Journeys to the Edge: In the Footsteps of an Anthropologist

Performers in Indian Bronze

Performers in Indian Bronze South India Once Again During the summer of 1978 I undertook a brief study of how south Indian artists who sculpt sacred images for Hindu temples go about their professional work. My two primary interests lay in their procedures for realizing the images and their ways of passing on and maintaining their professional knowledge. Why art all of a sudden? There were two reasons, one personal and the other professional. I had grown up with art around me. My mother’s maternal grandfather, Harry Roberts, had given up architecture at the age of forty-nine in order to pursue his real passion, painting. I had inherited many pieces of his. When his sight began failing, in his late eighties, he replaced working in parks or the countryside with daily trips to the Tate Gallery in London. Each day he undertook analytical study of a different painting or sketch, particularly those of J. M. W. Turner. Even those exercises were gems. Several others in Mother’s family painted, including my mother herself. My father’s sister was also an artist, and Dad had dabbled for years in both art photography and sculpture. It’s little wonder that I painted in high school and college, counted artists among my friends, and had been a lifelong collector of artworks and books on art. I had been longing for years to find an excuse for doing an anthropological project expressly on art. Professionally speaking, my project was motivated more by puzzlement than by anything else. I confess to being baffled by the existence of 177 divergent perspectives on the images Hindu sculptors made. Art and cultural historians of several Western nations and India had been railing since at least 1858 at the“conventional,”“repetitive,”or“stereotyped”forms of those artworks made during the past millennium. Some who took this approach were V. A. Smith, A. L. Kroeber, S. Kramrisch, H. Goetz, A. De Riencourt, and M. Bussagli and C. Sivaramamurti. Their historical appraisals were, to say the least, cutting and dismissive. My own experiences and those of south Indian friends and colleagues led me to believe that neither the teaching nor the practice of sculpture was moribund. It seemed possible that both were still being pursued vigorously in quiet, but long-existent, sacred places, such as Kumbakoonam . And one could find good recent pieces. Trudy had once given me for Christmas a subtle, elegant bronze of Bhikshatanar. It portrayed Lord Shiva as an ascetic who came out of the forest looking so handsome that the distracted wives of the sages inadvertently let their clothes slip off! This treasure was certified to be recent; even if the certifier had been in error, style alone indicated it could be no older than the eighteenth century . I had also bought for about thirty cents a lyrical image of Balakrishnan , Lord Krishna as a playful child, with stolen butter in his hand from his mother’s churn. Sculptor friends of mine handled it with misty eyes. It, too, could not be very old. While neither was a “great” work, of the caliber that caught the eye of historians or museum curators, sensitive art lovers took them seriously. Finally, there was a robust literature by specialists on Hindu aesthetics texts, such as Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and D. N. Shukla, who laid out the unique creative practices of the culture’s artists.1 Most art historians turned their backs on this literature; those who acknowledged it failed to discuss its relevance to recent times. If the texts on aesthetics were at all correct about creative processes in Hindu art, the region’s sculptors were not merely emulating older pieces, as the sharp-tongued historians contended. I wondered, nonetheless, whether these texts adequately reflected the practices of artists during the past few centuries. With reactions to the artworks ranging from disparaging to laudatory , how could I either reconcile what the scholars had been saying or ascertain the bases for their divergent opinions? Perhaps everyone was partially right, but they disagreed for reasons I could not yet grasp. The best way to clarify the situation was surely to do actual field study of the present practices of Tamil sculptors using the same techniques I had used in my earlier projects.Yes, it would be an abrupt new departure for me, but I did at least know the language, I had my professional tool kit 178 Journeys to the Edge [3.144.28.50] Project...