictures of Western schools. In all that concerns the well-being
of animals and people, improved knowledge cannot but do good, but the
extinction of the pictured horses of romance, the pursy steeds of Sohrab
and Rustom, of the legendary Raja Rasálu and the fat chargers of many a
Hindu Maharaja and Muhammadan Nawab will not be accomplished without
regrets. With them will perish the Persian winged horses which have become
naturalised among Indian draughtsmen, and there will be no place for the
Yālis and other fantastic creations in which horse forms are traceable.
Sūrya, the sun-god, is always represented in a chariot drawn by horses,
invariably in profile: one horse being completely drawn and a long row
indicated behind with a few repeating lines. Very admirable design is
possible under these conditions, but few modern pictures of the Indian
Phœbus are admirable either in suggestion or accomplishment.
On a very humble level are the little animals made in clay by the women of
a household and often by potters for certain Hindu anniversaries. I write
"humble" mechanically, but it must be said in fairness that the rustic
classes in Europe do not produce for their amusement anything so good. We
once had an elderly servant of serious demeanour, respectable appearance,
first-rate testimonials as to character, and hopeless incapacity for his
work. One evening, with all the shyness of a youthful artist, he invited me
to see a little "picture" he had prepared in the court of the servants'
quarters. I was delighted by a charming model of a fort with walls and
bastions complete, in which there were camel-riders, dragoons, generals,
colonels, and Rajas, all modelled in clay and painted; little lamps were
lighted round the mimic scene, the children sat gazing in rapt admiration,
and from the dark background of the yard sympathetic murmurs echoed my
words of praise. The "bearer's" triumph was complete when his mistresses
came to see and admire, but if he had been very wise he would have been
content with the master's approval. For during the rest of the time he
afflicted us I was often reminded that he had missed his vocation, and
would be better employed in modelling soldiers, elephants, and camels,
which he did well, than in trimming lamps, making beds, dusting furniture,
and blacking boots in a half-hearted and wholly inartistic manner.
Figures of horses and cattle like the gingerbread "gee-gees" of country
fairs in Europe, are all that are strictly required for these rustic
celebrations, which are probably of great antiquity, representing the
worship of domestic animals as part of the family prosperity in a pristine
age, or the setting forth of the army of Rama, with an interweaving of
obscure legends. But when the artist is clever the subject is naturally
expanded and embroidered upon. When you see Mr. H. M. Stanley paraded as
Guy Fawkes in London streets it is easy to understand how, with themes of a
far more vague and shadowy character, Oriental fancy has free play.
[Illustration: SMALL WARES IN METAL]
A regular part of the potter's business in many regions is the fashioning
of toy animals in terra-cotta, gaily painted by his women folk for fairs
and festival days. At Delhi, by way of compliment to the chief civil
authority, the potters there have at times made small statuettes of the
Commissioner and Deputy-Commissioner. These portraits were often amusingly
like the originals. There is a legend indeed, that one distinguished
officer was so much more than flattered by his clay images that he bought
up the whole baking to be broken up. Fantail pigeons, peacocks, parrots,
and the generic bird of Indian domestic decoration, akin to the
"dicky-bird" of the British child's slate, are made as toys in great
numbers. Crows and poultry seldom appear.
Birds and animals are often fashioned in metal, and always with purely
decorative intent. The resolute conventionalism of the Indian artisan is
shown in the silver mouse from Muttra here sketched with half a dozen small
wares, and in the brass owl from Bengal. The parrot and the peacock are old
and constant types, but the brass bison is the work of a jungle artist, who
from direct observation has learned that a bison's horns meet and join over
its brow. And there his lesson ended.
[Illustration: BIRDS BY AN INDIAN DRAUGHTSMAN]
A Muhammadan artist who is skilful in Hindu mythology and produces many
lithographs and illustrations, has been kind enough to sketch for me half a
dozen birds as they are rendered to-day--a peacock, a pigeon, a heron, a
partridge, a parrot, and a bird which he describes by the word we use for
wild duck, but which is evidently a water-fowl of another kind. In coloured
work the forms would be carefully filled up and finished, but the outline
would remain the same, and speaks here for itself. All are _yek
chashm_,--one-eyed,--the Persian draughtsman's idiom for in profile. A
full face picture is _do chashm_, two-eyed; but birds are never shown full
front. In illuminations for poems and romances the yellow mango bird, the
hoopoe, and the maina are occasionally shown, but the distinctive
differences lie more in the colouring than in the form. A pair of cranes
stands as in Chinese and Japanese pictures (_e.g._ the willow pattern
plate) for an emblem of the souls of lovers. A pair of Brahminy ducks
sporting in the water, or a pair of pigeons, serves the same purpose. The
bird of ancient myth, _Garuda_, whose name in Southern India is given to
the common kite, is a Hindu conventionalisation of aquiline forms from
which eagle character is usually omitted. In bazaar prints he carries three
or four elephants as he flies or serves as a steed to Vishnu in one of his
forms, and sometimes he appears as half man half bird. He is borne in the
arms of the Maharaja of Mysore, with whom in heraldic guise is associated
the Yali, the strange, horse-like beast that is carved as a ramping corbel
or truss on some of the Hindu temples in Southern India.
[Illustration: A PERI ON A CAMEL]
The name Shikargah (hunting pattern) is given to a diaper or border of
antelopes, tigers, and horsemen often combined with foliage. In old work
the designs are often beautiful, as on the margins and backs of Persian
MSS., in embroidery, carpets, metal-chasing, and decorative painting.
Modern commerce does not encourage this kind of art, but there are still
artists capable of good work.
[Illustration: KRISHNA ON AN ELEPHANT]
[Illustration: KRISHNA ON A HORSE]
A fantastic but very popular device is to fill up the outline of an animal
with a jumble of various creatures. Three examples are here given from the
brush of Bhai Isur Singh, a Sikh designer. Trivialities of this nature
scarcely bear description, and, like many more Oriental fancies, are safe
from serious criticism. In one a peri rides on a camel compounded of men
and beasts. In another, Krishna playing his pipe, is borne on an elephant
made up of adoring Gopis in the guise of modern dancing women. In the third
the god holds a lotus flower, and his adorers are arranged as a horse.
[Illustration: NANDI OR SACRED BULL]
When one considers the sacred character of the cow and bull, and the
estimation in which they are held, it is wonderful that cattle forms are
usually so vaguely seen by Hindu artists. There are thousands of carved
stone bulls in the courts of the temples of Mahadeo, and hundreds of
thousands of brazen bulls in domestic shrines, and all might own direct
descent from the golden calf of Moses (which must have been a piece of
half-learned Egyptian conventionalism), so fixed and negligent of nature is
the type. That Hindu artists can see nature clearly at times, is proved by
those who practise the modern new craft of modelling figurines in
terra-cotta for sale to Europeans. At Lucknow in Oudh, and at Kishnagar in
Bengal, cattle are often skilfully rendered in clay. But draughtsmen and
painters as a rule keep faithfully to the hieratic type of the
stone-cutters, who never make preliminary models. The Jeypore
marble-workers, who turn out a large quantity of animal statuettes, excel
in buffaloes in black marble, but since the main of their practice is the
supply of images for temples, they adhere to the conventional form for
Brahminy cows and bulls.
* * * * *
Sir George C. M. Birdwood has kindly lent me from his collection a coloured
picture of Krishna and other personages attended, as usual, by cows. A
group of cattle from the foreground of this composition is here engraved,
and shows an unusual feeling for nature. The popular ideal, which is the
hieratic, is shown more truly in the picture broadsides illustrating
country romances, and sold at fairs for a pice each. The muzzle is clumsy
and bulbous, the brow is round, the shortness of the body is exaggerated,
the dewlap is almost ignored or shown by conventional flutings, the clean,
thoroughbred legs are made thick and shapeless, while the form of the hump
is seldom truly seen.
[Illustration: CATTLE BY AN INDIAN ARTIST]
It is curious that a cow's head, carved separately as an ornament, is
seldom seen in old Indian work and never in that of to-day. Much as he
loves the cow, a Hindu of the old rock would prefer not to drink from a
fountain where the water issued from a carved cow's head,--the first idea
to strike an English sculptor as "neat and appropriate." The head of the
elephant is frequently used in ornament, that of the horse is a favourite
old Rajput dagger pommel in jade and silver, and tigers' and lions' heads
are plentiful, but never that of the cow. A steel _garz_ or mace with a
horned head, occasionally seen in collections of Indian arms, is really
Persian, and represents one of their many fabulous beasts. The reason of
this exclusion is that technically the cow's mouth is impure. A horse may
drink from a vessel and, after the usual sacramental scrub with earth, it
is no worse for family use, but a cow defiles anything it touches with its
mouth.
Outcastes seldom find their way into pictures, so one of the most important
subjects of the Western animal painter is lost to the Oriental limner, for
dogs are not respectable enough to be drawn. The story of Yudhishtira and
his dog, already mentioned, offers a good subject for illustration, but
though the legend is known to educated Hindus, its hero has for centuries
ceased to be popular and there are no pictures of him to be found. In
illustrations to the popular romance of Leila and Majnūn a dog accompanies
the lady, while a parrot perches on the gaunt shoulder of the passion-worn
Majnūn. A dog, a staff, and a bottle are the attributes of the black
Bhairon, most popular of Hindu divinities. Perhaps the science of
dog-breeding or appreciation of the variety of canine races has been
developed since St. Roch was canonised. At all events, the same casteless
mongrel that waits on this holy man in Continental churches attends on
Bhairon and runs after antelopes and tigers in such popular Indian
romances as Raja Rasálu. The Greeks knew more and better, for they loved
and classified their dogs, and sculptured them with discrimination of
breed.
* * * * *
The _Illustrated London News_ and the _Graphic_ are foremost in an
educational movement unnoted by many observers. In quite out-of-the-way
places as well as in the large towns you may see the narrow wall spaces of
the shops covered with their pictures, among coloured German lithographs
and native prints. Portraits of the Queen and the Royal Family, pictures of
the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race, of winners of the Derby, of prize
cattle, of the buxom British infant and types of Western beauty, are stuck
side by side with the blue Krishna and the black Kali, and nobody sees any
incongruity. Some say that European picture papers are fraught with peril
for the Indian artist. There is, however, no possibility of keeping them
out of the country, so we must be content to wait for a generation or two
before we can judge of their evil effects. Meanwhile, it is only fair to
say in anticipation that races who for centuries have known how to accept
and assimilate a long series of foreign importations and yet to maintain
their own individuality of character may be trusted to deal even with the
_Illustrated London News_ and the _Graphic_.
The boar in art occurs only in a form so highly conventionalised as to be
almost unrecognisable, in representations of the Boar _avatar_. There is a
superb boar of colossal size at Khajuraho, carved in stone and completely
covered over with row upon row of human figures in relief. It has never
occurred to a Hindu to draw a pig for its own sake, while a Muhammadan
would scorn to look at a pig picture.
In consequence of the popularity of the Monkey-god, Hanumān, the whole
tribe has fared well at the hands of the Indian painter. He scarcely ever
occurs in ancient carved work, and the sculptures of to-day are horribly
rude, but in many pictures there is a first-rate appreciation of monkey
character. In a MS. Rāmāyana in the Lahore Museum a pair of monkeys are
shown drinking from a stream, and drawn with wonderful delicacy and
naturalness. In the Ajanta frescoes there are some well-painted monkeys.
Even in the much conventionalised representations of Hanumān, drawn for the
poorest classes, there is often a quaint humour and observation, surprising
to those who accept the common fallacy that the people of India are
destitute of humour. That representations of the Monkey-god have long been
admired is clear from the mention of his picture on Arjuna's banner in the
ancient Hindu Epic. Rajput chivalry still bears a red Hanumān on the "five
coloured" flags peculiar to the race.
One of the futile works of patience which so often take rank as works of
Indian Art is a picture of Hanumān, composed of thousands of repetitions of
the sacred name Ram. You draw the Monkey-god in pencil and then write Ram
all along the lines in minute Hindi characters. Ram, ram, is a common
salutation among Hindus, and mere repetition of the word is a sacrament.
All sacraments mean more than meets the eye or ear, so we need not find
anything absurd in the case of a Hindu personage who, by a curse of the
Gods, was condemned to forego the use of the life-giving word. But he was
permitted to say Mra, mra. This relieved his despairing soul, for, saying
it quickly for an hour at a time, the most vindictive God or demon alive
could hear only Ram, ram.
[Illustration: A PUNJAB HEROINE (FROM AN INDIAN LITHOGRAPH)]
Bears took part in the wars of the Gods, and in consequence are sketched
with some freedom. A heroine of Punjab romance in more recent times is
credited with marvellous exploits in hunting, and a bazaar print,
reproduced here in little, gives a favourable idea both of the state of
popular art in its humblest form and of the kind of legend in which the
masses still delight. Whatever may be thought of the tigers in the upper
panel, there is good bear character in the lower, and, as a large sheet
bearing four such pictures is sold for a halfpenny, criticism ought to be
disarmed. The gains of the artists employed on this kind of work are not
large. I remember a friend of mine criticising with some asperity the
careless drawing in a full-page cartoon of a vernacular comic paper. The
draughtsman took it in good part and listened humbly, but when some of the
laborious triumphs of Persian art were brandished before him, he mildly
remarked that it was not easy to produce masterpieces at the rate of
fivepence per picture, which was all that his Editor allowed.
In Indian Art, as in Indian talk, the only use made of the Ass is to point
a curse withal. "Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour's landmark," said
the Jews, but the Hindus inscribed their commination, a nameless, shameless
horror, on the stone landmark itself. Several of these grotesque
abominations now lie in Bombay Town Hall.
[Illustration: ANTELOPES. AN INDIAN ARTIST'S FANTASY]
[Illustration: BUFFALO BULLS]