Subject: [world-vedic] indian art

Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2002 12:20:48 +0530

From: "sanjeev nayyar" <exploreindia@vsnl.net>
Reply-To: vediculture@yahoogroups.com
To: <Undisclosed-Recipient:;@mail1.vsnl.in>
Columns
http://www.newindpress.com/sunday/sundayitems.asp?id=SEC20020913062144&eTitle=Co
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Creations
Animals in Indian art
Nanditha Krishna
The response to my previous article "Are we civilized?" (NSE,
September 1) was overwhelming. I am thrilled that so many people are
concerned about animals, and relate the growing social violence to the
general lackadaisical attitude towards cruelty and violence. One
letter said that kindness to people came first and would automatically
ensure kindness to animals. Of course. Neither precedes or succeeds
the other. A humane person is always humane.
Ancient India protected animals in the same way it protected all of
nature, by creating an aura of sanctity around them and celebrating
their dignity. Some animals were the vehicles of the gods. Others,
such as the elephant-headed Ganesha and Hanuman, the monkey devotee of
Rama, became gods themselves. There is probably no other culture in
the world that has been so consistently associated with plant and
animal life as the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions of India.
So, we were taught to treat animals well. I remember when I sat with
my feet on the warm fur of my Alsatian dog; my grandmother would scold
me, saying I was stepping on Lord Bhairava himself! At every meal a
small bowl of boiled rice was kept out for the birds. And the kolam
had to be drawn outside the house every day, in rice flour, for the
ants had to be fed. Thus respect and kindness to animals was ingrained
in our daily lives.
Indian art, which was used to allegorise values and moral beliefs,
honoured the dignity of animals. Hermits and saints were always
depicted living in harmony with nature. Cave paintings express a
primeval fear, a need to subdue and subjugate as people hunted.
Probably, as people moved from hunting to food production, the need to
kill for food receded, and they could sit back and appreciate the
qualities of the animals that were once their antagonists. In the
Indus Valley seals, animals such as the humped bull and elephant were
particularly popular, while the rhinoceros, tiger, antelope, eagle and
snake appear to have some significance. The Vedas invested gods and
animals with divine parentage. In the ten incarnations of Vishnu we
have divine manifestations that are equally animal and human.
Early Indian art portrayed animals with human qualities such as love,
jealousy, sacrifice, resentment and more. They were given a status of
equality, with scenes of Boddhisattvas preaching to animals and rishis
teaching a multi species audience. The Jataka tales are replete with
stories of the Buddha's many births in various animal forms. Ancient
India loved its forests and animals.
At Mamallapuram, the scene of the cow licking its calf in the

Govardhana cave and the gentle, loving animal families in the rock-cut
penance of Arjuna are some of the greatest works of sculpture. Scenes
of hunting were unavoidable, as the patrons were kings, but the artist
sent out his own silent message when he depicted the pain and agony of
the wounded deer, the elephant cringing as he was attacked from all
sides in the midst of a war and the desperation of the tiger when it
was cornered. "Is this valour?", was their message.
The lion capital of Ashoka, with the majestic Asian lions in
Persepolitan style, proclaimed the might of the king, and is now the
emblem of the Government of India. In contrast, at the base of the
same capital, are frolicking animals, nature at its free and
untrammeled best. Ashoka selected four animals to represent the
Buddha: the elephant symbolised his birth, the lion his clan, the
horse his renunciation, and the bull his zodiac sign. The lion
represented might, a symbolism that continued all through Indian art
history, as late as the Pallava and Vijayanagara periods. This
probably saved the Asian lion from extinction.
The animal that appears most frequently in Indian art is the elephant,
the mount of kings and heroes. As a sequel to the story of Maya,
mother of the Buddha, who dreamed that an elephant entered her womb
before the birth of her son, the elephant represented the Buddha and
Buddhism in sculpture and painting. The elephant was the mount of
Indra in the Western Indian rock-cut caves, and is represented in the
Jataka tales. He appears in scenes of Gajendramoksha. Vishnu on his
mount Garuda swoops down to rescue the elephant from the mighty snake
Naga. And, of course, he is Ganesha, the elephant-headed deity who
keeps away obstacles (Vighneshwara).
Ungulates are prolific in art. The bull represented nobility and
stature. It was also the capital of an Ashokan pillar from Rampurva
(Bihar). The bull accompanies Shiva, standing at the entrance to
Shaivite shrines, while depictions of Uma Maheshvara (Shiva and
Parvati) are prolific in the Maratha paintings of Tanjore. The cow
was, of course, go mata and Kamadhenu, a representative of Goddess
Lakshmi. Unfortunately, the buffalo alone, representing the demon
Mahisha destroyed by Durga, came to represent ignorance, slothfulness
and evil, and became a much maligned and sacrificed animal.
The advent of the horse in India has been the subject of much debate,
irrelevant here. Suffice to say that terracotta horses from Sar-Dheri
(2500 BC), Lothal, Rangpur and Kayatha (Ujjain) indicate its presence
in the proto-historic period. It was in the Mauryan, Kushana and Gupta
periods that its representation took on dynamism, for it was
associated both with royalty and the chakravartin or universal ruler.
The Vedic description of the sun with his flying steeds was
personified by the Sun God Surya on a solar chariot driven by seven
horses, magnificently depicted in the Sun Temple at Konarak. The deer
represented peace and serenity, the meek and the oppressed,
sacrificing its life to save another, and appears in delightful scenes
of forests and nature.
Birds were used to express human emotions. The swan represented
morality and clean living, being the vehicle of Brahma and Sarasvati,
while the crow was a messenger. The eagle-hawk (Garuda) and similar
large birds of prey symbolised speed, strength and the sun. It was the
enemy of the snake, feared yet respected and worshiped in the Naga
stones of rural India. Several animals represented the waters, such as
the elephant, snake, crocodile and tortoise, the last two symbolising

the rivers Ganga and Yamuna respectively.

The change came after the Sultanate period. The paintings of
Vijayanagara and the Mughal and Rajasthani schools became more
realistic, and animals were no longer symbols. Akbar commissioned
painters to reproduce the animals recorded by his grandfather in the
Babar Namah, while Jehangir's period is known for the remarkably
realistic paintings, by the artist Mansur, of rare and common animals
stripped of all spiritual overtones. Unfortunately, this period also
saw the celebration of scenes of the hunt, a throwback to prehistoric
painting. Earlier, scenes of hunting were generally accompanied by
scenes of renunciation and remorse.
Paintings of Krishnadevaraya hunting at Lepakshi, Babar's mass killing
of deer and tigers, trapping of birds and animals and Rajput rulers
hunting characterise the mores of the age, and set them apart from
earlier Indian art, although the Ragmala paintings and scenes of
Krishna's life still treated them with sympathy. The elephant, tiger
and rhinoceros were hunted to extinction in the Indus Valley, which
had celebrated them on its seals. The corollary came in the British
period, when photographs were taken with large numbers of tigers,
leopards, cheetah, deer and elephants killed for sport. In one stroke
the new rulers of Hindustan wiped out what India had cherished for
millennia. More important, they changed attitudes. Hunting became a
sport', dead animals became trophies' and destruction became an
entertainment'.
Art still carries a message, especially for the illiterate. The
symbols chosen by political parties are a good example. I will never
forget a woman who told me that she voted for the rising sun symbol
because it represented the Sun God, giver of life, little realising
that the party it stood for (DMK) preached atheism. When the AIADMK
led by Ms Jayalalithaa had the rooster as its symbol, it led to gory
instances of cruelty towards the bird by the opposing party, till
Chief Election Commissioner T N Seshan mercifully banned the use of
animals as election symbols.
In contemporary Pakistan, animals as election symbols undergo great
cruelty. Advertising is a use of art to propagate a message, then and
now. Artists of ancient India sent out a message of kindness and
harmony through animals, using stories and symbols understood by the
masses. We need to revive the use of art as a means of propagating the
same values today.
Nanditha Krishna is Director, The C P Ramaswami Aiyar Foundation,
Chennai