Never a Good Fight

Why are battles so one-sided in our visual representations of conflict? Why is there never a possibility that the outcome could be reversed?

Any nation’s art is most alive at its dead ends. Inside the Agra Fort, the marble brackets that hold up the roof of Shah Jahan’s palace are so voluptuously carved that they look biomorphic. We seem to be just two degrees away from having apsaras hold up the bedroom of a Muslim king. Staring at these brackets, I imagine Shah Jahan and Dara Shikoh steering the empire to the doorstep of a new, liberal, Indian vision of Islam; but then Aurangzeb won.
In a temple in Hampi, Krishna Deva Raya’s triumph over the king of Orissa is depicted on the entranceway—a radical break from the purely mythological focus of almost all our temple art. The king leads his helmeted mercenaries and horsemen to victory over the enemy—it is like a newspaper cover splash. Could this have been the start of an engagement with contemporary political and social realities in the temples? But then Hampi was sacked.
When I think of all that is tantalising in classical Indian art—when I sum up the what-might-have-beens—then it seems to me that our greatest achievement is our greatest dead end.

And this is not the Taj Mahal.

A few years ago, I was in the Janpath area of New Delhi, when an auto-rickshaw drove past; instead of the image of a film hero or starlet that normally occupies this spot, the back of the vehicle bore just these words in Hindi: Jeevan Hai Sangharsh [life is struggle].

I had just read a book on Chola sculpture, so I began to think what an unusual statement this was in the context of Indian art.

The Greeks had a word that was similar to sangharsh. They called it agon. When you study the images of centaurs fighting giants on the Parthenon temple of Athens (now at the British Museum in London), you cannot tell which side is going to win the battle; in some the centaurs are triumphant, in others the giants. Art historians call this the ‘Homeric spirit’. If a battle was worth showing, the Athenian artist believed, it had to be a battle of equals. All that we cherish in Classical Greek culture—democracy, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the histories of Thucydides—happened because that culture glorified agon: conflict without easy resolution.

The Homeric spirit is present in The Mahabharata; the Kauravas, though evil, are every bit as valiant as the Pandavas. In visual representation, however, battles are always one-sided.  In the most famous of our icons—the Dancing Nataraja—Lord Shiva stands with his foot on the demon Mara: the battle is over. And so it is in every other icon. Art is dedicated to conquest—the moment after conflict has been resolved. So Krishna gloats over the snake. So Goddess Durga prepares, scimitar in hand, to behead the demon she has vanquished. Even in heterodox icons, it is thus: take the Tantric image of Goddess Kali dancing over the dazed Shiva. There is no possibility that these outcomes could be reversed.

What is conspicuously missing from Indian visual art (until about the 19th century) is agon.

Except in one place.

In 2003, I took an all-night bus from Bombay to Aurangabad. In the morning, I checked in at the MSTDC guest house, and went on a state tourist bus with people from around the world. We had all come to see Ajanta, and the bus took us right there: we spent the day wandering about paintings illustrating the life of the Buddha.

Our guide indicated, almost apologetically, that we had another day in our tour: “For Ellora.”

Half the people—all the Japanese tourists—had left by the next day. In the morning, we got to Ellora. Taking us around dull dim caves, the guide explained that though Ellora had once been painted, the dye had worn away over the centuries. The place seemed like a weaker decoction of Ajanta. And then we came to Cave No 16, the Kailashnath Temple.

There was a striking beauty and fluidity in the giant sculptures outside the temple; and a sense of drama, as we walked through the doorway to discover a soaring, multi-storeyed courtyard, with free-standing victory pillars and a stone elephant. We learnt that this was a monolithic temple—all carved top-down out of one rock. That was overwhelming enough: but for me, the crucial detail was something the guide had not bothered to talk about. Holding up the base of the main temple was a frieze of elephant heads, each beautifully carved; every now and then, one of the elephants turned to the side to fight with a lion. This was no graceful jousting between the animals: it was a matter of life and death, and shown as such. Trunks, claws, and teeth were all tangled up; the fighting pairs of animals were sometimes cleverly positioned so that you had to turn a corner to see the full image. In this way, the sculptors kept me going round and round the frieze, until the guide said we had to go.

After all these years, I am still going round and round, and the elephants are still fighting the lions in my mind.

In my travels to temples, palaces, and mosques around India, I have seen skill, colour, detail, and drama, but never again have I seen such a brilliantly choreographed or sustained representation of conflict.

It is probably no accident that a dialectical image is embedded in the heart of the Kailashnath Temple; it is surrounded by Jain and Buddhist caves, and the desire to outshine their religious competitors may have spurred the Rashtrakutas, a medieval dynasty, to make this temple as grand as possible. Perhaps there is political significance to the emblems of lions and elephants. We know so little about the Rashtrakutas: or why this temple did not lead to others like it, and an indigenous art of agon. Yet it stands, and even today—when decades of neglect and the permitting of active worship at the temple have damaged the sculptures—it is still at the apex of our artistic achievement. For the Kailashnath Temple is something that says, perhaps singularly in the Indian tradition, Jeevan Hai Sangharsh.

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