Heritage Gold Colour Magic - Painting, Textiles, Crafts, and Music
Dr Navina Jafa
Leading Expert in South Asian Cultural Skill Mapping & Sustainable Tourism | Heritage Conservation Strategist | Innovator in Inclusive Tourism Models & Creative Community Empowerment
The idea of India is organically diverse. It is a privilege to expand public engagement with heritage. This small post reflects on the amalgamation of human thoughts, techniques that contribute to the enriched, layered comprehension of the Idea of India and the subcontinent. It aims to encourage travelers to journey India with an open mind and receive the vibrations of India’s joyful, complex, and contradictory experience of organized chaos.We all know the passion Indians have for the metal Gold. Today’s heritage window is about the color Gold that symbolizes, among other qualities – royalty, illumination, love, compassion, courage, passion, magic, and wisdom. Just a color unfolds an example of the Idea of Idea - complex, complicated, diverse and never can it be suppressed.
PAINTING :
Let us Travel first to the Tomb of Mughal Emperor Akbar situated outside the chaotic city of Agra. The color Gold is exemplified on the ceiling of the Emperor’s tomb. In the picture from Akbar’s tomb is the presence of Gold in the paintings in beautiful ceiling. ( By the way, on another note, the number of a mix of people from different cultural backgrounds in his councils of ministers is fascinating.) Perhaps the broad-minded manner to create a language in Art that involved so many cultural influences emerged from the way included representation of people from different backgrounds. For instance, in his council of ministers, Raja Todar Mal (apparently of a community called Kayasth) created a seminal financial model whose elements still work in India. THE ART ON THE CEILING OF THE TOMB: The ceiling highlights the theme of paradise—Paradise, a land of beauty, brilliance, flowering, and fruit-bearing trees. The artist paints the ceiling with Geometrical patterns and floral designs. The Gold Persian inscriptions and Gold in the surface decor paintings provide the foreword to the way inside the tomb of a magnificent emperor whose grave interestingly is in contrast simple, in peace, and hallowed power of silence.
TEXTILES:
The Hiranya ( cloth of Gold) is mentioned in the times of the Rg Veda. The brocade is craftsmanship using gold and silver threads on delicate silk and is mentioned in epics the Ramayana and Mahabharat. An example of the color gold can be among several other brocade and subgroups of brocade textiles seen in several Banaras Silk weaving techniques of Jamawar Tanchoi Sarees. Weavers from Gujarat migrated to the Gangetic plains, and the Gold and silver thread weaving Art was nurtured gradually in Varanasi. The style of tanchoi weaving involves the weave being woven into the fabric with no loose threads on the back. The Tanchoi sarees carry a similar range of spectacular colors and floral and geometric designs as if there is a unique theatre of woven aesthetics on display that dramatically express themselves.
领英推荐
CRAFT OF PAPER MACHE IN KASHMIR:
Linked with Sufi Traditions this craft is inspired in its colors, forms and delicacy of designs by the natural environment and its changing colours. The use of the Gold color, in the borders functioned to provide frames and inserted in the surface decor paintings to create a royal highlighted impact. Gold is also used for calligraphy in the craft. Most importantly, the surface decor on paper mache reflects the idea of India as an organic cross-road of ideas on multiple trade routes. There is seen the influence of Tibet-Chinese, of Afghan, Central Asia, of Greeks and Europe. The designs, the mix of colors highlighted many a times with Gold is a statement of India's natural engagement with world.
MUSIC
Once, a long time ago, when I was staying in Banaras/Varanasi on my heritage cultural skill mapping research, I remained in Banaras/ Varanasi. I went around the city with the famous art historian Late Anand Krishna Rai. There were several visits from the Bharat Kala Museum to homes of weavers and the learning of culture on the Ghats of the famed city. On one occasion, we happened to meet the legendary Late Bismillah Khan. The visit was part of the Banarasi 'Safa paani' ritual in the morning. As the two legends began their conversation, Bismillah Khan recalled the music of the famous Rasoolan Bai and her mastery over a complex semi-classical genre of Hindustani music called Tappa. Anand Krishna Rai exclaimed, "O! Khan Sahab when you speak of Rasoolan Bai's and sing her composition 'Wey haani wey' it reminds me of our tanchoi weave. The complex, delicate threads of musical notes are woven in gold and silver. Features of the curves, the flow of threads caught in the musical features of gamak, meends and taans…." The Tappa is a tradition that has traveled from the folk music of Punjab and Sindh and flowered in the Gangetic valley.?
Credit - Syed Wajid
CONCLUSION
India remains an experience only, and only when you free your mind and open your senses to absorb the impulses and pulses of human expressions in Art, in Traditional skills, and the layered of multiple streams such as woven as tappa in Hindustani musical tradition, woven painting as a ceiling on a Mughal architecture or the weave of Tanchoi. Ah! India, you need several births before we can understand you!