Brimming with Life

I remember the drill displays we had in school a long, long time ago. Innumerable girls in white, divided skirts, covering the entire expans...

I remember the drill displays we had in school a long, long time ago. Innumerable girls in white, divided skirts, covering the entire expanse of the grounds of the National Stadium in Delhi, moving with synchronised harmony to music blaring from loudspeakers. We always held a prop 8212; a forest of slim, metal-tipped batons waving in the air or perhaps flowered sticks coming together in varying arrangements. I realised that it was the youthful energy of so many of us that made it so.

Repetition of motifs achieves resonance and movement through pattern

It was also because there were so many of us dressed in a particular way, making formations and dissolving them in a set manner. A few of us would not have achieved the same effect. Our drill displays happened at a time much before the more complex and mesmerising spectacles connected with important sport events or the razzle-dazzle of Bollywood song sequences. All however, share the same things. The performers are the many parts that make the whole and the whole only acquires a meaning if it is disciplined and follows a certain pattern in its rhythm and movement.

A similar thing happens in art but since we are dealing with something inanimate, there is naturally no movement. Creativity finds other ways of making that movement happen and hence enhancing the visual quality of a particular work of art. The clue lies in the repetition of a particular motif. It is not done casually, but maintaining a balance with the size, composition, and proportions of a painting or the architectural space where it is used. The repetition of an image brings a resonance to the work, enriching its visual quality. There is a limit to which it can be done, too much bringing monotony. This resonance, the setting up of a pattern or parallelism is an important device in Indian art and used constantly. It is seen in a line-up of identical soldiers in a miniature painting, not soldiers anymore but a design with a certain rhythm.

A row of soldiers forms part of this wall art in a haveli in Shekhawati, Rajasthan

Similarly, palace arches that curve their way across a painting, quivering silver stars on a flat blue surface with perhaps a nayika dressed in stripes and dots, a lotus that proliferates its image over an entire pichwai, cavalry, infantry and horses symmetrically arranged in battle formation, an endless repetition of identical elephants carved in stone along a temple wall. There are also floral bouquets that project themselves everywhere in an Arpita Singh painting or a lotus that seeks different connotations on a single Ramachandran canvas.

Advocates of modern art call this abundance 8216;decorative8217;, claiming it lacks complexity and artistic value and finds no justification in contemporary art which seeks serious concerns and issues. But art is primarily visual, appealing to the emotions and the heart. It has to take recourse to many devices and concepts, the rhythm of parallelism being one of them.