India in Africa, Africa in India: Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanisms

6. The Idea of “India” in West African Vodun Artand Thought

149 6 The Idea of “India” in West African Vodun Art and Thought Dana Rush . . . I grew up with two ideas of India. The first idea . . . was about the kind of country from which my ancestors had come. . . . There was a second India. It balanced the first. This second India was the India of the independence movement, the India of greatness. . . . This was the identity I took to India on my first visit in 1962. And when I got there, I found it had no meaning in India. —V. S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now There are many ideas of India.1 As noted above by Trinidadian author V. S. Naipaul, “India” does not always refer to the peninsula region of South Asia, south of the Himalayas, between the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, where Hindus and others live and revere their gods. In west African Vodun art and thought, the idea of India is not simply one of geography or theology.2 Rather, “India” offers boundless aesthetic and spiritual opportunities in both time and space, going beyond the empirical known world into the un-empirical, un-known world. Through an exploration of origins and deployments of Indian imagery within contemporary Vodun art and thought, outside influences emerge as constituent components therein, whose origins have, at times, become lost in the process of creation. In this analysis of the incorporation of Indian imagery into contemporary Vodun art and thought, the present-day concept of globalism with its compelling 150 notions of international boundary-less-ness can be understood in a way which goes far beyond the visible, tangible, human domain into a world in which eternity and divine infinity are collapsed into the here and now. Vodun arts document Vodun histories. For centuries, the coastline of Bénin Republic and Togo has acted as a vortex, incorporating items and ideas from across the sea into its littoral. This ongoing phenomenon has generated a fertile mosaic of international, transcontinental, and transoceanic peoples, histories, commodities, and spirits, made manifest in Vodun art and thought. The following chapter focuses upon a relatively contemporary aspect of this “vortextual phenomenon,” that is, the incorporation of “India”—via chromolithographic imagery (mostly Hindu)—into the eternally organic religious system of Vodun. Although the idea of India in Vodun art and thought probably emerged no earlier than the late 1950s, it is the ancient, essentially elastic, conceptual system of Vodun which has allowed it to thrive on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The integration of Indian chromolithographs into Vodun epistemologies is exemplary of the overall incorporative sensibilities of Vodun art and thought. The Essential Sea Coasts kept alive the dialectic between the seen and the unseen . . . tangible horizons making the unattainable attainable . . . contract[ing] time as well as space. —Paul Carter, “Dark with Excess of Bright: Mapping the Coastlines of Knowledge” In Vodun thought, India spirits are invariably from the sea, rendering “India” and the sea synonymous; they are both known yet unknowable, a paradox mediated through art. Because the sea is as deep as one’s own imagination, and vice-versa, the breadth of India spirits, associated India arts, and India experiences is inexhaustible. The Atlantic coastline of Bénin Republic and Togo simultaneously effaces and defines the meeting of land and sea: that is where Africa and “India” merge. It is a place where awareness can be Janus-faced, and where space and time can and do alter. At the same time, this very coastline—liminal as it may be—is a gateway to centuries of intercontinental and transoceanic interactions and exchanges. This particular seaboard was a very real marketplace during the transatlantic slave trade (Law 1977, 1991; Lovejoy 1986; Manning 1982). As such, this coastline qualifies as a “diaspora space,” a concept introduced by Avtar Brah as a meeting point of “economic, political, cultural, and psychic [spiritual] processes . . . where multiple subject positions are juxtaposed , contested, proclaimed, or disavowed, where the permitted and the Dana Rush The Idea of “India” in West African 151 prohibited perpetually interrogate, and where the accepted and the transgressive imperceptibly mingle” (1996: 208). The idea of “diaspora space” thus encapsulates the global position of “culture as a site of travel” (Clifford 1992). In effect, we confront along this west African seaboard two simultaneous processes in which the sea functions as both a passageway to vast cultural and spiritual potential and as an exceedingly lucrative portal...