Speaking Tree - Spanning two diverse cultures and continents

Speaking Tree - Spanning two diverse cultures and continents:

Earlier this year, i took a boat ride on the Ganga at Varanasi with photographer Hari Mahidhar. We were shooting boats helmed by khevats. As in life or allegory, the khevat takes the pilgrim of life across realms and regions in his craft. In his bhajan, ‘Payoji meine Ramratan dhan payo’, for instance, Sant Tulsidas compares the sadhguru to the oarsman, or the khevatiya, who ferries his disciples in the boat called Truth across the samsara-ocean or bhavasagara.

Sant Tulsidas left his mortal coil at the southern-most Assi Ghat in Varanasi, the later haunt of long-time foreign students, researchers and tourists.

This was also where the Swiss artist, art historian and cultural ambassador between India and Switzerland, Alice Boner, lived from 1938 to 1978. Boner proved to be a formidable cultural guide, or a cicerone, in her own right. Her terraced Assi Sangam House became a confluence, a congenial meeting point and a platform for visiting artists, musicians and savants. Nor was it artists alone who were drawn to Alice Boner’s hospitality. On December 28, 1937, after his lecture at the Faculty of Psychology at the Benares Hindu University, Alice managed to lure the renowned Swiss psychologist Carl G Jung to her home for a dinner and “an unforgettable evening”.

Today, her house serves as the Alice Boner Institute supported by the Swiss Arts Council. The Institute and library are primarily devoted to research in Indian arts; it also supports peripatetic artists, performers and philosophers engaged in the deepening ties and expansion of cultural links between the two countries much as Alice Boner did in her lifetime. Indeed, the experience of spanning two diverse cultures and continents with her truly multi-faceted interests provided Alice Boner with a rare insight.

She contributed significantly to making India’s culture known abroad: With Uday Shankar and his troupe, she played a key role in sparking the renaissance of Indian dance with a worldwide appeal. Through her artwork and her scholarly publications and collaborative projects with various artists and thinkers, she added greatly to the sensitisation and understanding of Indian art throughout the world. In her very first stay in Varanasi in February 1930, for instance, Alice Boner observed that everything in this ‘City of Light’ on the Holy Ganga was determined by religion; and that included even the slightest act of daily life: “If you want to eradicate religion here you are cutting the vital lifeline.

” By immersing her own daily life in this numinous spiritual dimension, she began to experience and enjoy a heightened measure of spiritual comfort in her creative life. This provided her with a new understanding of the sacred arts tradition of India: ‘Sacred art does not exist for itself but exists to reveal the One Transcendental Truth,” she wrote. “The primary purpose of sacred images is not to give aesthetic enjoyment but to serve as focusing points for the spirit. ”In a similar vein, Alice Boner conceptualised a series of paintings pertaining to the Indian ideas of cosmological cycles of creation, evolution and destruction, which led to the notion of the Great triptych or Trimurti.

The subject of Alice Boner’s paintings represents the concept of Prakriti, Vishvarupa, and Samhara Kali. (An exhibition on Alice Boner’s legacy is on at the National Museum in New Delhi).