Finding the Indian in Christian Art PDF

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Finding the Indian in While I admit that such a definition definitely reduces the number of images that one can attribute Indianness produced only in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This format of defining Indianness, or Hindu Christian Art to, it does not diminish our ability to apprecia...

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Finding the Indian in Christian Art jason keith fernandes1 The eagerness to demonstrate that there is an “Indian influence” on Christian art in Goa, or in India for that matter, has been a preoccupation that has united various groups for some time now. These groups include Catholics in Goa, as well as those within the confines of the country, and art historians across the world. This preoccupation has resulted in a certain obfuscation in the way in which we appreciate the rich treasures produced under the rubric of the IndoPortuguese, some of which are documented in this book. To my mind, the single largest problem with this preoccupation lies in the way in which we use the word “Indian”. A historically, and juridically, sensitive reading of the word would indicate that “Indian” comes into existence only after the establishment of the independent nation-state of India in 1947. Prior to this there really is no conclusive agreement on what this term could mean. While the nationalist activists against the British Raj definitely saw themselves as Indians, it needs to be recognized that they owed this term to their British overlords who administered portions of the subcontinent as British India. And while the nationalists

may have seen themselves as Indian, a number of the inhabitants of the subcontinent would not embrace this identity until after the establishment of the Indian nation-state. The term Indian may have been used by persons from outside the subcontinent, namely the European overlords, merchants and travellers, and it may have well been used by some locals, but this was by no means a privileged identity-marker for subcontinentals, who would have given primacy to caste, region, and familial identities. Indeed, in the antique period, India referred to a rather vague territory that could encompass the eastern coasts of the African continent.2 It should not surprise us, therefore, that for a long time, the Estado da India Portuguesa included Portuguese territories on the eastern coast of Africa. To this extent, it becomes difficult to speak, as some do, of an “Indian mind”. Such a singular expression of identity is often impossible without the muscled will of a nation-state firmly behind it. It may appear that our ability to trace the Indian influence on objects of Christian art in the collection of the Museum of Christian Art is substantially reduced as a result of so narrow a definition of the term Indian.

While I admit that such a definition definitely reduces the number of images that one can attribute Indianness to, it does not diminish our ability to appreciate these objects from an Indian perspective. On the contrary, it could be argued that we are now able to develop a more nuanced appreciation of these objects. Take, for example, the image of “Nirmala Matha” featured in this book. Carved in ivory, this image from the twentieth century seems to evoke the tradition of the ivory statues meant for Catholic contemplation, a number of which are featured in this book, and whose production can be dated between the seventeenth and the late eighteenth century.3 While evoking this tradition, in particular the images of the Virgin Mary, and incorporating representational elements like the crescent moon that gained currency in the course of the Reformation, this image is nevertheless distinct. It features Mary in the form of what we would now see as a Hindu goddess. Palms folded and with demure expression, this statue has Mary draped in a sari and with a distinctly Hindu crown placed on her head. Behind the figure of Mary is a prabhavali or aureole that one is more often accustomed to seeing framing the idols of Hindu deities. That the image is not of a Hindu goddess but the virgin Mother of God is indicated by the presence of the dove at the head of the aureole, replacing the demonic face that one would find in a Hindu image. This statue demonstrates Indianness at its most distinct, and it is possible that the Museum possesses no other image where the Indianness of the image is so stark. And yet, it needs to be borne in mind that the form of this Indianness, or Hindu-ness, is one that was

produced only in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This format of defining Indianness, or Hindu divinities and femininity, owes much to British Indian sensibilities, and in particular the pioneering work of the famed painter Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906). Ravi Varma gained fame not only for his novel way of representing Hindu deities, within the techniques of European academic art, but also because subsequent to the acclaim his oil paintings received, he then went on to popularize his images by printing oleographic images of them. These images gained wild popularity and were to a large extent responsible for standardizing the way one imagines Hindu deities are, and ought to be, represented.4 These representations were far from traditional, however. The sari that Ravi Varma often depicted the goddesses wearing was one that did not recognize the diversity of ways in which the garment was draped across regions and castes. Indeed, some credit Ravi Varma for having popularized a dominant form of the sari worn by contemporary Indian women.5 Further, the addition of a blouse to the attire of these goddesses was also a novelty. Within British India, the blouse had only recently become a part of the feminine ensemble, as women from upper-caste and upper-class families, especially among the Bengali bhadralok began to imitate Victorian sensibilities, both in dress and morality. As Emma Tarlo suggests, “[t]he widespread adoption of the blouse was probably the most noticeable effect of British influences on Indian women’s dress”. 6 Indeed, it could be argued that Ravi Varma’s images gained popularity precisely because they embodied the Hindu nationalist sensibilities of what their past was like, and what women with good morals ought to look like.

3. Francesco Gusella, ‘Behind the Practice of Partnership; Seventeenth Century Portuguese Devotional Ivories from West India’, in The Mercantile Effect: Art and Exchange in the Islamicate World during 17th–18th Centuries, ed. Sussan Babaie and Melanie Gibson, accessed 26 December 2019, 1. Jason Keith Fernandes is a researcher at the Centre for Research in Anthropology, ISCTE, Lisbon University Institute (DL 57/2016/CP1349/ CT0003). 2. Siddhartha Sarma, Carpenters and Kings: Western Christianity and the Idea of India (Gurgaon: Penguin Random House India, 2019), p. 16.

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https://www.academia.edu/35656815/_Behind_the_Practice_of_Partnership_Seventeenth_Century_Portugese_Devotional_Ivories_from_West_India_.

4. Tapati Guha Thakurta, ‘Westernisation and Tradition in South Indian Painting in the Nineteenth Century: The Case of Raja Ravi Varma (18481906)’, Studies in History 2, No. 2 (August 1986): 165–95, https://doi.org/10.1177/025764308600200203. 5. Enrico Castelli and Giovanni Aprile, Divine Lithography (Il Tamburo Parlante Documentation Centre and Ethnographic Museum, 2005), 27.

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The image of Nirmala Matha, therefore, is well within the ambit of this Indian or more properly, Hindu nationalist imagery. The manner in which Indian is often conflated with Hindu is another problem with the way in which many seek to demonstrate the Indianness of Christian art. This is, however, a problematic appreciation of Indianness. Once again, we need to recognize the scholarly argument that Hinduism as a discrete faith was consolidated from the diverse faith practices of Brahmanical groups across the subcontinent, especially in the context of Indian and Hindu nationalism since the mid-nineteenth century.7 Secondly, we also need to recognize that both Islam and Christianity, often seen as foreign faiths in the subcontinent, have been present here almost from the moment of their inception. That they are seen as foreign is a result of racialized Orientalist epistemologies which sought to recognize that each region had its own distinct faiths that could not be at home elsewhere. Contemporary politics will well demonstrate the problem with such an appreciation of religion. In fact, it could be suggested that the desire to demonstrate the Indian influence on Christian art in the collections of the Museum stems from the nervous desire to establish one’s Indian roots. One way out of such a problematic position lies not in trying to point out to the Indian influence on Christian or Islamic art, but by complicating the way in which we understand the term Indian in the first place. I have already pointed out, in my brief discussion of the statue of Nirmala Matha, that much of what we popularly assume to be Indian is of fairly recent provenance, and in fact owes much to British Indian

sensibilities, or more properly Victorian sensibilities adopted in British India. I have also suggested that it is not very useful conflating Hinduism with Indianness. This caution becomes especially critical when we realize that Islam has had a powerful influence on the Christian art produced in India. All too often it is assumed that the local artisans who produced Christian art were Hindu, or converted from Hinduism and estranged from their social or caste inheritance.8 This presumption ignores the fact that the subcontinental world that the early modern Portuguese entered was in fact a profoundly Islamic one. This is to say that the local artisan, if not Islamicized, was producing for clients who were used to Islamic sensibilities, especially if they were elite. This Islamic influence on local elites and other groups can be best assessed through reference to the image of Saint Christopher in the Sé Cathedral, Goa. The saint, who carries the Christ child on his shoulders, wears a loincloth much like a subcontinental peasant, but he also wears a shirt that looks distinctly like an angarkha, fastened with string rather than buttons. There are a wealth of other Islamic contributions to Christian art in India that I have discussed elsewhere9 but we should perhaps have reference to pieces from within the collection of the Museum to contemplate these possibilities.

the figures in this representation have scarves pulled over their shoulders. While this garment feature is also common to peasant European, and Portuguese women, who wore it until well into the late twentieth century, this fact once again speaks to the common codes of modesty shared by Islam and Christianity, and which could have well found their way into subcontinental depictions of the Virgin. The Islamic influence on Christian art is, unfortunately, not a subject that has received much attention. This is a lacuna that we must actively and urgently remedy because it would allow us to appreciate the wider dimensions of the Indian on Christian art. It would complicate and nuance the way in which we appreciate contemporary India, but also add richness to the way in which we appreciate the cultural currents of the subcontinent both prior, and subsequent, to the arrival of the Christian missionaries from Western Europe.

To do so, I would like to take a cue from the discussion on the statue of Nirmala Matha and contemplate the sari for a moment. In their discussion of Muslim style in South India, the anthropologists Caroline and Filippo Osella observe that “[f]or Hindu women, modesty is

6. Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (New Delhi: Viking Penguin India, 1996), p. 46. 7. See, for example, David N. Lorenzen, ‘Who Invented Hinduism?’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, No. 4 (1999): 630–59; Richard King, ‘Orientalism and the Modern Myth of “Hinduism”’, Numen 46, No. 2 (1999): 146–85. 8. John Irwin, ‘Reflections on Indo-Portuguese Art’, The Burlington Magazine 97, No. 633 (December 1955): 386–90, 386-7. 9. Jason Keith Fernandes, ‘Indo-Portuguese Art And The Space Of The Islamicate’, Parmal 7 (2008): 41–50. See also Jason Keith Fernandes, ‘The Unsung Glories of the Imam: Silence, Absence, and the Islamicate in the Kwok On Collection’s India Holdings’, Oriente, June 2019.

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about wrapping, restraining, and binding: clothes are tight, wound around the body, and jewellery such as anklets and bangles contain the bodily extremities.There is an emphasis on binding, sealing, and restraining”.10 Islamic sensibilities, on the other hand, saw such a style of clothing, which revealed and accentuated the body, as inappropriate or even dishonourable. Emma Tarlo observes that “certain Muslims used the plea of Islamic moral decency in their attempts to convert Hindus to stitched clothes”.11 Islam in this case prescribed a dress that covered one’s body fully.12 This distinction between forms of modesty can be viewed between the Nirmala Matha and other images of the Virgin. Most of the images of the Virgin Mary found in this book depict her covered in voluminous garments. One also notes an absence of ornaments on the bodies of these various statues, as opposed to the bangle that features very prominently in the image of the Nirmala Matha. A possibly Islamic sensibility is also noticed in the clothes of the statue featuring Saint Anne and the Virgin. Both

10. Caroline Osella and Filippo Osella, ‘Muslim Style in South India’, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture 11, no. 2 (1 June 2007): 233–52, https://doi.org/10.2752/136270407X202790, 236. 11. Tarlo, Op.cit, p. 29. 12. Lennart Bes, ‘Sultan among Dutchmen? Royal Dress at Court Audiences in South India, as Portrayed in Local Works of Art and Dutch Embassy Reports, Seventeenth–Eighteenth Centuries’, Modern Asian Studies 50, No. 6 (November 2016): 1792–1845, https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0026749X15000232, 1802.

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