 |
Contemporary traditional art of Bangladesh Henry Glassie
The great ceramic tradition of Bangladesh unfolds in the context of geology. From the world's tallest mountains, mighty rivers roll to the sea. Their silt has built the world's widest delta. The earth of the delta is heaped into mounds that hold the villages above the flood. It is planted to rice so that people might eat. It is shaped and baked into vessels so that water can be carried, food can be cooked, and people can get though another long day. There are six hundred and eighty villages dedicated to pottery-making in Bangladesh, nearly half a million people who use clay to make art because clay is what there is. They dig and mix two kinds of clay -- one white and sandy, one black and sticky -- treading and kneading them together to make a smooth new substance for creation. The potters are predominantly Hindus. They bear the same surname -- Pal -- indicating their membership in the craft-craft-caste of the workers in clay. Most of the Pals make utilitarian ware. Women use paras, men turn the great chak. With their different techniques, women and men make identical kalshis and they collaborate in making patils -- smooth useful vessels that are slipped for brightness, fired to ruddy buff or silvery black, and then sent to market. During commercial exchange, Hindu products go to Muslim consumers, unifying society in the honorable ethic of utility. Symmetrical, smooth, and bright, the potter's vessel is at once useful and beautiful. Then utility declines and beauty rises when the pot is painted. The sakher bari, painted by Hindu women in Rajshahi, is famed in Bangladesh, and at the Mirpur Mazar, the tomb of Hazrat Shah Ali Baghdadi, I watched Nur Mohammad paint kalshis that were crafted in the Hindu villages. Born in Mirpur in 1962, Nur Mohammad is one of the seventeen decorators who create souvenirs for pilgrims to the tomb. Working quickly to a geometric scheme, color by color, Nur Mohammad coats working pots with floral designs that evoke the promised garden of the Holy Koran. Useful vessels dominate the potter's labor, but some potters specialise in images. Chittaranjan Pal was born in Bikrampur, a major source for the small earthenware statues that are sold in the markets of Dhaka and Chittagong. His father and grandfather made clay images, and Chittaranjan Pal now lives in Rayer Bazar, where, together with his wife, Mongoli Rani Pal, he molds, fires, and paints swarms of small statues. Decorative images in clay subdivide into four main classes: animals, village life, heroes, and religious icons. The animals -- the birds and fowl, the horses and cows, the lions and tigers -- are most abundant. Toys for children to use in play, items to enliven the decor of the home, they can be read as merely decorative, though subtly they can carry deep messages. Is the handsome striped tiger a beast of the jungle or an emblem of the nation? Is the bird only colorful, or is it the symbol of the soul conventional in Sufi verse? Is the lion only imposing, or is it the vahana of Durga, the prime Hindu deity of Bengal? Among the products for sale in the markets for pottery along the streets of Dhaka, enormous, vigorous horses prance out of the crowd. They were assembled of molded components, finished and fired in the workshops of Falan Chandra Pal and Joy Pal, of Maran Chandra Pal, Babu Lal Pal, and Narayan Chandra Pal, in the village of Khamarpara, Shimulia. The horse is a noble, decorative presence, suitable to the middle-class home, and it is a symbol of the mortal body that carries the soul through life as the horse carries the rider over the land. Conspicuously handsome and alive, the horse is a sign of vanity. Maran Chand Paul is the great master of animal imagery in modern Bangladesh. He has taken traditional forms from the country markets and worked to give them a new refinement. Maran Chand Paul calls himself Mritraj, the King of Clay, and he is today the most famed among the potters of Rayer Bazar, where he was born in 1946. Like his father and grandfather before him, Maran Chand Paul was raised in the potteries, but his life took a turn when Zainul Abedin, the most renowned modern artist of Bangladesh, led his students on a sketching ramble through Rayer Bazar. Like the Swedish, artists who summered in the country, painting the people and the landscape, and whose fears for the death of the picturesque led to efforts at preservation and eventually, through the construction of Skansen, to the worldwide movement for open-air museums, Zainul Abedin and his students became interested in the people and in the preservation of their art. A collector of folk art who envisioned a museum for Bangladesh on the Skansen model, Zainul Abedin had served since 1949 as the principal of the Art College, now part of Dhaka University. He believed that Rayer Bazar's old pottery and tradition could survive only if it opened to include, as it has, Japanese techniques of shaping and English methods of glazing. Zainul Abedin brought Maran Chand Paul to the Art College. There Maran Chand Paul's education continued, and there he works as an instructor, using the knowledge he gained in his familial workshop to help his students realise their innovative plans. With his colleagues in Rayer Bazar, Mohammad Ali and Subash Chandra Pal, Maran Chand Paul is a leader among the modernizing potters of Bangladesh. He is the master of a workshop that supplies toys for export, and he is an artist, widely recognised for two creations. The first, a part horse, was inspired by an earthenware horse from Bankura, West Bengal, which C.M. Murshid asked him to replicate when he was Pakistan's ambassador to China. C.M. Murshed chose a peculiarly Bengali form to use as an ambassadorial gift. It was a statement of cultural commitment in the ambit of political tensions between East Pakistan -- the Bangladesh of the future -- and West Pakistan. As it was for C.M. Murshid, the horse is a symbol of Bengal for Maran Chand Paul. It has proved to be such a successful commodity that he has created horses in many sizes, merging ideas from West Bengal and Bangladesh in the smaller versions, and he used the Bankura horse as a model in creating an earthenware elephant, the second of his signal forms. His elephant is symmetrically shaped in a mold, fastidiously finished by hand, and enriched with applied ornamental detail. For their creators and consumers, earthenware birds and animals are depictions of the wonders wrought by God. They evoke the beauty and power of nature. The transformation of nature into culture is the topic of a second class of decorative image. It embodies affection for the human world, for the very land shaped and shared by Muslims and Hindus. The potter's form is a sculpture in relief: the single "wall plate" made for hanging , or the suite of "terracotta" tiles. The subject is rural Bangladesh: the river winding past forested banks, the houses of bamboo and thatch or corrugated iron, the spread of the agricultural landscape, and the common labor of women and men. Subash Chandra Pal in Rayer Bazar and Nepal Chandra Pal in the village of Kakran have filled many commissions for terracotta portrayals of the lush landscape of Bangladesh. In the village of Kagajipara, the brothers Santosh Chandra Pal and Govinda Chandra Pal sculpt exquisite depictions of the land. The boats on the river, the houses in the village, the potters at work, and the Bauls in song -- are all closely observed and meticulously executed. Amulya Chandra Pal, their neighbour in Kagajipara, is admirable for his bold style. He crafts images of animals. He sculpts pictures from the land, symbolising the nation through rural scenery and labor. And he symbolises the nation through portraits of its heroes. The heroes that the potters select for sculptural presence are the culture's great poets, its masters of the language. Bangladesh is a place of beautiful views, and it is a place famed for the quantity and quality of its poetry. Amulya Chandra Pal is a poet as well as a potter. He was born about 1937 into an old pottery family, but his career did not truly begin, he says, until he married at the age of twenty and received encouragement from his wife's grandmother, Ashtrasukhi Pal. Amulya Chandra Pal has created many unusual images, including a portrait of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, the nineteenth-century Bengali poet who reconfigured myth into drama and epic, becoming one of those -- like his Finnish contemporary Elias Lönnrot -- who would form the national tradition into coherent verse before, through action, it could be shaped into political independence. But, like the other potters, Amulya Chandra Pal most often portrays the poets who make a pair in modern Bangladesh, as Shakespeare and Milton, rendered by the potters of Staffordshire, made a pair in Victorian England. One is Rabindranath Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize in 1913 and introduced Bengali literature to the world. The other is Kazi Nazrul Islam, called the rebel poet, in whose veins, Mahatma Gandhi said, freedom flowed. One a Hindu, the other a Muslim, these are the men of our century who most beautifully shaped the language shared by all in Bengal. Animals, village life, and heroic poets make three of the classes of decorative image. Fourth is the religious icon. For his Hindu customers, Amulya Chandra Pal sculpts and fires images of Saraswati, of Ganesh, of Radha and Krishna. For his Muslim customers, he creates depictions of mosques. Molded and fired images of mosques and especially of the Hindu deities are made commonly by potters in Bangladesh. The religious topic of the fourth class of decorative image leads us toward the pinnacle of the potter's art in Bangladesh: the murti, the unfired image of the deity that is used in worship. Both women and men make utilitarian vessels. Only men make murtis. Their work begins with a prayer, a mantra of praise that brings a direct revelation of the divine to the mind. Then as the artist of realism works to realise an image that registers on the retina, the maker of murtis works to realise an image that God placed before the mind's eye. As the artists describe it, God -- called Bhagaban, called Allah -- is omnipresent and without form. God appears in the mind in the form of a particular deity. The deities each have their spheres, their missions. In working to advance a mission of God on earth, the artist forms an armature of sticks, binds it with rice straw, and then covers the straw with clay, working to set into the world the image that appeared in his mind. His work is driven by a desire for beauty. In realising the aesthetic of the murti, the artist pitches every motion toward unnatural perfection. Nature's implicit orders are extracted, refined geometrically, and materialised in a singing symmetry of form. Nature's roughness is erased in dampened layers of fine clay. Smooth and idealised -- exhibiting the qualities found generally in what is called folk art -- the murti is not a failed attempt to picture a woman out of the world. This is a goddess, perfect in beauty and not of this world. I learned by watching and talking with the artists, with Manindra Chandra Pal and Sumanta Pal in Kagajipara, Babu Lal Pal in Khamarpra, and Lal Chandra Pal in Rayer Bazar. But I learned the most from Haripada Pal, sculptor on Shankharibazar in Old Dhaka. Born in 1947, in Norpara, Shimulia, Haripada Pal was trained in his craft by his father, Jhar Chandra Pal, and by his grandfather Niroda Prasad Pal. Learning all he could in the village, he left for Dhaka as a teenager. Then he went west to Calcutta and east to Tripura, working to bring his gift to maturity. Trained in esoteric interpretation by the Sadhu Surendra Chandra Sarkar, Haripada Pal speaks deep words as well as shaping beautiful statues out of clay. Haripada Pal's work is an aesthetic act and an act of devotion. In the clay, he says, there is the seed of creation, the presence of God that springs to life with prayer. In his body, there is a drop of God, the soul that enables all action. As he slowly massages the clay, urging it towards perfect form, the power in his body surges through his fingers to unite with the seed of creation in the clay. This fusion of divine power is sustained by the dampness that abides in the clay. The potter of India burns the clay to purify it, but Haripada Pal says that fire kills the power that lives in the moist interior of the murti. The statue's interior is for power. Its exterior is for beauty. When it is dry enough, the dark clay is covered with a coat of thickened white paint that seals the surface and prepares it for the application of luminous color. Bright paint completes the aesthetic programme, and on the day set in scripture, the murti is installed for worship. The murti is not God. It is a receptacle for God's power in the form of a particular deity: Durga or Kali, Saraswati or Lakshmi, Ganesh or Krishna or Vishnu. As the potter Amulya Chandra Pal puts it, Hindus do not pray to the murti, but through it, just as Muslims do not pray to the Mihrab in the mosque, but through it to God. The murti is a prayer, a device of communication. As the artist called the deity into the mind with a prayer, now the Brahmin calls the deity into the clay with a prayer. The deity descends. The crowd presses forward, straining to take darshan. Their eyes, meet the eyes of the murti. The water in the body connects with the water in the statue. The soul in the body connects with the deity in the image. Communication becomes possible. Haripada Pal calls the murti a mediator. It opens a channel between the worlds. Requests are made, gifts are given and received, and then the puja ends. The drums cease, the incense smokes no more. The deity is gone, and the statue is empty, a pretty shell, bereft of power. It is carried to the riverside in a carnivalesque procession, and, to the ululation of the women, immersed. Unfired clay melts back into the water from which it came, becoming the silt out of which the kalshis and the murtis of the future will be made. The cycles continue. The rivers go on flowing. Haripada Pal says that some people find it strange that he would work for a month to create a statue that will exist for only one day. But once the deity has left it, he says, the murti is of no more value than the body after the soul has flown. Some bury the body, others burn it, and the murti must be sacrificed in running water. His livelihood and his devotion require repeated creation. During creation, he unites with God, and he responds honorably to God's gift of talent by striving to make every murti as beautiful as it can be. Haripada Pal is a success in the world, respected in his community as a great artist, and his hope is that his effort will so please God that he will be released from the cycles of reincarnation and launched into a state of perpetual bliss. Shaped of mud, then sacrificed in the river, the murti repeats the cycles of birth and rebirth. Its impermanence is a perplex to the historian of art. The potter's greatest creations do not last beyond the period of the ritual. Only the ethnographer on the spot gets to see and record them. But the potters also create for the temples. The temple to Kali on Shankharibazar contains a monumental image of the goddess, sculpted by Haripada Pal and ornamented by the goldsmiths of Tanti Bazar. Painted clay murtis are found in the temples, and it is fortunate for art historians that the potters use their modeling skills to shape figures that are cast in metal. The ancient bronze and the modern work in brass or copper is a tangible shadow of the murti in clay. Sankar Dhar works in a shop a few blocks from Haripada Pal's in Old Dhaka. He was born into a family of carpenters in 1957. His father worked for the temples, framing the lion seats, the ornate wooden stages that shelter the deities. Sankar Dhar continues his father's line in wood, but early in his life he began to work in clay. He was not taught, he says; he learned by experimentation. Had he received a degree from an educational institution, he believes, his talent might have brought him wealth, but he comforts himself by observing that the great poets Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam were, like him, self-educated, and in his art he fulfills his inner passion. At work in the clay, Sankar Dhar makes murtis for pujas, and, like Haripada Pal, he sculpts human figures to be used in the displays in shop windows. Haripada Pal once made a stunningly realistic portrait of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who would have been the Washington or Ataturk of Bangladesh if his bright life had not been cut short by brutal assassins. Sankar Dhar also excels at portraiture, and he has made clay models of the deities for sand-casting in brass. His gleaming image of Durga, cast in the scared blend of eight metals, stands now in the sanctuary of the Dhakeswari Mandir in Dhaka. Sankar Dhar's creations in wood and metal carry us away from work in the clay, but the potter's art has provided a pattern, derived from Bangladeshi tradition, that will help organize our thinking as we shift to exploration of other media. Utility is not belittled; it is stressed. The potter's common vessels are useful, and so is the potter's greatest work. The murti is used by people to connect with God so that they might receive the blessings that make life on the earth tolerable. All the works are marked by symmetry in form and by smooth, bright surfaces. Then they divided by function into the plain tool, the ornamented tool, the decorative image, and the sacred image. And the third of those classes, the decorative image, subdivides into animals, village life, heroes, and religious icons. Photos: Amirul Rajiv Henry Glassie is a folklorist and emeritus College Professor of Folklore at Indiana University Bloomington. This article is excerpts from the 'Contemporary Traditional Art of Bangladesh Exhibition 2000' catalogue of Bangladesh National Museum.
|
Bangla Proverb: Baro mashe têro parbon Bhalobashar nouka pahar boie jae |
