Art & Entertainment

In The Court Of Tara

Undimmed by a millennium, Alchi's Buddhist murals point to a maturity beyond Ajanta

Advertisement

In The Court Of Tara
info_icon

A richly painted Avalokiteshwara and a sensuous, full-bosomed Tara, the female Buddhist divinity, greet you from long panels floating down the outer walls of Delhi's National Museum, their reds, purples and greens luminous even under a watery winter sun. These colours, belonging to the finest surviving examples of Indian Buddhist painting after Ajanta, have not lost their intensity over a thousand years. Still, capturing them on camera for an exhibition presented by the Museum and the Central Institute of Buddhist Studies in Leh was no easy task for photographer Aditya Arya, who flew in tall ladders, scaffolding, lights, and sophisticated equipment from Delhi to shoot last summer in the home of these extraordinary murals—the cramped, pitch-dark 11th century Alchi monastery in the valley of the upper Indus near Leh.

While the monastery's treasure trove of paintings and woodcarvings have been photographed before, this was the most comprehensive exercise, in which Arya was asked to shoot thousands of images, using minimally invasive lighting, not just for display but to document every detail of a heritage that may not last another thousand years. It is a visual feast that unfolds on mud walls covered with soot (from butter lamps lit over centuries), atop doorways, and across the bodies of giant stucco statues in the monastery. Some of the most remarkable scenes are those painted, with a miniaturist's eye for detail, on the dhoti-like garment worn by the monastery's two-storey Avalokiteshwara—gods, goddesses, kings, courtiers, soldiers, dancers, gambolling hares and muscular horses, all brimming with an exuberant vitality.

Advertisement

info_icon
Goddess in a 'peacock' cloak in a Tantrik ritual

The anonymous painters who made Alchi come alive are said to be from Kashmir, and this is the finest extant example of their genius (many others, in what is now western Tibet, were destroyed during China's Cultural Revolution). Perhaps even more than its religious iconography, Alchi is famous for scenes capturing courtly life—royal hunts, banquets and the like—which provide a wealth of detail about contemporary lifestyles. The richly embroidered and printed robes, including one patterned like peacock feathers, are especially striking. Their intricate detailing suggests, according to art historian Deborah Klimburg-Salter of the University of Vienna, that the artists modelled these on actual textiles of that time.

Faces, hairstyles, costumes and headdresses in a famous banquet scene painted on one of Alchi's walls have tantalised scholars for years for their Central Asian/Silk route echoes. Renowned US-based scholar Pratapaditya Pal, in his authoritative study of Alchi, says the murals reveal "an eclectic civilisation" in which elements from Tibet, Kashmir, the Indo-Aryan, Iranian and Turko-Mongol cultures, even of Byzantium, commingled. This, he says, was because the Kashmir of the times was a remarkably cosmopolitan place "where Tocharians and Turks, Iranians and Chinese, Dards and Tibetans rubbed shoulders".

Advertisement

info_icon

For all the excitement generated by Central Asian resonances in the Alchi paintings, what strikes Klimburg-Salter most is that their iconography is distinctively Indian, but "the standard Indian themes have been elaborated in an exotic way...it is a fantasy world, and a quite astonishing one". Agrees architect Romi Khosla, who has worked on the conservation of Ladakh and Himachal monasteries: "They show that an Indian style of Buddhist painting, well established in Ajanta, continued to evolve and mature. After Ajanta and Ellora, Alchi's are the most important, and easily as important, Buddhist wall paintings." And they are the only surviving examples of a style of painting that was once prevalent in Kashmir.

While the Buddhist paintings enclosed within the simple walls of monasteries like Alchi, Nako (Kinnaur) and Tabo (Spiti) survived in the dry cold of these remote mountains, those in the plains largely did not, making these treasures all the more valuable. "Of paintings in Nalanda and Kanchi we only have fragments. Because of the harsh climate—the heat, the monsoons—they did not last," says Klimburg-Salter. The startlingly luminous colours at Alchi, though, are one of the many unsolved mysteries about the murals. "We don't know why they are so luminous. The Japanese have done complex analyses of painting techniques at Bamiyan, and some of these techniques may have been used. It is not just the colours, but the building materials and surface sealants used." The current exhibition (on till February 5 but likely to be extended) is—or rather should be—a reminder that there is a huge amount of research still waiting to be done, and that Indian scholarly interest has been mostly lacking. Says Khosla: "Western scholars of Himalayan Buddhist art have taken much more interest in this area than anyone in India itself, there are no institutions here for the study of these ancient paintings and art. We need to connect with this tradition."

Tags

    Advertisement

    Advertisement

    Advertisement

    Advertisement

    Advertisement

    Advertisement