 As I was strolling amidst the magnificent ambiance of Kailasanathar Kovil at Kanchipuram, I was assiduously searching for some remnants of the Pallava murals. It is said that the walls and the interiors of the fifty eight sub shrines of the temple were once covered with paintings of myriad hues. Almost all the paintings on the exterior walls have been lost and only few faint fragments remain inside some of the sub shrines.
I looked keenly in each of niches of the sub shrines and finally could spot this beautiful visage of an unknown person in one of its dark corners. I had to bend my head at an awkward angle to have a glimpse of it. What I saw in the dim light left me spellbound. In spite of the vagaries of time and years of neglect, her face looked so ethereal! There was a haunting wistfulness in her face. Who was this doe eyed damsel? Did she emerge from the creative imagination of an artist who remains unidentified? Or was she real? There is something Elysian in the beautiful brush strokes of the artist, the play of light across the face and the choice of colors. In spite of its fading layers and evanescent tints which seem to have deliquesced with time, there is a transcendental quality to the painting that lingers on. When I looked at her closely I felt that there was a striking resemblance to the paintings of Ajanta. It left me wondering whether the artists who painted them at Ajanta migrated over a period of time southwards! It is a fact of history too that the Pallava dynasty gained prominence after the eclipse of the Satavahanas whom they served as feudatories. The paintings at Kailasanathar temple along with the remnants at Talagishwara temple at Panamalai are the only two surviving examples of the Pallava mural paintings. Lurking in the shadows Her mysterious allure Shines through The veils of history . . . Murals are my muse and I have posted earlier about several of them which I was privileged to see. This link which is about the murals of Hampi also has links to earlier posts about murals in Switzerland, Rajasthan and Kerala: https://www.profraguram.com/musings--reflections/entrancing-murals-of-hampi In February this year, after lots of efforts and assistance from various sources, I was able to have a glimpse of several ancient murals which are away from the public eye in some of the most ancient temples in Tamil Nadu. Will write about them soon….watch this space!
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 This morning as I was listening to the bird calls, something caught my attention. A small leaf shimmering in the early morning light was twirling in midair. Its pirouette would have put a talented ballet dancer to shame. It was careening through space as if testing an invisible force in the air. Slowly it descended down and found its home, secure among the other leaves under the tree.
For a moment I pictured myself sitting under the tree and that leaf falling on my lap as a book. As we course through our lives, we try to seek comfort in those persons or things that convey a sense of belonging, and for me personally it has always been amongst books. My passion for books has its origin in my mother, Saraswathi Ramnath. She lost her father who was a Gandhian and a popular doctor early in life and was married at the tender age of sixteen. In addition to being a housewife, she had to bring up her brother and an infant sister. Caught up in these demands, she couldn’t pursue higher education. She too was drawn to Gandhi and when he gave a call that learning and using a common language, Hindi, would unite the nation against the colonial power, she pursued it on her own with zest and qualified as a Vidwan. That opened up an immense vista of discovery of Indian literature and she commenced writing, focusing on translating from Hindi to Tamil and vice versa. My earliest memories of her are the ones when I see her quietly sitting by herself, after finishing household chores, writing furiously. This practice continued all through her life. Her days were filled with bring up three children, one of whom was differentially-abled, taking care of the household, teaching students Hindi and writing. Even now I am amazed as to how she found time amongst all these demanding tasks to pursue her call. She was the one who introduced me to books. There was no cake on birthdays but a stack of children’s books. I devoured them as fast as they came and my ambit of reading expanded with years. She would take me to the Connemara Library when she had to do her research for her writings and I would wander among its beautiful environs with soaring ceilings and books stacked on high racks. There were volumes of the Illustrated London News beautifully bound in leather and art books containing beautiful reproductions. Running my hands over them was itself an idyllic experience. It was a tantalizing world, just waiting at my fingertips. I devoured all the books I could lay my hands on and it wasn’t surprising that I needed glasses at an early age! It wasn’t just books but also authors I was besotted with. All the leading writers in Tamil would visit our house and there would be lively exchange of ideas. I would watch silently from the side amazed at their breadth of knowledge. As a child, I would keenly look forward to visit Azha Valliappa’s house where he used to arrange weekly story telling sessions “Kathai Sollum Nigazhchi”. His wife would provide us with snacks, and we would settle down to listen to his stories. He would also encourage us to sing along with him. Another visitor was the poet Namakkal Ramalingam Pillai. He used to collect all the children in the place where we stayed and tell us stories. As I grew older I was smitten with the writings of Jayakanthan. To hear him articulate his ideas with such conviction and clarity was an unforgettable experience. I had a long personal association with Ashokamitran. He would often sit in a quiet corner of a park near our house and write. He was a keen observer of human feelings and frailties which he described with a subtle sense of humor. My mother was also involved in organizing the First All India Writers Conference in which all leading writers from across the country participated. As a small boy in half shorts I ambled among them clutching my autograph book requesting them to sign in it. The first person to sign in it was Tarashankar Banerjee. It is my most precious possession which I have guarded against the ravages of time. Books continued to flow from the pen of my mother. She had three major surgeries and a very rare malignancy later on in life. But travails of the body had little impact on her abiding engagement with literature. She must have written more than a hundred books across various genres. She wrote a series of books on the major rivers of India, chronicling their history, legends associated with them as they traverse the land from their origin till they merge into the sea. Her forte was translation. That was no mean task especially at a time when Hindi was anathema in Tamil Nadu. Through her work she opened avenues of readership across the nation for all leading writers in Tamil. She translated Kamba Ramayanam into Hindi and the President at that time Sri Shankar Dayal Sharma, read the book and invited her over to the Rashtrapathi Bhavan to personally felicitate her. Many accolades and award came later in life, Dwivageesh Award from Bharatiya Anuwaad Parishat, Akshara Award, Kendriya Hindi Sanstan Award, Souhardha Samman from Uttar Pradesh Govt, Saraswathi Puraskar, Award from Shantiniketan in recognition of her contribution to Indian literature through translation and then the Sahithya Academy Award. Her passion for the world of literature was infectious. She taught generations of students, encouraging them to explore works of literature. Hearing her explain Kabir’s dohas was an unforgettable experience. Understandably she has had a huge impact on me. With her by my side I have ventured into the vast landscape of literary works, unraveling in the process the far reaches of creativity expressed through words. Though I miss her physical presence, every time I discover an unknown author or savor a new book, I feel that she is along with me relishing every word of it. When I leaf through her books which have weathered with time and whose pages have become brittle, I am reminded of her unabated struggles in writing them. Much has been written about how pain and suffering interweave with creativity. The connection between suffering and creative expression is one of the most elusive of human stories. All through her life my mother’s body was ravaged by one illness or the other. But that didn’t reign in her spirits. She embraced her pains and they became a partner in her life. Her creative trope transcended the travails of her physical body. She had to endure a plethora of adversities, yet in the midst of them her spirits soared like the phoenix. Her life has been an inspiration in my professional disposition in addressing the needs of those who are in throes of suffering. I strive to provide space for patients to tell their stories, uninterrupted. We all live in storied lives and want to share our stories with a responsive listener. Often stories that are told in therapy are the ones that cannot be told in everyday life. My love of books continues unabated as witnessed in the shelves overflowing with them at home. In spite of Ahalya cautioning me not to add to them, I follow Oscar Wilde’s dictum that “the best way to get rid of temptation is to yield to them” and keep buying books. Turns out that bibliophileness is genetic! I seem to have passed the bibliophene gene on to our son Rahul too! For me books are like a Borgesian kaleidoscope, in which each reflection sparks another one..no pattern is ever the same and every book is a new revelation. And I owe that debt to my mother… I am a book Foreward Written by my mother…  When I was studying at JIPMER, Pondicherry, one of my favorite haunts in the city was Honesty Book Shop which was manned by one of the gentlest person I have ever known. He was the one who introduced me to RD Laing. During one such visit, he silently handed over a paperback titled Space Within The Heart by Aubrey Menen. I returned to my room and finished the book at one stretch. The writer, after the demise of his biracial parents was driven by a quest to discover his personal identity. He isolated himself in a small room in the Thieves Quarter in Rome and proceeded to examine his life peeling off layer after layer of his personality and the events that had shaped it in the past, to finally arrive at the silent “space within the heart”. I was drawn to the evocative narrative about the search for self in isolation. Around that time, I also read a small account in a journal about a French aristocrat Xavier de Maistre who was placed in house arrest for 42 days in 1790.
I tried to imagine and visualize as to how a person would experience and cope with isolation for long periods. One day I requested my close friend Surendran to pose behind a partly closed door and took a photograph with a borrowed camera. When I described this to Mr Krishnan in the photography section at JIPMER, he was intrigued by it and helped me to take a print of it. I titled it ‘From The Shelter Of Silence’. Encouraged by him, I sent it to the All India Intermedical Youth Festival at AIIMS where it received the first prize and a commendation. During the period of enforced lockdown due to COVID, I was wondering whether I could get hold of the journal kept by Xavier de Maistre and was fortunate to locate a copy of it, ‘Voyage Around My Room’. It was a fascinating read! In 1790 Xavier de Maistre was punished for having gotten into a duel and was put under house arrest for forty-two days. de Maistre adroitly took advantage of his sequestration, finding within his own four walls a wealth of material to dwell on and kept a journal. Physically, de Maistre could not roam far and so most of the travels were, indeed, leaps of the imagination -- but he did find a surprising amount of material in his fairly comfortable room. He invites us to join him… “we will travel in short marches…yielding merrily to our imagination, we will follow it wherever it pleases to lead us”. He slowly leads the reader around the room, describing the pictures on the walls, the vistas and prospects within and beyond the room, exploring and dwelling on objects that are otherwise taken for granted. And what he sees brings back vibrant memories and leads him to look at things anew. The room is "that enchanted realm containing all the wealth and riches of the world". At one point, de Maistre, is startled by what he sees outside his window: “A heap of unfortunate folk, lying half naked under the porches of those sumptuous apartments, on the point of expiring from cold and misery. What a sight! I wish this page of my book could be known throughout the world; I would like it to be known that, in this city—where everything breathes opulence—during the coldest winter nights, a host of wretches sleep out in the open, with only a boundary stone on which to lay their heads. Here you see a group of children huddling close together so as not to die of the cold. There it’s a woman, shivering and voiceless to complain. The passers-by come and go, quite untouched by a sight to which they are used”. de Maistre proceeds at a leisurely pace and the journey is non linear, offering us rich insights as to how a person in confinement can cope with isolation through heightened perception and vivid imagination. Written in the form of short chapters, each one is like a polished gem. de Maistre’s work springs from a profound insight: that the pleasure we derive from our journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to. If only we could apply a travelling mindset to our own rooms and confined spaces, we might find these places becoming no less interesting than the world outside. In this world of hyper-chatter, we are less likely to observe and hear ourselves and unwittingly COVID has provided us with such an opportunity… It is a break in our everyday busyness in which we immerse ourselves. The first thing we experience is silence the moment we retreat from the outside world. The roots of the English term “silence” has its antecedents is the Gothic verb anasilan, a word that denotes the wind dying down, and the Latin dēsinere, a word meaning “stop.” Both of these etymologies suggest that silence is bound up with the idea of interrupted action. The pursuit of silence likewise begins with a surrender of the chase, the abandonment of efforts to impose our will and vision on the world. Not only is it about standing still, it is also a step inwards from the tussle of life. My first experience of immense silence was when we spent a night in the sand dunes of Khuri. The silence of the desert took hold and overwhelmed me. It was the deepest silence I have ever known. There was nothing to hear. It was absolutely still, absolutely silent. The desert night was not very dark and the sky was deep – the stars did actually ‘twinkle’, and I had a sense of their distance – even distant stars seemed near, as well as larger or brighter. The starlit sky was an infinite space and one could gaze at it forever. Underneath my hand when I reached out from the dhurrie, the sand was made of tiny grains, very cool and clean, fine-textured, soft against my fingers. It was probably the most profound silence I had ever engaged with. Perhaps this is the silence that hermits seek in the desert. Glimpses of the magical sandscapes of Khuri are at: photos.app.goo.gl/PyRP2rSB88Pt84w8A We all live very noisy lives. Our silent spaces in cities have become constricted. It is not surprising to note that the word “noise,” derives from the Latin root nausea! We probably do not need a pervasive silence—desirable as this might seem. What we do need is more spaces in which we can interrupt our general experience of noise. We must also aspire to a greater proportion of hushed stillness in the course of our everyday life. And realize that many of the major physical forces on which we depend are silent – gravity, electricity, light. We have not been locked away; we have been given an opportunity to silently discover a range of unfamiliar, sometimes daunting experiences, to maximize the connection with our inner worlds. It has given us a space to appreciate a great deal of what we generally see without ever properly noticing them. As Thoreau suggested we will have to become “our own streams and oceans; to explore our own higher latitudes.” After these transformative few weeks we will recover our freedoms. The world will be ours to roam in, once more. As we resume our journey in the garden of life, hopefully we will see it from a different perspective than that we were accustomed to… As Seneca commented long ago,“We are waves of the same sea, leaves of the same tree, flowers of the same garden.” Looking forwards to your comments...and do post them here! |
Dr Raguram
Someone who keeps exploring beyond the boundaries of everyday life to savor and share those unforgettable moments.... Archives
May 2024
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