Alka Pandes search for beauty takes her deep into history,spirituality and mythology. The result is the book,Shringara We are dying to be thin twiggies but our bodies are not made like that. The Indian beauty is explained in our temples,in our sculptures. It shows us our morphology,we were meant to be thin-waisted and have child-bearing hips. Indian beauty is really about ananda (happiness), says Alka Pande. The Delhi-based art curator and authors latest book Shringara: The Many Faces of Indian Beauty (Rupa,Rs 2,500) comes at a time when the quest for beauty from physical to the spiritual is touching obsessive stratospheres in India. A perfect body is a nip and tuck away and meditative retreats in sylvan surroundings promise inner beauty. Shringara,meanwhile,announces some quaint truths. In the Indian tradition,there is no opposition between beauty and social responsibility,between aesthetics and ethics, writes Pande. In successive chapters,she traces the concepts of beauty from the Natyashastra,a first and second century BC treatise on poetics,dance,drama,music and other art forms,and the Navarasa,the classical definitions of flavour,to beauty in poetry,music and Shilpa Shastra or adornment in stone. Images from an array of painting traditions and stone sculptures sit beside photographs of modern theatre productions such as the controversial Ambedkar aur Gandhi by Delhi-based Asmita Theatre Group as Pande throws light on the many forms of beauty. Pictures of dancers such as Rama Vaidyanathan and Sonal Mansingh express various emotions,thus capturing beauty in hasya (joy),karuna (pathos),raudra (fury),and vira (heroism) among others. What I found was Satyam Shivam Sundaram,that truth is divinity and divinity is beautiful, says Pande. Truth,she says,is frequently difficult to accept. In the five years that it took to write the book,her bathroom mirror told Pande that she was growing old. I dont like it,I dont like it at all, she cries in mock terror,But it is the truth,so I feel more beautiful than ever before. I wont colour my hair,Ill let it grow grey. The book,that travels through the annals of history,mythology,spirituality,tribal traditions,fine arts and performing arts,however seems to come to a halt in the current age. The final segment asks a relevant question,Has the morphology of the old nayika been given up for more westernised perceptions? Do we simply venerate shringara as a holy relic of the past? Or will we have the courage to establish a new language for shringara? The answers,unfortunately,arent contained in this tome. Its a big enough subject for another book, says Pande.
