July 1985

Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi visited the Aditi exhibition with Nancy Reagan (see back cover) and lighted the traditional lamp (top, left).

Inaugurated by S. Dillon Ripley (above, center) at the Museum of Natural History (left)¡in Washington, Aditi is a big draw with Americans. Thousands wait in line up to an hour to watch performers give music concerts, show their acrobatic skills, or to get their hands painted by the mehndiwali (far left row).

Another Festival attraction is the Indian sculpture exhibition (top). In still another Festival event, violinists L. Subramaniam and V. G. Jog performed a jugalbandi in Karnatic and Hindustani music at the University of Maryland (above).

Publisher James A. McGinley Editor Mal Oettinger Managing Editor Himadri Dhanda Assistant Managing Editor Krishan Gabrani

2 Celebrating India

Senior Editor Aruna Dasgupta Copy Editor N.K. Sharma

9 Art and the Life of India

by John Russell

Editorial Assistant Rocque Fernandes

12 Revealing India to America

Photo Editor A vinash Pas rich a

An Interview with Pupul Jayakar by Aruna Dasgupta

Art Director Nand Katyal Associate Art Director Kanti Roy Assistant Art Director Bimanesh Roy Choudhury Chief of Production Awtar S. Marwaha

19 A New Voyage of Discovery

Circulation Manager Y.P. Pandhi Photographic Service USIS Photographic Services Unit Photographs: Front cover-Pete Souza, The White House. Inside front cover-Avinash Pasricha except top left by Baldev/Photo Division and bottom right by B. Fitzgerald. 2 left-National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., right-Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian. 3-National Gallery of Art. 4-Freer Gallery of Art. 5-courtesy Smithsonian Institution.

6-Avinash Pasricha. 7 left-National Gallery of Art; right-Avinash Pasricha (2). 8-Smithsonian Institution except center row courtesy National Gallery of Art. 12-R.K. Sharma. 17 top right-Raghubir Singh; bottom- R.K. Sharma. I8-courtesy Festival of India, Ministry of Culture. 19- B. Fitzgerald. 21 top-Bill Filz-Patrick, The White House;. bottom-Baldevl Photo Division (2). 22 top and center left-Avinash Pasricha (3); center right-Carol Hightower; bottom-Baldev/Photo Division (2). 23-Mary Anne Fackelman, The White House. 24 top and center-B. Fitzgerald; bottom-Avinash PasTicha. 25 topBaldev/Photo Division; 25 bottom, 26-Avinash Pas¡ richa. 27 top-Baldev/P~oto Division; center and bottom--Avinash Pasricha. 28 center left-Avinash Pasricha; right and bottom-Baldev/Photo Division.

31-33-Subhash Nandy. 36 Ieft-Lala Deen Dayal; right-Dhiraj Chawda. 37 top-courtesy Kaiko Moti; right-USIA; bottom-courtesy Mliseum of Science & Industry, Chicago. 39, 40-courtesy Center for Asian Studies, the University of Texas at Austin.

41-Avinash Pasricha. 42-Haku Shah; 44-48Avinash Pasricha. Inside back cover-B. Fitzgerald except right row top to bottom by Baldev/Photo Division. Back cover-Baldev/Photo Division.

Published by the United States Information Service, American Center, 24 KastJirba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government.

Printed by Rajkumar Wadhwa at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana.

34 Sen's "Kharij" .A Review by Stanley Kauffmann

35 On the Lighter Side

38 Scholars View India's Future

by Chidananda Das Gupta

41 Dimensions of the Clay Pot

by Geeti Sen

Front cover: President Ronald Reagan welcomes Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to the White House.

Back cover: Prime Minister Gandhi, First Lady Nancy Reagan (honorary cochairpersons of the Festival of India) and Rajeev Sethi (the curator and designer of Aditi) watch young bhapa Shish Ram perform at the Aditi exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution.

46 Paul Lingren Evangelist of Printmaking

by V.S. Maniam

Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission write to the Editor. Price of magazine, one year's subscription (12 issues), Rs 25; single copy, Rs. 4. For change of address send an old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to Circulation Manager, SPAN Magazine, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001. See change of address form on page lb.

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE NEXT ISSUE

IN SEARCH OF STRAY SATELLITES Is a lost satellite lost forever? Not any 10ngeL The versatile space shuttle now retrieves wayward satellites and gets them back to earth for refurbishing.

."

UNDERSTANDING AGING Medical researchers in America . are well on their way to achieving both a longer lifespan and an old age that is not decrepit. The goal is not to find the Fountain of Youth but to permit the individual to die young as late as possible.

Superstar Paul Newman scores again-this time in the real-life role of the king of a food empire that gives millions away to charity.

So many friends raved about his all-natural home-brewed salad dressing that he decided to go public. And now, popcorn.

A THINKING MAN'S ROCK STAR Thirty-two-year-old David Byrne, leader of the rock group "Talking Heads," is a multitalented individual who is as likely to be seen in a museum as in a hard rock cafe. He straddles the two worlds of what he calls "unsleazy" rock and roll and avant-gard.e "Neo-Expressionist" music effortlessly.

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The visit of Prime Minister PBjiv Gandhi to the United States was rich in both symbolism and substance. Even before he arrived, American interest in India was at a peak. Films about India had intrigued the public and the Festival of India provided a focus for the excitement. The Prime Minister was the beneficiary of this anticipation, and he used the spotlight masterfully to add a new dimension to American perceptions of India. He made a deep impression on the leaders and the people of the United States about India's commitment to democracy, its economic and scientific achievements and its position of leadership among . developing nations. .

News media coverage of the visit was extraordinary. The national television networks vied with each other to get Prime Minister Gandhi for their programs and he obliged them with a series of virtuoso performances. Cable television and the public radio network brought his speeches before the U.S. Congress and the National Press Club into millions of American homes. The U.S. Chief of Protocol, .Selwa Roosevelt, who has assisted at dozens of state visits, commented that she had never seen a leader of another country make such an impression on the audience as Mr. Gandhi did in his speech and handling of questions at the National Press Club.

The Prime Minister 'demonstrated those qualities that Americans admire in their own leaders: confidence, optimism, humor and candor. He was completely in his element addressing a joint session of the House of Representatives and Senate; his speech was interrupted by applause eleven times. When he expressed an opinion contrary to prevailing U.S. policy, he did so in a manner that elicited applause. As he left the Capitol chamber, American elected officials crowded around to shake his hand, and he responded with obvious rapport, demonstrating the ease and charm that have always been the marks of a successful political leader in a democracy.

In a television interview, Prime Minister Gandhi commented that he and President Reagan "got along together as individuals, and although we have different viewpoints, different methods of solving similar problems ...we could talk about them, discuss them and try to convince each other about them." The interviewer, Ted Koppel of ABC News, quoted Charles de Gaulle (who was paraphrasing Gladstone) to the effect that 'Men have friends; nations have interests," and asked Mr. Gandhi why was it important that he and the President get along as individuals.

The Prime Minister replied, "National interest is important and we can't deviate from national interest. But we do deal with human beings and I certainly Would like to feel that I'm dealing with a human being and that is why I appreciate personal contacts and getting to know people." He said his "very frank, open talks" with Mr. Reagan had convinced him "that we could build relations on this and much improve the friendship, the cooperation that we have had with the United States in the past."

There was a ring to what was said on the V1Slt that far surpasses the stiff formality that often marks state occasions. In a farewell toast in Houston, Texas, Vice President George Bush said: "There was a great deal of understanding. And the beautiful thing about it with a man like Prime Minister Gandhi is: If you have a difference, you can sit and talk about it. You can do what we do here in Texas.

You can just lay it out there on the table and you can discuss it. I just happen to think that's going to lead to great understanding between our countries."

--J.A.M.

Celebrating

India

India has come alive in the United States.

Gloriously, as only a country with a tradition of thousands of years behind it can. Exuberantly, as only a country just 38 years old can. The Festival of India lifts the veil from the mysteries, contradictions and enigmas that have fascinated and frustrated the Western world. Not limited to one megaevent but spread over scores of events, almost 100 cities and 18 months, the Festival speaks of India through images ranging from silent sculptures thousands of years old to a brightly turbaned flesh-and-blood balladeer from Rajasthan.

It speaks of Indian art, dance, music, culture, science, history; of the people and their lifestyles. It speaks through exhibitions, film shows, live shows, seminars ... just about every way of getting a message across. It speaks with joy, pride, passion ... and sometimes in hallowed silence.

Above: Jahangir Embracing Shah Abbas; from the Leningrad Album; India; by Abu'l Hassan; circa 1618; opaque watercolor on paper heightened with gold; 9% by 61/16 inches.

Left: Goddess Holding a Flywhisk; probably 3rd century B.C.; Didarganj in Patna, Bihar; polished sandstone; 5 feet 2V2inches head to pedestal; Patria Museum, Patna.

Right: Emaciated Head of a Fasting Buddha; 2nd century A.D.; findspot unknown, probably ancient Gandhara,now in Pakistan; schist; 10 inches; Bharat Kala Bhavan, Varanasi.

Lifestyles A song, a dance, a handcrafted creation ... in India these aren't just art. They are life. A young girl-not yet in her teens-doing intricate acrobatics on a street corner to earn her daily roti, a song sung and a dance danced just to celebrate yet another festival at home, an exquisite handmade bowl put to the most mundane daily use, a clay figure made at home to offer to a deity-images that offer an insight into some aspect of living in India. Millions of Americans are seeing them in their own milieu, in a

recreated Indian village at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. They are part of Aditi (facing page), a living exhibition that features 1,500 objects and 40 traditional craftsmen and performing artists depicting different stages of life in India, "charting the life cycle." Aditi is revealing to Americans that art is a part of everyday life, in India, that there is always something to celebrate even in the humblest Indian home.

Facing page: The Devi as Bhadrakali, Honored by Brahma, Krishna and Shiva; from a Tantric Devi series; India; circa 1660-70; Basholi school, Punjab Hills; opaque watercolor on paper, heightened with gold and silver; 8'12inches square.

Clockwise from left: Glimpses from Aditi-Sangeeta, itinerant acrobat; Palani Appan, a master craftsman from Tamil Nadu; street theater; craftswoman Bindeshwari Devi of Mithila, Bihar; Langhasmusicians from Rajasthan.

Top: Bharatanatyam dancer Malavika Sarukkai. Below: Kathakali performer Krishnan Nair.

Left: Vocalist Kishori Amonkar.

Right: KaraikkalaAmmaiya (a saint of Shiva); South India; Vijaynagar period, 15th century; bronze with brilliant patina; H 17.7 inches; The NelsonAtkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri.

The strains of the sitar, the twinkle of ghungroos, the lilt of a raga ... the music and dances of India will take center stage in several American cities for the next 18 months. Starting with the inaugural concert featuring Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan, Zakir Hussain, Allah Rakha and the Kathakali trio from the Kerala Kalamandalam, the Festival of India will see an explosion of talent in dance and music styles from classical to homespun folk, from the known to the unknown, the sung to the unsung. Performers will range from the internationally acclaimed to 9-year-old Sangeeta whose stage is usually a street corner somewhere in India.

Art and the Life of India I

by JOHN RUSSELL

When I went to India for the first time, not quite six months ago, I had in my hand the schedule of the Festival of India inaugurated in Washington on June 13 by the Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi. It is a remarkable, nationwide roll call of events, in which seasoned professionals will do all that can be done to import the importable India.

In any other country, I should have knocked myself out getting ready for it. I should have gone to as many museums, as many churches and as many houses and gardens, great and small, as could be fitted into the day. I should have gone to the theater, to the opera, to the ballet. I should have pestered eminent writers for their opinion on this question or that. I should have "taken the pulse of the country," the way people take the pulse of Italy by going to the horse race in Siena or of England by going to the Henley regatta.

I did none of those things. Three days into the journey, something showed me

1. Applique work from Gujarat.

2. An acrobat.

3. Mrinal Sen (his films are being shown in the Festival).

4. Chariot; circa 2000-1500 B. c.; Daimabad, Maharashtra; bronze; 18 x 72 inches.

(Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi, on loan to the Prince of Wales Museum, Bombay.)

5. Shiva; 1011-12 A.D.; Tiruvenkadu, Tamil Nadu; bronze; 40 inches. (Thanjavur Art Gallery, Thanjavur.)

6. Papier mache figures; H 83 inches.

7. Makara Head; 13th century; Konarak, Orissa; Khondalite, 36 inches square.

(Archaeological Museum, Konarak.)

8. Artist Sita Devi (making a Madhubani painting).

9. Puppeteers from Rajasthan.

'

that, in India, art and life are one. Sometimes Indian art is in a museum, as it is elsewhere. Sometimes it is a great monument that has been preserved and guarded, and to which admittance may be procured for pennies. But most often it is just there, in the air, on the ground, all over the place, for the taking, and no name is attached to it.

That is what I learned-that art is everywhere in India, if we know how to look, and not only in famous places. It is in the costume (as spectacular as anything in Diaghilev's Russian ballets) of a woman working on the road. It is in the fragments of lapis-lazuli mosaic that lie on the ground beside a temple long left for dead. It is in the bracelets (canary yellow, it may be, or emerald green) that we see on the horns of white oxen by the roadside. It is in the ferocious color of the spices in every smalltown bazaar, and it is in the celestial spacing of one building after another in the abandoned city of Fatehpur Sikri, near Agra.

The epiphany that I have in mind occurred at midday, somewhere in nowhere, on one of the long straight roads that were built by the engineers of the Indian Civil Service in the 19th century. We had pulled off the road. Sitting on finespun blankets in the shade of a king-size acacia tree, we counted the 23 green parakeets that had flown out of its branches to take a look at us. From a whole battery of cardboard boxes there appeared Indian vegetarian dishes, each more delicious than the last. With them came long draughts of fresh lime and soda.

There were fields of mustard to give us a new notion of yellow, and in the distance the pink hills of Rajasthan. Indian talk went on all around us, and as the locals walked past us on their way home to lunch, they moved like gods, but unselfconsciously.From the other side of the hedge, a solitary flutist blew a cool spiral of sound into the clear

pale air. The road was lightly trafficked, and we could not fail to notice that every truck that passed had been painted-front, sides and back-in ways that were fanciful, euphoric and wildly superstitious.

When we were all through with lunch, two dancing bears got down from a passing truck and began to limber up for the evening's performances.

A 12-year-old shepherdess came by with her sheep and said, "Good morning! How do you do?" in limpid, unaccented English. And as the late December sun warmed our Western bones, we agreed that from the moment we had stepped off the plane at 3 o'clock in the morning at New Delhi airport, everything had gone right-but right in a specifically Indian way that was not like the way of anywhere else.

We remembered, for instance, the ways of Indian luggage. If I speak of "Indian luggage," it is because everything in India is peculiar to itself. Boredom in India is Indian boredom, and unlike boredom elsewhere.

Tantrums in India are Indian tantrums, and unique. Conversation in India is Indian conversation, carried on face to face, sitting or half-lying down, open-endedly and untouched by the tyranny of the wristwatch.

So it is with Indian luggage. When it comes down the carrousel, it is unlike any other. Whereas American luggage lies flat and minds its own business, Indian luggage comes roped and bundled, with stenciled messages ("Good Luck!" or "Safe Journey!") in big letters on its sides. Not only that, but it rocks itself continually, frantically, forward and backward, as if a living creature were trussed up inside it and calling for help.

And right there, in what seems a quiet provincial airport, within sight of the first charcoal fires in the street, the visitor gets an immediate lesson in the interpenetration of

Indian art and Indian life. For in the unwieldy animation of Indian luggage there is mirrored the unwieldy animation of Ganesh, the elephant-headed and hugely fat Indian deity, 'fundamental to Hindu belief, who functions as destroyer of obstacles and dispenser of wealth and wisdom. We shall remember that animation, that convulsive rocking and rolling, long after we have forgotten much else that happens to us.

But we shall also remember it when we see the sculptures of Ganesh that are among the prime pleasures of Indian art.

Indians do not view their divinities, any more than they view the art in their museums, with the kind of detachment that is regarded as good form in the West. Nor do Indian museums see themselves as a department of show business. In this, they are closer to the village churches of France and Italy, where until lately it was taken for granted that anyone who wanted to come to see their treasures would come, and that everyone else (thieves and vandals included) would stay away.

Nor do Indian museums foster, or envy, the frenetic social activity that Americans expect of their museums. The work is there.

The museum is open from time to time.

What more can anyone want? If catalogs, reproductions and postcards are defective

by Western standards, nobody grieves. If there are no scarves, no pieces of simulated jewelry and no neckties, that's perfectly all right with Indian visitors.

As against that, Indian visitors identify with Indian works of art with an intensity that is almost unknown in the West. To them, they are not works of art at all, in our sense, but objects of worship that happen to be in a museum and not in a temple. To see them lay gifts and offerings at the feet of a figure of dancing Shiva is an experience that has nothing to do with "art appreciation" or with the nice distinctions in quality that we in the West like to find between one Crucifixion and another. Shiva for the Hindu is right there, in person, dancing the universe into being, sustaining it with his perfected rhythms, and finally dancing it out of existence. We cannot wonder that what the worshipers have to bring, they bring.

In India, the art of the past is always relevant. It will tell you how to distinguish the good people from the bad people among the divinities with whom you will become more familiar every day. It will tell you what goes on in those tiny, many-storied town houses where everyone knows everyone else's business. It will tell you about garden-

ing, and about hunting, and about how to deal with people great and small.

It will tell you about the untroubled sexuality that is an immemorial feature of Indian life. Above all, it will give you a whole new set of references by which to judge human motives, human character, human beauty and the interaction between human beings and nature. It will do all this with economy, with subtlety and with wit.

You will be lucky to have Indian art as your guide, and its guidance will not fail you when you come home, no matter where "home" may be.

"Art" in this sense can include the printed word. If you want to know India and Indians, look out for the memoirs of the Emperor Babar (1483-1530) and note the freshness and the modernity with which he sets down every. quirk of character that amused him. (Of one great warrior, he wrote: "His courage was unimpeached, but he was rather deficient in understanding. ... He was madly fond of chess. If someone else played chess with one hand, he played it with two hands. He played without art, just as his fancy suggested.")

Observations of this sort and quality run throughout the great years of Mughal painting, which can be dated roughly from 1555 to 1857. During the three centuries of Mughal rule in India, paintings made in watercolor or gouache and small enough to be put into albums or held in the hand had an immense popularity at court. Beginning with Akbar, who took the throne in 1556 at age 14, the Mughal emperors not only did all they could to encourage the art of painting, but the Mughal nobility and the minor provincial rulers were delighted to follow the imperial example. Throughout north India and the Deccan, painting flourished and was protected, with results that can be enjoyed not only in India itself but in many a great museum in the West.

Mughal painting was concerned with portraiture, with demeanor and with differentiation. No two people were alike, and it was their differences, not their likenesses, that should be brought out.

Mughal painters missed nothingneither the purposeful tumult of a building site, the transport of secret lovers, the concentration of the calligrapher as he pored over a page of poetry, nor the brief definitive savagery of battle. Missing nothing, they put everything down, but with a finesse that is still a sure guide to Indian mores.

What we remember most vividly from an

Indian journey may not, in the end, be the great set pieces that people cross the world to see. They are just as likely to be a matter of chance, whim, patience, private affinity and luck. Sometimes a gifted photographer may sift them from the experience of every day, but most often we have to go to India ourselves to see them. Once we have been there, our India turns into a private India, a confidential India and an alternative India.

People don't always want to hear about it. They prefer the big standard remarks about the big standard sights, and of course it is true that many of the monuments for which India is best known are on a colossal scale. The 30 and more cave chambers of Ajanta, the huge temples cut out of the living rock at Ellora, the northern medieval temples at Khajuraho, the temple of the sun god Surya at Konarak, the enormous granite relief called "The Descent of the Ganges" on the natural rock wall of the reservoir at Mahabalipuram-all these and many other are as impossible to ignore as they would be to move. They will always be places of pilgrimage, just as was once the case with Persepolis and Angkor Wat. They are a part of everyone's imaginary India.

It is important to remember that Indian art is not just painting or sculpture. Talk, costume, food and drink are a part of Indian art and a part of Indian life, also. Indian art penetrates into every crevice of Indian life.

The decorative arts, in their relation to Indian architecture, do not function either as fillers or as mere ornaments. The Taj Mahal is not simply a matter of noble forms and mother-of-pearl tonalities that change from moment to moment. It is spiced, prickled and, in a strange way, put to the test by the linear decoration-much of it invisible in photographs and omitted altogether in the hideous reproductions that people buy by the hundreds of thousands -that adds color, tone and nuance to surface after surface.

To understand the Taj Mahal, it is indispensable to take it by surprise, difficult as that may be. On the far side of the Jamuna, with the loud railroad trains crashing to and from and the water from the river pumped up to feed the archetypal Mughal gardens, we see the Taj quite differently-with a train conductor's eye, a gardener's eye, even a water buffalo's eye.

It is worth the trouble.

No less important than the role of the decorative arts is the parity enjoyed by dance and music. Dance and music in India are a part of life in ways that have no

parallel in other countries. A lot of Americans enjoy the ballet, for instance, and can't wait to discuss the season's 17th change of cast in Nutcracker. But it would not occur to them to say, as was said in India more than 1,000 years ago, that without a close knowledge of the art of dancing no painter could possibly arrive at a full and truthful expression of human feeling.

Equally well, not even those who go to concerts every night of the week would argue that music in America has the manycenturies-old, minutely calibrated function that it has in Indian life. Long before the Indian raga had its current popularity in America, an English musicologist in India was moved to say that "in India, the nature of the music is that of the language (Sanskrit), of the architecture, of the painting, of the dancing-of the whole man." In fact, music was, as A.H. Fox-Strangways saw it, the universal element, the binder and combiner that could cause an educated audience "to sway, and tremble, and shed tears." "If ever music spoke the soul of a people," he concluded, "this music does."

Among the many attractions of the Festival of India are performances of the Kathakali dance dramas that are the apotheosis of the interaction among dance, music and art. Anyone who knows Indian sculpture and goes to see a Kathakali performance will see at once that the body language is the same in the one as in the other. Indian sculpture without Indian dance would be much impoverished. Indian dance without sculpture would lack the brevet of authenticity that is given by sculptures that have existed for a thousand years or more.

Singing and drumming likewise have their part to play in the Kathakali dance dramas. Indian singing has within it an element of heightened speech-of speech, that is to say, in which something especially important is being said. The word as sound is fundamental to Indian culture and has been so ever since the Indian who knew how to read was a rarity. As for drumming, it is an activity that may take a lifetime to master, so complex is the role of the fingers, whether singly or jointly, of the thumb, of the knuckles, of the palm of the hand, and of all these in partnership. (When the drums used in Kathakali dramas come into play, the fingers of the right hand are taped-so Grove's Dictionary of Music tells us-with "cloth finger stalls made rock hard by a plaster of rice paste and lime.")

As must by now be clear, mine is an

llltImate India. What is true of Indian Mughal painting of the great period is also true of Indian life-that now.here is a glance more eloquent, a whisper more compelling or a touch of the fingers more poignant.

That glance, that whisper and that touch are everywhere.

They are as basic to Indian art as they are to human exchange, as basic to the Mughal garden as to the wayside shrine, as fundamental to drum and sitar as to the multitudinous rock-cut figures of the temples at Ellora, and as basic to the empty space as to the crowded one.

India can make a big noise, on occasion, and Indian processions, whether religious or political, set up an undisciplined racket that, once heard, is never forgotten. But it is in the sound of the sitar, the solo flute and the impossibly versatile drum that India speaks to us in its own voice.

It has not, of course, escaped me, even at a distance of more than 2,000 years, that Indians in general are paradoxical and contradictory people. Perfectly at home in the life of the spirit and positively prehensile in their power of adaptation to its complexities, they are born, dedicated and full-time politicians. They are volatile, much given to banding and disbanding in short-lived and ferocious alliances, capable of great feats of energy and perseverance and yet happy at other times to sit the long day through, doing nothing much of anything. All this, and more, is set out in Indian art.

As for the look of India itself, as distinct from the look of India in Indian painting, in the prints and watercolors of English travelers, and in 19th-century photographs, it will immediately strike the visitor that only quite lately have Indians had any sense of conservation. Buildings that were not in current use had no meaning for them. Had it not been for the all but anonymous English Army officers and civil servants who saved one monument after another, and for Lord Curzon, who, during his years as viceroy, set in hand a nationwide program of rehabilitation and paid for much of it out of his own pocket, most of India's great monuments would have fallen into a definitive decay.

But then talking, not looking, is the prime activity of the Indian. Language is, of course, the great instrument of confidentiality, and Indians are prodigious, irrepressible, never-tiring talkers. Many of them today have no great fluency in English. I do not have, and now shall never have, so much as a word of Urdu, Sanskrit or Hindi.

But it takes only a short morning in the bazaars for a visitor to judge that there is something quite special about the uninterrupted clicketyclack of Indian speech.

I would, in fact, lay money that the English Jesuit, the Rev. Thomas Stephens, knew what he was talking about when he wrote in 1579 that "like a jewel among pebbles, like a sapphire among jewels, is the excellence of the Marathi tongue. Like the jasmine among blossoms, the musk among perfumes, the peacock among birds, the zodiac among stars, is the Marathi language."

Language works, among Indians, on a one-to-one or one-to-two-or-three basis, but it also works on an altogether vaster scale.

In this context, I have a last image to offer.

One of the great experiences of Indian travel is to climb to the top of one or another of the historic forts that overhang town after town in central India. You climb until your knees give way. You cross courtyard after courtyard. Monkeys scatter at your approach, spitting and squawking.

Vultures veer up and away, scenting that you are still in passable health. And then, eventually, you reach a belvedere-often sexagonal or octagonal-from which you look down on the town.

Below you are blue doors by the thousand, white roofs as far as you can see, and alleys, terraces and open shopfronts by-as it seems-the tens of thousands.

And as you look down, picking out a turban here, a pale gray bullock there, a chromatic explosion of saris and stall after stall of what E.M. Forster called "sweets like greasy tennis balls," you become aware of the most extraordinary, all-permeating noise that you have ever heard in your life. And what is it?

It is the sound of India, talking.

Perhaps a hundred-thousand people are down there beneath you, and everyone of them is talking. They never fall silent. Other noises there may be-transistor radios of appalling quality, indiscriminate beatings and bangings of unknown origin, automobile horns worn to the point of no return-but fundamentally what you hear is Indians, talking. An Indian city rides on talk, the way a full-rigged sailing ship rides on the sea. Art and life are one, in that experience. It has in it something of speech, and something of song, together with echoes of music and intimations of dance. It is the Indian moment, par excellence and in excelsis, and-let me tell you-it is worth crossing the world to be there.

0 About the Author: John Russell is the chief art critic of The New York Times.

Revealing India to America India itself sits m all corners of Pupul Jayakar's drawing room in her government bungalow on New Delhi's Safdarjung Road. In the corners, in the center, on the walls... sculptures, paintings, wall hangings, cushions, textiles-all handcrafted. The mood isn't ethnicthat would¡ reduce it to just another faddish drawing room. The mood is Pupul Jayakar.

Pupul Jayakar was handpicked by Mrs. Indira Gandhi to be India's chairperson of the Festival of India. (S. Dillon Ripley, secretary emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution, is America's chairperson.) The late Prime Minister's cultural adviser and reportedly one of her closest friends, Pupul Jayakar is known informally as India's First Lady of Handicrafts.

SPAN: You have been involved with the Festival of India from its very inceptiQn. How was it conceived and created?

PUPUL JAY AKAR: It all started when I was asked to be chairperson of the committee for the 1982 Festival of lndia in the United Kingdom. To prepare for it I began exploring the cultural environment of India. Any fragmentary projection distorts an image. If you want to get a meaningful image across, you must build it up through various elements, which when put together will form the groundwork of this country's structure. It is a pursuit of discovery of the outer environment and also the inner environment-of the mind. There is so much to depict ... a projection of the contemporary image includes the great heritage of the past. This heritage exists today; therefore it is of today. It also includes science and technology, dancers, musicians, films, craftsmen, street performers, the great classical musical forms of this country, the rural and urban ... they all come together in one total perception.

That was the basic groundwork, of course, for both the festivals, for the concept. How did the Festival of India in America come about?

The idea came up when Mrs. Gandhi was in the United States on her official visit in 1982. She and President Reagan decided on this cultural journey. In a very eloquent and moving message President Reagan has dedicated the Festival to the late Prime Minister. She was central to it.

It was she who came and told me, "We are going to have a festival and I want you to take on the chairmanship." She always showed a very great interest in it.

Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi too is very interested and involved. He presided over the last meeting of the Festival committee.

How is the American Festival going to be different from the one in London?

We are having many more seminars in America than we had in England. This is partly because we have extended

the Festival to universities this time. The U.K. Festival was centered around museums in or near London. In the United States the Festival will be held in a large number of cities. In fact, Mrs. Gandhi specifically told me: "Don't neglect the West and the Midwest. See that some activities take place there." She was aware that although New Yorkers are somewhat aware of what is happening in India, there are a number of areas in the United States where to most people India is just another place on the globe.

Could you recall some other suggestions that Mrs. Gandhi made concerning the Festival?

She WqS very keen that we include some tribal music, dance and art-you know she had a profound interest in tribal and rural culture. And she liked the idea of taking dancers and musicians to universities and to young people. She also recognized the power of cinema and we discussed having films made and shown. Incidentally, we had asked Sa~yajit Ray to make a film for the Festival; he agreed but then couldn't do it because he had a heart attack.

I often discussed the elements to go into the Festival with Mrs. Gandhi-whenever she could spare time.

Unfortunately, it was also a very difficult period-1984, when she had many pressures. But as the Festival's patron she liked to be kept informed very closely about what was happening-for example, she wanted to know who were the young designers taking part, what were the different events, the progress that was being made. She was profoundly interested in every aspect. She always gave a . lot of importance to the role culture could play in the world. To her culture was really the river that broke through frontiers.

Do you think the Festival will help in removing some misconceptions about India and lift a veil for many who visit it?

Yes. I think one of the things that has to be understood is that free India is only 38 years old. People forget that.

They see India as a continuity. But free India and an India under the British are two separate things. India was alive before, but in terms of real development, it started moving only after 1947. I'm not saying that the British did not do anything for India-they opened up the country with the railways and roads-but India has really come into its own now.

There is so much of India to project ... what is the India that the Americans will see? Will it be exotic India, modern India ... ?

Both-and much more. They will see India's past and present, her arts and science, people's lifestyles and creations. There is a lot that is exotic in India today as there always has been. They will see exotic India in the costume exhibition which is a treasure. So are the ones at the National Gallery of Art [Washington, D.C.] and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art [New York]. They will also see a contemporary terra-cotta exhibition where men and women potters will be using techniques that are 5,000 years old. Another exhibition will show contemporary handloom textiles. They will see Aditi with all its various objects, performing artists and craftsmen. Then there is the Golden Eye-master craftsmen of India will be working with the greatest designers of the world and finding a common idiom. Many of these master designers-from America and other countries-have already come to India and worked with our artisans. Frei Otto of Germany wrote back to say that it was probably the greatest experience of his life. It just proves that the mind of the great artist is capable of instantly comprehending a totally new concept.

What about interaction in the other direction? Do you like the idea of these traditional craftsmen picking up modern techniques?

What are the modern techniques? Machine tools. If they use machine tools, then they cease to be artisans. They become designers in another sense. I have no objections to that. But as long as they are artisans, they will have to use hand tools.

You've seen artists from all over the world. What do you think makes Indian craftsmen special?

I think India is the only country in the world that has nurtured its craftsmen the way we have from the time of Independence. We have given them a new sense of dignity, a new position, a feeling of pride in their skills.

Today skills are still available in this country to produce the most extraordinary objects which were produced at the time of the Mughal kings. The skills exist, what is needed is patronage. As costs go up, patronage comes down.

Do you feel the Festival may act as a catalyst to get some patronage of a kind for them?

Some very expensive things are going to be sold at the Smithsonjan shop, at the Metropolitan shop .... Bloomingdales is having a big promotion. So a market will be opening up for them.

You said something very nice in a recent interview in The Washington Post about an Indian craftsman being more than just someone who turns out objects.

Let's take an object made today that looks exactly like one made by the artist's grandfather several years ago.

You call probably find many such pieces. But where the difference lies between mass production and craft is in the intention. When the intention is to imitate, then it ceases to be art. When you are imitating anything then the link between skill and insight is broken. When the knowledge of material skill and insight come together then the craftsman finds his richest expression. These are the three components of form-skill, insight and knowledge of material. With skill comes tools and knowledge of how to use tools; knowledge of material is very important-to know how wood or stone or any other substance behaves; and beyond this a certain insight into¡a thing, seeing an object from within. The great craftsman has the capacity to see from within.

How did you go about selecting who should participate from the enormous talent that is available in India?

Well, we have one main committee and then we have a number of subcommittees made up of experts. It's a very difficult problem. Because it doesn't matter whom you select, there is always someone who feels that he or she should have been selected.

One thing we decided-and I had discussed this with Indira Gandhi-was that there should be a greater emphasis on the young talent for this Festival. So we have tried to select as many young dancers as possible, as many young designers as possible-to show the extraordinary capacity and energy of the young. That really is the India of today. India of today contains all its yesterdays. But India of today is the India of today.

Have you received any letters or enquiries from Americans about the Festival?

A number of them-from individuals, institutions, people wanting to help. People have written in with suggestions or requests to show certain exhibitions in their cities. Of course, it is not always easy to give them what they want.

But it is quite extraordinary-the kind of interest the Festival has evoked. The media response we've had is amazing-and very encouraging. And it's not just art and culture that they write about-but even our science and technology exhibitions.

Have Indians in America been involved with the Festival in any way?

Not in the creation of the Festival. But there is a trust that we have set up in Washington. Zubin Mehta is the head. It has Dr. Subrahmanyam Chandrashekhar, Dr. George Sudarshan, Dr. Naresh Trehan, Jugi Tandon ... the Indian Ambassador too is part of it. They are raising funds, and after the Festival is over, they will see if some parts of it can be kept going.

What do you see as the long-term impact of the Festival?

Most important, I expect the Festival to leave a permanent impact on the American mind, on the minds of its people. They will see India differently. And that itself is a tremendous happening.

Do you think it can lead to more cultural interaction?

Well, that way, we've had a very rich interaction this and last year. After all, we got some of America's most

important performing arts here. We'd like to see some big exhibitions from the United States. A large portion of the great treasures of the world is in America. We would like to see some of them here.

While I'm in America for the Festival, I'll be looking forward to seeing Peter Brooks' Mahabharata. I hope to bring it to India sometime.

What would you say is the essence of the Festival, that India is ... what? How would you fill in the blanks?

India is an ancient country with very deep roots. The challenge to it is that it is entering into a new century, a new ethos. What is important now is whether it can take in the technological culture without destroying the sense of heritage.

In all these months of working hard on the Festival, what has given you the greatest satisfaction?

It is to see the young people flower .... I think there is nothing that gives you so much delight as to see that the future is in safe hands. The young people have an understanding of heritage, understanding of those creative impulses which are important to our country.

Has it been a personal discovery of India for you also?

Well, I have already in my own way probed quite deeply into India, and what I did was to put together the many impressions I have gathered through the years, the many incidents I have seen, the many skills I have witnessed.

I've traveled a lot in India, I've looked, I've listened ... there's nothing which teaches you so much as looking and listening.

Where does all this interest stem from?

I was educated abroad-at the London School of Economics and Bradford College. I did journalism as my main subject in London University.

My father and grandfather were quite well-known writers. They were very enlightened people. I have now been working for 45 years.

I first worked with the National Planning Committee of which Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was chairman. I worked as an assistant secretary in the women's section. After that I worked with the Kasturba Trust, one of Gandhiji's main organizations connected with village work among women. This was in 1943-44. Then I got interested in industrial cooperatives.

That's where my interest in art and handicrafts started-with the Cottage Industries which was an important part of the industrial cooperative movement. I already had a passion for textiles and through the Cottage Industries I got interested in handlooms. Minister T.T. Krishnamachari asked me to take over the design and technical development of the handloom industry. I was so young and had so little experience that I said yes, little realizing that it meant about 3 million looms and about 8 million people. And then I started exploring what design was, I opened it up, I started establishing the functions.

I also helped set up the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. In fact, I have been connected with all the major design movements in the country.

And they still are very much a part of your life, aren't they? Could you describe a day in your life in recent months to give an idea of how you cope with all the many things you are so involved with?

During the past year I have also been writing two books. I have written a major memoir of J. Krishnamurti. It's about 700 pages. I've known him since 1947. In the last two months I wrote a short memoir of Indira Gandhi, which is being published with Raghu Rai's photographs.

Between 6 and 9 in the morning I write. I don't let anything disturb me. I write solidly, it doesn't matter whether it's my book or an article or introduction for something. I've written for Marg [and also for SPANsee October 1981 issue], I've written a volume of short stories, books. Recently I've been writing an introduction to an encyclopedia on religion being brought out by Mercia Eliade. I wrote some introductions to Aditi, and for the Festival. So I've been doing odd bits of writing apart from these two books.

Then by 10 o'clock I'm ready to meet the stream of people coming to see me-about the Festival, or the Indian Council of Cultural Relations or the handloom and handicraft industries. I'm also connected with the Krishnamurti schools all over the country, so there's work concerning them too.

My daughter, Radhika Herzberger, and her husband (an American professor in the University of Toronto) come to India for six months every year and work in the Rishi Valley in one of the Krishnamurti schools, about 130 kilometers from Bangalore. It's one of the great schools in the country. My son-in-law has come to an arrangement with his university that he will teach for half the year and comes here for the other half. Radhika runs the place; he does research and sometimes teaches.

Apart from all this, there's also the Indian National Trust for Cultural Heritage which some of us have recently set up with Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi as the chairperson. We started with the enormous project of cleaning the Ganga at Raj Ghat in Benares. Now, of course, the Government of India has set up the Ganga Board. But the initial work was ours.

I have many interests, but if one knows how to take a thing, leave it, turn to another and not carryover one thing to another then it's possible to do many things with intensity.

You were trained as a journalist. Do you think that helped in knowing how to drop one thing and pick up another?

I don't think so! I stopped being a journalist the day I was told by a British editor of The Times of India in 1942 that he would have loved to have me on his staff but they didn't take women. I nearly became a feminist instead of taking up all this.

"All this" .... The expanse of her hands seems to take in the room. But it's really the life reflected in the corners of that room and beyond the room. A full life of nurturing people and their talents, a life filled with the colors of an Indian rainbow. She has written books, articles, commentaries. Her entry in the Who's Who lists more than a dozen organizations that she has spearheaded. Dozens of young people working for the renaissance of Indian crafts say that she is their inspiration. Then there are the awards. But through everything she has done and hopes to do there runs. a common thread: India.

0

Aditi

A Celebration of Life Turn any corner at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and there it is: India. Here a sculpture, there a dancer; somewhere an acrobat up on a rope, elsewhere a deity at peace on his pedestal; today a festival, tomorrow a wedding. Sometimes the craft, other times the creator and his creation. People and objects. Performers and happenings.

These multiple, multihued images of India are Aditi-one of the most unusual, innovative (and certainly the largest, according to museum director Richard Fiske) exhibitions that the hallowed halls of the Smithsonian have seen. It's a living exhibition that talks, sings, dances, lives and tells the tale of life in India.

"I want it to be a noisy exhibition, not a hushed whisper affair," proclaims 36-year-old Rajeev Sethi, the creator of Aditi. "Life," he philosophizes, "doesn't come to you in an ambience of solitude. It is a rich, full experience."

And so the dholak rolls, children laugh and play, dance and song fillthe air, a burst of color and the roar of cheers herald yet another festival. A craftsman weaves magic with his fingers, a young man paints and sings a tale of an era gone by, a bride shyly lifts her veil. ...

Aditi comprises some 1,500 artifacts and 40 live performers, artisans and craftspeople. S. Dillon Ripley, chairperson of the American Committee for the Festival of India, describes Aditi as "a triumphant expression of the vitality and life that goes on in India today."

Explaining the concept and creation of Aditi, Rajeev Sethi says, "It is extremely difficult to present a country's culture when it is as holistic as ours is. It is almost impossible for us to present our music, dance, theater and crafts as if they were not a part of our life. We don't see culture as something that lives in glass cases."

Nor, he adds, as something to be viewed clutching just a catalog in one hand and a small cassette player in the other telling you just what you are seeing. These high-tech exhibition techniques just won't do for an Indian exposition, he says firmly. "We could have had huge slide presentations with sound and all that but you lose out on being tactile, because you have these gadgets stuck to your ears or whatever and you've got these sounds all programmed. I suppose, some people would say it is very convenient ... you follow your rhythm, you switch it off when you want to. But I feel it loses something. It doesn't work. I want the exhibition to be more personal, I want people to see people, to talk to people, to interact, to feel, to touch."

And maybe even to participate. Aditi lets the visitor do all that.

The Smithsonian museum has been transformed into a setting suggestive of an Indian village. The mud walls, the objects within, the colorful costumes, the people. , .they all just set the mood for an experience that is, to quote The Washington Post, "the most exuberant part of the Festival of India."

The Sanskrit word for "abundance" and "creative power," Aditi

is also the name of one of India's most ancient goddesses-the mother of all gods on earth.

Aditi has as its theme "The Cycle of Life." The visitor proceeds through 18 sections, 18 stages of life. These include fertility, courtship, marriage, pregnancy, birth, infancy, childhood, initiation, learning and maturation. "Aditi traces one complete lifecycle," says Pria Devi, who has done the scripting for the exhibition.

"It does not track down the individual from birth to death but slices across a spiral of time from the coming age of one generation to the coming age of the next." Each section shows artifacts, live performances, demonstrations and rituals associated with that particular stage of life.

The creations are juxtaposed with people to give as full an experience of that stage of life as is possible. For example in the section on marriage, as visitors walk through a corridor with a wall painting depicting a wedding procession, they are joined by a band of dancers and musicians, gorgeously attired in dresses that shimmer with silver and gold threads, who recreate the actual ritual of a marriage procession. And then visitors see a nuptial chamber, wedding costumes, artifacts ranging from boxes to keep jewelry, vermilion, kaajal to carved bedstead legs from a nawab's nuptial chamber and paintings depicting marriage ceremonies of the centuries gone by. A wedding night chamber of a prince is set beside a papier-m.khe model of a villager's wedding night hut. Both rich in their own way-one with a tent embroidered with gold threads and lavished with rugs; the other bright with colorful paintings, handmade artifacts, the glitter of lesser jewels.

And that's just a very quick peep at but one of the sections.

There are many more tales being told. To ensure that the entire affair doesn't become stilted and mechanical, the performers and craftspeople have been given almost total freedom to express themselves as and when and how they want to. "If there are moments when they don:t feel like creating or sharing, they can just do what they want to do. There ¡are large areas where they can sleep, rest, chat. They can make something and erase it if they want to. That's all a part of life, isn't it?" Sethi says.

The Washington Post's Sarah Booth Conroy, an early visitor to the exhibition, caught them in a moment of sharing and creating.

"India's unparalleled crafts workers, perhaps the best and most diverse in the world, make no distinction between a statue of a god and a plaything for a child," she writes. "An ephemeral painting in henna on the hand of a bride, lasting at most two weeks, is as intricately worked as the design for a silver bracelet."

Says Sethi, "For a long time the Western media have projected India in extremes of poverty-the begging bowl and bloated belly-or exotica-the peacock and the maharajas. Somewhere along 'the line we have failed to identify the daily rhythm, the common man's genius which I am sure people in any country can relate to because they too have their own."

Sethi himself became involved in India's folk art and craft soon after his return from Paris where he worked with Pierre Cardin for two years, developing designs for clothes, furniture, interiors, industrial products and architectural environment.

Inspired by people like Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Pupul Jayakar, Sethi turned his talent to India's traditional crafts.

When a motley group of itinerant performers in New Delhi found themselves without a home after yet another slum clearance drive, they turned instinctively to Sethi who had been contacting them for performances in his bid to encourage their talent. He suggested that they break their own caste barriers and come together and form a cooperative.

Thus was born the Bhule Bisre Kalakar Samiti-the Cooperative of Forgotten and Neglected Artists. A number of Aditi's performers are drayvn from the cooperative.

The miniaturist, tie-dyer, weaver, sculptor, juggler, toy maker, magician, bahurupia (impersonator), puppeteer, dancer, acrobat, balladeer, painter and musician-all a part of Aditi-are more than just craftspeople and performers. They are an integral part of daily life-especially in rural India. For example, even in villages with schools, education for the child still comes from the balladeer, the puppeteer or the patwa. The balladeer chants the great myths and stories, puppeteers tell tales of yesterday and today and the lessons to be learned from them; the patwa is "traditional television" -painted scrolls unroll to the singing of a lyric, creating an audiovisual experience.

It's entertainment and informal education. It's a way of making a living and it is oral history. Ram Karan and the other bhapas (balladeers) have kept alive the legend of the 14th-century Rajput chief Pabuji Maharaj.

Playing the ravanahatta, a 19-stringed instrument, Ram Karan sings his tale over long all-night sessions in homes. A painted five-meter-Iong scroll forms the backdrop of his performance.

Both the scroll and the ravanahatta have accompanied Ram Karan and his two sons to Washington for Aditi-as they did to London.

When curious visitors come to ask the tall Rajasthani questions, Ram Karan smiles and says the two English words that he has learned and finds most useful: "No English."

Ram Karan isn't sure of his age ("perhaps 30") or of how old the bhapa tradition is ("must be 200 years"), but he is sure that the next generation in his family will not take up any other profession. "Not just in my family-any other bhapa who sings the tale of Pabuji Maharaj will not let his children do anything but this. This is our life."

Not all bhapas sing the Pabuji legend. They sing of other kings or deities. But each group usually limits its repertoire to one part of history.

Sethi is eager for the bhapas and other performers to extend their repertoire.

"But we have to develop the performers' vocabulary with caution and care. We have to give them new things to say and new means of saying things. We have to give the craftspeople new objects to make which are in use today."

The Festival of India will act as a catalyst, no doubt about that.

A week before the Festival opened, the interest it h~d generated had helped sell Rs. 10 million worth_ of handicrafts, according to Sethi. That figure should skyrocket in the months ahead. A demand for the crafts means a better life for the craftspeople and their craft.

Not every performer in Aditi is a professional. There is Mewa, a graceful young dancer from Jaipur. Until a few years ago dancing for her had just been something she reveled in at family gatherings, at relatives' and friends' weddings. She didn't ever do it for money.

Then one day at the Pushkar Mela in Ajmer, she and her friends got into the spirit of the festivities and did an impromptu dance and song routine. Some "sahib log" from the "sarkar," impressed by the grace and fluidity of her untrained movements, asked her if she would take part in an official program. No girl in her "jaati" had danced and sung for money or for the public; no woman had set out to earn money. The panchayat said "No," till one village elder convinced them that this was "izzat ka kaam" (respectable work).

Since then Mewa has performed in most of the major cities of India.

This is her first trip abroad.

In creating Aditi, Sethi discovered a unity of craft. "There are things that bind people from different parts of the country together.

The other day a Rajasthani woman was doing alpana on the floor. A glass painter from Karnataka saw her and exclaimed that she does the same thing at home as part of her household ritual. The Baul woman singer from Bengal said she does it too. They live thousands of miles apart, yet there is this amazing similarity."

There were other discoveries too for Sethi as he put Aditi together. There was the discovery of talent.

"We had to do a lot of traveling but it would be wrong for me to suggest that one has to make an enormous effort. This country is so rich that things just flow in. You have to just keep your eyes and ears open. You can't just go into a village and ask if there are any kalakars there. They may not even be seeing it as kala."

Probir Guha, a young theater director from Calcutta, says he must have traveled some 9,000 kilometers in three months in search of artists who were both talented and authentically folk and would fit into Aditi's theme. As a committed director who only takes his group-Living Theater-to villages, Guha is used to seeking talent among rural India. But this was a rare chance for him to go beyond his familiar territory, West Bengal.

He found talent wherever he went. He also found that not all the artists were keen to come out and let the world see their craft.

Sometimes it was fear and superstition that held them back, other times just a total lack of interest in moving out.

Often they helped the artist himself to discover his talent. "One of the Durga imagemakers had brought an assistant along the other daJ," recalls Sethi. "We were just discussing how badly we needed a drummer. Suddenly this man says, 'I can play the drums.' And then we discover that he can not only play the drums, he can also sing and dance beautifully. He's got just amazing talent."

Adds Sethi, "I think it's wonderful, in a way, that they don't even see it as talent. Or as art. It's just a part of their life, like breathing, drinking, eating, making love."

Many people worry about the effect of worldwide exposure on these simple folks, some of whom have never even stepped out of their villages before.

The implied question upsets Sethi "tremendously."

"If we all can go out and expect nothing to happen to us, why should we think something will go wrong with them? In fact, I think there are more chances of negative influences on people with urban middle class backgrounds.

Because this is something they have always craved for. They have always emulated the West.

But if you have a basic center there is nothing anyone can take from you. And these poor artists have a dignity, a sense of center infinitely more solid than any of us can boast of.

"If we can go abroad for a holiday, why can't they? In fact, I find their attitude to it all so much more healthy. You know, they can just pick up an electronic gadget, demystify it, and use it as if it were just nothing. The way they handle cameras and tape recorders, I wouldn't even dare. To them it's just like a toy. This isn't something they've been craving for. They have their life to come back to. They have their rasa within."

-A.D.

FESTIVAL OF INDIA USA 1985-1986

Calendar of Events India 2000: The Next Fifteen Years Symposium sponsored by the Center for Asian Studies, University of Texas, Austin. (See pages 38-40.)

Conference on Indian Democracy Girilal Jain, L.K. Jha and Pran Chopra were among the scholars from India, the United States and the United Kingdom who participated in a series of panel discussions sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs, Princeton University in March.

The Sculpture of India: 3000 B.C. to 1300 A.D. A wealth of sculptured beauty in stone, ivory and bronze. The 100 items include some that have never been exhibited abroad before. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. May 5September 2.

Arts of South Asia The Freer Gallery of Art's own collection of Indian art highlights the artistry of India's craftspeople from the 2nd century B.C. to the 18th century A.D. Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. May 14- November 30.

Art of India: Miniature Painting, 15th to 19th Centuries A traveling exhibition of 90 exquisite miniatures from the Mughal and Hindu courts opened at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, in April. In Memphis (May-June) it had the added attraction of being the first major Indian art exhibition to be funded privately by Indian residents of an American city.

The Indus Valley: New Light on the Origins of Indi,an Civilization An illustrated lecture held in May by Gregory Possehl of the University of Pennsylvania, author of Landmark in Harappan Studies. Asia Society, New York.

The Photographs of Raghubir Singh Thirty-five dye transfer color photographs by . a camera artist who, to quote Artforum, "fuses the soul of a Rajput miniaturist with the outlook of a Henri Cartier-Bresson." University Art Museum, Berkeley, California. May 8-July 28.

The Erotic Theme in the Cultural Traditions of India A three-day conference held in May. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

4,000 Years of Civilization in India A lecture series held in May to introduce the Festival of India. Asia Society, New York.

The Impact of Industrialization and Urbanization on the Lives of Women in India and the United States Prominent women scholars from India and America "instruct each other and start a dialogue" at a four-day conference in June.

Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York.

Images of India: Photographs by Lala Deen Dayal Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C. June 4-August 31.

(See page 36.)

The Gift of Dance from India Gershwin Theater, New York. (See page 36.)

Music at Maryland A blending of Karnatic and Hindustani music in a concert in June by violin virtuosi L. Subramaniam and V.G. Jog, accompanied

by Zakir Hussain on the tabla and TH. Subhashchandran on the mridangam.

University of Maryland.

India: A Festival of Science Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, Illinois. June 12-September 2. (See page 37.)

Inaugural Concert The event that officially inaugurated the Festival on June 13-a concert featuring Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan, Allah Rakha, Zakir Hussain and the Kerala Kalamandalam Kathakali trio of Krishnan Nair, Parvathi Menon and Raman Kutti Nair. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C. Yankee Traders and Indian Merchants, 1785 to 1865 A nostalgic exhibition of those early days when America exported ice to India and India sent back shiploads of pepper, sugar, indigo, silk, cotton and ginger. Peabody Museum of Salem, Massachusetts. June 20, 1985 through 1987.

Etchings by Kaiko Moti The Meridian House International, Washington, D.C. June 19-July 23. (See page 37.)

The Canvas of Culture S. Dillon Ripley and Pupul Jayakar, the chairpersons of the Festival of India, presented a three-day symposium in June on "Rediscovery of the Past¡as Adaptation for the Future."

Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Aditi Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C. June 4-July (See page 15.)

Folklife Festival An Indian me la-with all its color and verve, including a roadside photographer-is recreated at the Mall, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC June 26-July 7.

28.

Akbar and His Court A one-day intensive course in June, in anticipation of the upcoming exhibition on Akbar's India. Asia Society, New York.

"Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright" An Indian wildlife portfolio of photographs.

American Museum of Natural History, New York.

October 1-January 12, 1986.

Contemporary Printmaking-India A traveling exhibition of about 100 outstanding examples of India's best printmakers. Inaugural exhibition-San Diego California State University.

June 21-August 2. (See story on exhibition curator Paul Lingren on page 46.)

University Concerts The India-based American Institute of Indian Studies has arranged to take Indian performing artists to universities all around the United States. September-March 1986.

Indian Animal Folk Tales A two-day presentation in June. East West Fusion Theater, Sharon, Connecticut.

Rosalind Solomon: India Focus on the colorful festivals of India-as seen through the camera of an American photographer. Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C. June 4-August 31.

Discovering India An exhibition of manuscripts, books, maps, music and posters illustrating American and European perceptions of India.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. June 13- September 28.

Puranic Studies A conference. University of Wisconsin, Madison. August 1-4.

Terra Cotta This exhibition of contemporary terra-cotta art is enhanced by demonstrations by craftspeople and performances by dancers and musicians. American Craft Museum, New York. August 16-0ctober 15.

India The diversity of India's artistic heritage from the 14th till the 19th century is highlighted in 400 works. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

September 14-January 5, 1986.

Classical Dance Performances Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York. September 9-15.

Salute to India The New York Philharmonic under the direction of Zubin Mehta celebrates the music, musicians and composers of India. Lincoln Center, New York. September 11-17.

Indian Sculpture A symposium/colloquium in October. National Gallery, Washington, D.C. The Golden Eye Yves St. Laurent, International designers-like Frei Otto, Ismau Noguchi, I.M. Pei and Philip Johnson-who recently worked with Indian craftspeople to discover craft traditions that they could adapt in their work, display the creations of this unique collaboration. Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, New York. November 5- February 23, 1986.

Kushan Sculpture Sculptures from the early centuries attest to the exquisite craftsmanship of the Mathura and Gandhara schools of art. Cleveland Museum of Art. November 13-January 5, 1986.

Fatehpur Sikri and the Age of Akbar Glimpses of the art and life of the city that Akbar made his home for 15 years from 1571. Asia Society Gallery, New York.

October 1O-January 5, 1986.

Life at Court A hundred paintings from Mughal and Rajput courts examine the concept of realistic representation in Indian painting. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

November 20-February 9, 1986.

Fatehpur Sikri A seminar on the art, architecture and culture of the lost city. Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. October 17 ':"-19

New Tantra Art Works of prominent contemporary artists from the Tantra school. University of California, Los Angeles. November 24-January 5, 1986.

Festival of Indian Cinema Contemporary films and retrospectives of noted directors like Mrinal Sen (see page 31), Ritwik Ghatak and Raj Kapoor. Museum of Modern Art, New York. October.

Indian Contemporary Paintings Seventy-five works by some of India's finest contemporary artists. From the Chester and Davida Herwitz Family Collection. Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York University. December 1O-January 25, 1986.

Patronage in Indian Culture A seminar. National Humanities Center, North Carolina. October 10-13.

One Hundred Years of the Indian National Congress A roundtable discussion. California State University, Long Beach, California.

October 11-12.

Indian Court Costumes Curator Diana Vreeland's selection of sartorial splendor of the 19th century. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. December 16 to September 1, 1986.

Festival of India events for 1986 will be featured in a later issue of SPAN.

A New Voyage of Discovery Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi came to Washington, D.C., on June 11, 1985, not as a stranger. He and his wife, Sonia, had accompanied his mother, Indira Gandhi, on her state visit-in the summer of 1982. But this time he came as the leader of the world's largest democracy, backed by an impressive mandate from the voters of India. When a' reporter asked him the purpose of his trip, the Prime Minister replied with a smile and one word: "Friendship." Throughout his visit, the leaders and people of the United States gave abundant evidence of friendship for him and his country. He returned it in gracious measure.

Welcoming him in a ceremony at the White House that was replete with pageantry, President Ronald Reagan recalled that Mr. Gandhi's grandfather, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, had referred to his own 1949 visit to the United States as "a voyage of discovery," and the President said: "Your visit marks a

continuation of that process of mutual discovery."

The President said: "Today we celebrate the depth and vitality of the ties between our nations. We Americans place great value on India's friendship. Our shared democratic ideals serve as a bridge between us. Our cultural differences enrich our relationship. Our mutual commitment to the freedom and dignity of man set us on a different road, a higher road than governments which deny the human rights so cherished by our peoples.

"Mr. Prime Minister, on this, your own voyage of discovery, you will find a deep well of affection and respect for India and its people. You will sense America's admiration for India's strength in overcoming adversities, and a heartfelt sympathy for the tragedy that you personally suffered. You will also discover that the United States remains steadfastly dedicated to India's unity and that we oppose those who would undermine it.

"You will find that we respect India's nonalignment and recognize the pivotal role your country plays in South Asia.

We're supportive of your efforts-and those of others in South Asia-to overcome past animosities in seeking stability, security and cooperation in the region."

President Reagan noted that the two countries have areas of disagreement and expressed confidence that a forthright discussion of such questions would lead to greater understanding, because fundamental areas of agreement far outweigh momentary differences.

"Your stay with us will also provide us with a better understanding of you, Mr. Prime Minister," the President said.

"Americans are impressed with what they've seen; your leadership and idealism are inspiring. We're eager to learn more of your vision for India's future."

President Reagan spoke of Mr. Gandhi's efforts to reinvigorate India's economy, a subject they discussed at length in their private meeting. He assured the Prime Minister that sharing of new technologies combined with progressive policies would be an important aspect of Indo-U.S. cooperation.

"Three years ago, when the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and I met here, we agreed that a Festival of India would advance America's knowledge of India's heritage and achievements," Mr. Reagan recalled. "You will inaugurate that festival, now dedicated to your mother's memory, during your visit here this week. This is an auspicious year for such a festival. You know it has been d~bbed 'The Year of India' in recognition of a resurgent American interest in India's history and culture."

Amidst applause from the throng of guests gathered to greet the Prime Minister on the White House's South Lawn, President Reagan welcomed him to the United States on behalf of all Americans.

In his remarks Mr. Gandhi noted, "Three years ago, welcoming Indira Gandhi, my predecessor, my mother, on this very stretch of green, you remarked so truly that our two people, with all their differences, have much in common. Yes, there are differences, but rising above them are the beliefs we hold in common-in the supremacy of freedom, in the necessity of equality, in the sovereignty of the people's will."

He added, "The United States and India have been developing a tradition of working together. If my visit strengthens that tradition, it will have given further substance to what is in any case one of the most important, and one of the most pleasantly rewarding, of journeys. I look forward, in particular, to my talks with you, Mr. President. We know of your life-long feeling for India and look forward to welcoming you there."

Following the ceremony, the Prime Minister and the President talked privately in the Oval Office of the White House for about a half-hour. Later Mr. Gandhi, his advisers and other Indian officials met in the Cabinet room with Mr. Reagan, State Department officials and members 'of the Cabinet for a thorough discussion of bilateral issues.

At a White House dinner in honor of the Prime Minister and Mrs. Gandhi that evening, President Reagan commented on their meeting, "I am happy to report to all present this evening that although a few years separate us-just a few-we hit it off, and just as with relations between our countries, I predict good things ahead."

Asked about this comment by a reporter, the Prime Minister said, "Yes, I think we did hit it off."

The Prime Minister and his party went from the White House meetings to a lunch at the State Department, held by Secretary of State George Shultz. In his welcoming toast, the Secretary cited the Festival of India as a symbol of Indo-

American friendship, but noted that the significance of the visit goes beyond symbolism, to the global issues of importance to both countries. "In South Asia, we recognize India's pivotal role and special responsibilities," he said. Secretary Shultz expressed pleasure at the steps India has taken to improve relations with Pakistan to bring peace, stability and security to the region. "For the same reason, the United States also believes the tragic ordeal of Afghanistan must be brought swiftly to a peaceful and just conclusion in accordance with U.N. General Assembly resolutions."

Secretary Shultz welcomed the economic and trade policies fostered by Mr. Gandhi's leadership and noted that "our new memorandum of understanding on technology transfer will give impetus to significant forward movement in this area, reflecting forward movement in our relations." .

In closing, Secretary Shultz reiterated the United States' uncompromising opposition to terrorism: "The United States will continue to work closely with India in the fight against terrorism, whatever its form. By our statements and our deeds, we have made it clear that we strongly support the unity, independence and territorial integrity of India against those who would undermine it."

In his toast to Secretary Shultz, Prime Minister Gandhi said, "Excellency, we have so much in common-so many ideals, so many visions of the world. Let us work together to build on these-to make it a better world for everyone to live in. In every small way that we can contribute, we would like to help all the other nations in the world in doing this."

The Prime Minister took the occasion to state several of India's concerns-themes he would expand upon in his address to the U.S. Congress. He talked of the concern that India and other nonaligned nations have expressed about the arms race and their strong desire to see a worldwide reduction of nuclear weapons. He stated, "We watch with interest your dialogue with the Soviet Union."

He looked toward relaxation of economic protectionism that he said works against the interests of developing nations and hoped that international monetary institutions would be helpful in assisting developing countries to move ahead.

Describing steps India has taken to increase cooperation in South Asia, the Prime Minister said, "We have made much headway." He spoke of his consultations with President Jayawardene of Sri Lanka concerning the problems of Tamils in that country and initiatives he has taken regarding the Punjab.

"After our new government came in, we took a number of steps to ease the tension in the Punjab, and I'm glad that the Akali Dal leadership has responded positively."

Following the State Department luncheon, Prime Minister Gandhi went to the nearby National Academy of Sciences, where he met with the President's Science Adviser George Keyworth and a number of other American scientists.

Detailing progress in the fields of genetics, telecommunications, biogas and robotics, the American scientists made a presentation to the Prime Minister showing him how American progress could be applied' usefully to India's needs. Mr. Gandhi said he would like to concentrate on a half dozen or so vital areas of technology, which he would designate as mission areas.

"We have a mix of pure development science and of converting that into active usage," he said.

One of the fruits of his visit was an agreement to extend the science and technology initiative that had been inaugurated by President Reagan and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi during her 1982 visit. A document signed by George Keyworth and Shivraj Patil, Minister of State for Science and Technology in India, (Text continued on page 29)

((We hit it off"

((The United States remains steadfastly dedicated to India's unity and we oppose those who would undermine it. "

On his arrival in Washington, D. c., on a 'five-day state visit, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi is greeted by Ambassador Harry Barnes, while Sonia Gandhi accepts a bouquet of flowers from a group of Indian children (above, left). Secretary of State George Shultz and the Prime Minister (above) walk arm-in-arm toward waiting photographers.

A large number of people were invited to the White House (above) to witness the welcoming ceremonies for the Indian Prime Minister, which included a guard of honor and a I9-gun salute (left). Secretary and Mrs. Shultz greet Ambassador and Mrs. Bajpai in the VIP enclosure (center, above). On the same evening the Reagans held a banquet for Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi at the White House (right).

"Every encounter between the peoples o/the United States and India is an essay in understanding. " .

- Prime Minister Gandhi

At a meeting at the White House (right), leaders of the two nations discussed a wide range of bilateral issues. From left are: L. K. fha, Chairman, Indian Economic Administration Reforms Commission; Defense Minister Narasimha Rao; Prime Minister Gandhi; Foreign Secretary Romesh Bhandari; Additional Secretary C.R. Gharekhan; USAID Administrator Peter MacPherson; Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Michael Armacost; Ambassador Harry Barnes; Secretary of Commerce Malcolm Baldrige; Secretary of State George Shultz; President Reagan and Secretary of the Treasury fames Baker.

During his address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, Prime Minister Gandhi received repeated applause from members, Vice President George Bush and Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas P. O'Neill (above), and a standing ovation on departure from Capitol Hill (top). A highlight of the Prime Minister's visit, which was covered extensively by the U.S. reporters and television (left), was his meeting with members of the press (right) at a luncheon at the National Press Club, which was broadcast to India by Doordarshan via satellite.

The FestivaL.ofIndia wasformally inaugurated on June 13 by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to the music 'ofsitar-sarod duo Pandit Ravi Shankar and Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, who were accompanied on the tabla by Ustad Alia Rakha Khan and his.son Zakir Hussain (far left), and Kathakali dance performances by the Kerala Kalamandalam troupe (center, above) at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington (center, below). The National Gallery of Art held a reception (below, left) in honor of the Prime Minister when he visited "The Sculpture of India" exhibition; at extreme right in the photo is SPAN's publisher, James A. McGinley. Mr. Gandhi toured the exhibition with Gallery Director J. Carter Brown (left).

Vice President Bush (above) introduces Prime Minister Gandhi to the guests at a luncheon given by Kathryn J. Whitmire, Mayor of the City of Houston. At right, Prime Minister Gandhi, Mrs. Bush and Mayor Whitmire.

"As the magnificent Festival of India will illuminate, you have enriched the world with beauty, cuLture, science and philosophy."

"We look forward to new contacts in new areas, new technologies, which will help us build India."

Prime Minister Gandhi was escorted by astronauts and NASA administrators on his visit to the Johnson Space Center (above, left) in Houston, Texas. As a former pilot he showed great interest in the Center's facilities and even examined the controls of a space shuttle simulator (above). At left, Prime Minister Gandhi with Secretary Shultz, Vice President Bush and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.

stated: "Since the inauguration of the sCience and technology initiative two years ago, excellent progress has been made in achieving its scientific objectives. Tangible research products have emerged from some of the established projects; in others, the groundwork has been laid for significant cooperative programs. A mark of the success of the initiative is the degree to which it has served as a catalyst for further collaborative efforts between American and Indian scientists in broader areas of science and technology research."

President Reagan and Prime Minister Gandhi have agreed to extend the program for an additional three-year period, beginning in October 198~.

The joint statement issued at the end of Mr. Gandhi's visit stated: "Encouraged by the success of science and technology collaboration to date, the President and the Prime Minister decided to initiate two new efforts. The first is a vaccine action program to develop and produce new and improved vaccines against major communicable diseases. The second is a longterm research and technology development program covering activities in agriculture and forestry, health and nutrition, family welfare and biomedical research and industrial research and development."¡ The statement also endorsed the growing peaceful cooperation in space research between the two countries. President Reagan expressed willingness to share with India the U.S. experience in reducing pollution of large river systems. A start has already been made with the recent discussions among pollution control specialists of the possibilities of Indo-U.S. collaboration in the Ganga Action Plan.

Cultural and artistic exchanges were also prominently featured in the joint statement. "The Prime Minister and the President agreed that the current cultural festivals in both countries would make a significant contribution to improving mutual understanding.

They discussed other activities that might serve to perpetuate the spirit of the festivals, including development of cooperative programs in education and exchange programs in diverse fields. They agreed that such programs served their mutual goal of broadening people-topeople contact between their two countries."

Prior to the White House banquet, the Prime Minister attended a reception at the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art given by the museum's trustees. There he and Mrs. Gandhi saw the exhibition of Indian sculpture that has been drawing enormous crowds since early June.

After the reception the Gandhis went to the White House dinner. In his toast, President Reagan said: "Yours is among the most ancient cultures and ours is one of the youngest. Ours is, however, the oldest constitutional democracy and yours is relatively new-thirty-eight years of age. Although young, Indian democracy has achieved strength and maturity, and today I have found that is also true of India's Prime Minister, who is just three years older than Independent India ....

"India and the United States have just begun to write the history of our relations. As the magnificent Festival of India will illuminate, you have enriched the world with beauty, culture, science and philosophy. Perhaps your most precious gift to us has been the many Indians who have become proud citizens of our country. Some are here tonight and they embody the human bond that is between us."

Prime Minister Gandhi's return toast was just as cordial: "Every encounter between the peoples of the United States and India is an essay in understanding.

It provides an opportunity for the reaffirmation of our commitment to personal liberty, to the rule of law and free expression.

We both are rather outspoken people, not known for keeping quiet about what we feel and what we believe. But being candid with each other is a

measure of the stability of om relationship.

Bdfh of us are animated by that capacious tolerance which marks the democratic spirit. It is one of the reasons why, in spite of some differences on policies and particulars, a firm people-to-people relationship endures between us .... " The Prime Minister reiterated his hopes for stability and peace in South Asia and for disarmament among nations. He said, "Nonalignment has been a positive force for peace. It stands for friendship and cooperation with all. Any nation's independence must include the option to steer clear of bloc identification.

One friendship need not be at the cost of another. We want to enlarge cooperation between our two countries in numerous fields."

He added, "India today is poised for greater growth. We have taken up plans and policies to generate new employment in our rural areas and to harness the productive energies of our young." Showing his familiarity with Americanisms, the Prime Minister remarked, "We need new technology in a big way. A good part of it we will develop ourselves.

But we must necessarily acquire the most advanced knowledge wherever it is generated. The United States is pre-eminently the land of high technology.

Recently our two countries have reached an understanding on transfer of high technology. These arrangements must be worked out with great speed."

After the White House dinner and a day packed with both ceremony and substantive discussions, the Prime Minister retired to the residence of the Indian Ambassador, K.S. Bajpai, where he stayed during his Washington visit. Until 3 in the morning, he worked, rewriting and adding to the speech he would deliver to a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress.

"I am deeply conscious of the honor you have done me in giving me an opportunity to address this joint session," the Prime Mi~ister noted, observing that his grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, had stood in the same position 36 years before. "I know that this is an expression of your regard for India, our people and our Parliament.

On their behalf, I thank you."

Prime Minister Gandhi's address was carried live on cable television and on public radio, and excerpts were featured on the. evening news of all television networks, reaching millions of American homes. As with many of his American appearances, Doordarshan had the address transmitted by satellite for transmission on Indian television, too. His remarks were delivered with the candor he had promised and were received with applause on 11 occasions.

"The precept and example of your Founding Fathers were a source of inspiration for us in our struggle for independence.

Mahatma Gandhi, the guiding light of our Freedom Movement, owed much to the thinking of Henry David Thoreau. Gandhiji gave to our freedom struggle its great distinguishing feature, which was the commitment to nonviolence.

He taught us that arms brutalized men and made them cowards, whereas nonviolence instilled courage and self-reliance. Gandhiji's idea of nonviolence as a positive moral force was later to travel beyond our borders to influence Martin Luther King in 'your country's civil rights movement."

The Prime Minister told the Congress of the progress that India has made since Independence in agriculture, management, industry and science. He spoke of India's role in the Nonaligned Movement, its opposition to arms proliferation.

And his wish for a political settlement in Afghanistan that would assure nonalignment.

Prime Minister Gandhi won an ovation with his thoughts on Afghanistan.

Mr. Gandhi said, "Afghanistan and Southwest Asia are on all our minds. Outside interference and intervention have put in jeopardy the stability, security and progress of

the region. We stand for a political settlement in Afghanistan that ensures sovereignty, integrity, independence and nonaligned status, and enables the refugees to return to their homes in safety and honor." This stand, the Prime Minister pointed out, is consistent with statements he has made on other occasions in his capacity as chairman of the Nonaligned Movement. His position was well received by America's leaders.

When the Prime Minister concluded his address, he was accorded a standing ovation. He passed through the crowd of American lawmakers and dignitaries shaking hands and sharing warm greetings as if he were in the midst of his own constituency.

The Prime Minister made the short trip from the Capitol to the Smithsonian Institution-actually a trip from the heart of America to the he<;lrt of India, for this was the site of the Aditi exhibition. Me. Gandhi and Mrs. Nancy Reagan, the honorary chairpersons of the Festival of India, visited the performers and craftsworkers who have established a corner of India on Constitution Avenue (see back cover).

The rest of the Prime Minister's afternoon was taken up with meetings. He met with popular astronomer Carl Sagan, conducted some of the numerous U.S. television interviews that marked his trip,. ~nd also conferred with U.S. Secretary of Commerce Malcolm Baldrige, a recent visitor to India.

After a dinner Prime Minister and Mrs. Gandhi held in honor of Vice President and Mrs. George Bush, one of the premier musicaleyents of the Festival of India, the inaugural concert, which featured Kathakali dancers and the inimitable duo of Pandit Ravi Shankar and Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, was held at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The American guests, who expressed great appreciation of the performing artists, craned for a view of the Prime Minister.

The following day saw no letup in the Prime Minister's whirlwind round of meetings and appearances.

He attended a breakfast in his honor given by Frank Morsani, chairman of the Board of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Orville Freeman, chairman of the Joint India-U .S. Business Council.

There he met dozens of America's leading industrialists and spoke to them of the business opportunities that India offers.

Later in the day, the Prime Minister met to discuss different, but equally important, issues with two members of Mr. Reagan's Cabinet: Caspar Weinberger, head of the Department of Defense; and John Block, who is in charge of the Department of Agriculture.

The Prime Minister's widely reported appearance at the National Press Club highlighted his skill in handling a wide variety of subjects concerning India, bilateral relationships and global questions. He ducked no questions and drew laughter and applause from the audience of journalists.

When asked whether he was concerned that the number of outstanding Indian physicians and scientists who have settled in the United States constituted "a brain drain," he replied that he considered these individuals to be a "brain reser.ve," since he was confident that they will continue to contribute to the welfare of India as they are needed.

The same evening the Prime Minister and Mrs. Gandhi attended two receptions held in their honor by the Indian National Congress and the Indian-American community at the Shoreham Hotel. The grand ballroom was decorated with signs reflecting the pride and affection Indians living in the United States feel toward Mr. Gandhi.

On the last day of the Prime Minister's visit to America, he and Mrs. Gandhi flew with Vice President and Mrs. Bush to Houston, Texas (the Vice President's home state), to visit the Johnson Space Center. During the tour of the mission control

center and astronaut training facilities, Center Director Gerald Griffith presented the Prime Minister with a 25-page photo album showing views of India taken from space during the Gemini, Apollo, Skylab and space shuttle missions. Vice President Bush gave him a flag of India that was flown aboard the shuttle Challenger during the April mission, which carried the Indian experiment Anuradha.

Astronauts served as guides to the wonders of the space center. Robert Crippen, the most experienced U.S. shuttle pilot, escorted Prime Minister Gandhi and Vice President Bush inside the huge mock-up of the orbiter cockpit. Astronaut Anna Fisher, who had worked the manipulator arm during a November 1984 shuttle mission in which two disabled satellites were retrieved, demonstrated how the apparatus works. The Prime Minister evinced keen interest in the high technology which is applied in the American space program, and asked many questions.

The official party had lunch at Ford Aerospace, near the space center, which manufactured India's multipurpose communications satellite INSAT-IB. It is now making INSAT-IC. The Prime Minister later addressed a reception at the Indian Culture Center in Houston, attended by some 2,000 members of the city's Indian-American community, the largest in Texas, numbering more than 40,000.

The official visit ended on a particularly cordial note. At a dinner Mr. and Mrs. Bush gave the Gandhis in Houston, the Vice President said: "We want very much to see your leadership succeed, as we know it will. We want to be a part of India's reaching its destination of prosperity. We would like very much to be of assistance in any way possible. And I know we have a great deal to learn from the scientists in India.

"India has the third largest pool of technological talent, and surely India will do with the Technological Revolution what you did with the Green Revolution."

The Vice President noted that India had done a magnificent job in producing food not only for its own population but also "being able to help its neighbors and others around the world."

Prime Minister Gandhi responded: "About 20 years ago we were in very dire trouble with our agriculture.

The United States came forward and helped us. And that has been one of the major success stories in the development of any country in the world. One of the areas that we have decided to work together in is to try and understand how and why our cooperation in agriculture was so successful, and then try to jointly repeat that in third countries.

"Similarly cooperation in other areas will help us come together, and I see with the U.S. and India getting closer, a bond of friendship building up. We will bring a new atmosphere of peace and cooperation in other world matters as well."

Summarizing his visit, Prime Minister Gandhi said: "This is our last evening in the United States and I really am deeply touched by the warmth, affection and friendship that we have gotten from the people of the United States. During the couple of days in Washington, we've had very cordial talks, warm talks. And like the Vice President has just said, where we had differences of opinion, we would just put them in front of us and were willing to be open to talk about them and discuss them, try to reduce the differences, try to understand what we thought about the particular issues. And this, I feel, brought our two countries much closer together.

"I don't claim that in three days we have solved either all the problems that we have between us or all the world's problems.

But we certainly have done the groundwork for moving in a positive direction and getting closer in the areas where there are differences." .

-M.O.

Mrinal5en on American Cinema When I asked Mrinal Sen for an interview on the influence of American cinema on him, he said he would be pleased to talk to me about his personal response to American cinema and its part in shaping his ideas and style as a filmmaker. "But this is the first time," he said, "that someone is going to write about me from an American angle."

He added, "I'm not Satyajit Ray. My childhood memories don't go back to a man with rings in his ears and a bandanna around his head fighting real grim guys in turbans and beating them all." He sounded positively amused.

"Don't you think American cinema is a little more than Douglas Fairbanks, Senior, and The Thief of Baghdad?" I asked.

"Come around ten tomorrow night and we shall find out. I'll be free to talk," said Sen. The following night, when we met, Sen remarked, "I don't think you could write a full-length article on the American influence on my films. I am a filmmaker by accident. I didn't train myself. When, pretty late in life, I did take some interest in cinema, it was the new Soviet cinema headed by Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzenko and others that I turned to. I was already deeply involved in the left political movement. And in Nilsen's book I was keenly reading about such things as 'socialist photography' and 'bourgeois photography.' The categorization impressed me. I naturally turned away from American cinema. To me Hollywood was the breeding ground of bourgeois philosophy. That was when 'proletkult' was very much in my head. So you see, my early interest in cinema merely became an expression of my political attitude. My early aversion to American movies also sprang almost entirely from my political bias." Mrinal Sen made this statement even before I put any question to him. Not a very welcome note to begin with perhaps. But 1 knew I had struck gold.

If Mrinal Sen's early antipathy toward American cinema came from his politics, then it couldn't really have much to do with his understanding and evaluation of the forces that Hollywood had let loose for the good or bad of world cinema. Intrinsically, no filmmaker could have ignored the might and influence of American movies, unless of course he intended to treat cinema purely as a medium of naked propaganda with little appreciation for the technical and the artistic aspects. I asked him therefore if his

so popular. It is a film that did touch a nerve in the American public. Well, I think 1 do understand the forces working behind a film like Rocky and 1 don't think as a filmmaker I've got to fight against them."

Frank Capra had liked Rocky so much that he himself wanted to make a film like .that. "Would you ever like to see yourself as the director of such a film?" 1 asked Sen. "No, not really. 1 wouldn't ever make a simplistic film like that. Like many of my films, Rocky speaks for the working class.

The director has taken as much care to make the settings look authentic as 1 do in my films. And like my more recent films, Rocky tries to capture a particular social milieu. But Fl film like Rocky would finally teach me how not to make a film. 1 don't think I can ever be that simplistic in my treatment of the working class perspective."

Who are Sen's favorite Hollywood directors, and what are their qualities he likes most? "I was exposed to American literature much before I became a regular moviegoer and started seeing American films. I read The Grapes of Wrath long before I saw Ford's film based on the novel and the novel's impact on me was certainly greater. Similarly, Griffith's attempt to conFilms are also a part of the ceptualize Walt Whitman's line, "And eterFestival of India. A retrospective nally rocks the cradle," in terms of cinema didn't fascinate me as much as the poem of Mrinal Sen's films will did. Well, frankly speaking, 1 owe my first be seen in six American cities. interest in American cinema to a Russian.

His name is Sergei Eisenstein. I read his understanding of the forces of American Dickens, Griffith and Film Today, which in cinema was as partial and incomplete as it . a sense opened my eyes. And the first used to be way back in the Fifties and early American whose films 1 took a special Sixties; or whether he had tiegun to under- interest in was David Wark Griffith, the filmmaker from Kentucky who brought the stand these forces more comprehensively cinema to its maturity between 1908 and and professionally.

"The trouble with me now is that 1 have 1916. However, when I first saw Griffith's come to love American movies. Their tech- Intolerance, with which one could say that nical efficiency is simply amazing. It isn't the film came of age, I wasn't thinking of ever becoming a filmmaker myself. Years merely a matter of machine and computer and teamwork. A lot of inspiration, a lot of later, after 1 had directed a number of films, real hard work and professionalism and a lot I once again had the opportunity to see of meticulous planning go into each good Intolerance, The Birth of a Nation and American film these days. Think of a film America. Griffith's narrative technique and like Rocky for instance. Well, what's so his command of mise-en-scene is outstandwrong about winning 10 Oscar nominations ing, and I feel every serious filmmaker and three Academy Awards? Rocky's com- should see Griffith's films from time to time mercial success, which is extraordinary by to marshal and enrich his own style. What any standard, certainly doesn't take away particularly interests me about Griffith from the film's intrinsic merit. I don't think is the influence of Victorian painting on it's highpowered publicity alone that could him which finally propelled him away have got Rocky so many awards or made it from the stage-proscenium style of photog-

raphy. Well, if one thinks of my shotframing, my use of depth of frame in recent films like Khandahar (The Ruins) and Portrait of an A verage Man (a TV film), one might find echoes of contemporary painting.

And it smacks of Griffith.

"Griffith's use of film language, especially in his attempt to bring to the screen the works of Poe, Tennyson and Browning, is very significant. I haven't yet made a film based on a poem. But a film like Khandahar comes very close to poetry in its ambiguity, in its range of implications, in its structural ingenuity and in its use of film language. I might even come to make a film based on a poem, or on a story like The Old Man and The Sea that has all the qualities of great poetry. The critics are often hard put to understand, to explain the increasingly lyrical quality of my recent films. Some of them have gone so far as to think that I've become an escapist and have gone back on my commitments. Well, they might find a more reasonable explanation in the forces working behind the avant-garde cinema of the United States. Take, for instance, Maya Deren, who was one of the pioneers of the American avant-garde cinema. I can't agree with her more when she says that a film should concern itself with the interior experiences of an individual. This is surely a line of thought that has influenced me over the years. In my recent films I am more and more inclined to treat my characters in the context of their psychological reactions to apparently simple incidents. Even some of the important situations in my later films like Kharij, Ekdin Pratidin and Khandahar assume symbolic significance through stylized manipulation of some of the elements in the situations. I don't think one would be wrong to find in this evolving style of mine references to the American avant-garde filmmakers like Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Sidney Meyers and John Cassavetes. I've never consciously imitated any of them. I don't think they have directly influenced my style of filmmaking either.

But they have certainly inspired me to direct my camera inward; to capture bits of our true vision."

Much of what happens in Khandahar seems to be taking place in a dream. The film is indeed remarkable for its trancelike quality. I asked Mrinal Sen if the film did not recall Brakhage in its somnambulistic treatment of the theme and the characters.

"Well," began Sen, "in Khandahar I at last totally rid myself of drama as the prime source of my inspiration. The material that I work with here comes from within the characters, a kind of inner reality radiating out of them. And all through the film images

of death and sleep are intimately intertwined. If this is what recalls some of the somnambulistic sequences in Brakhage's Anticipation of the Night, one should take it as my tribute to him. In both Brakhage's film and mine you find the expression of a lyrical mood which eschews the presence of a protagonist.

Khandahar, like a Brakhage or a Warhol film, tries to recapture the movements of a man looking. And then my film goes deeper into exploring the intense experience of feeling as the man looks on."

Sen had himself brought in the name of Andy Warhol. I couldn't resist asking him if Warhol had also shaped his thoughts or inspired him in any way. "Yes. Warhol has certainly been a major influence. I was exposed to him for the first time in the early Seventies.

But for this exposure I don't think I'd have turned so completely to the cinema of the mind. You see, the difference between Brakhage's Anticipation of the Night and Warhol's The Chelsea Girls is that Brakhage's film may be best described as lyrical, whereas Warhol's film marks the beginning of a new genre, the structural cinema. The Chelsea Girls is a film about a homosexual megalomaniac.

There's a lot of fun in it as the man thinks he is the Pope.

But I for one wouldn't be interested in a story like thaLI think it's too childish, too trivial to spend time, money and energy on.

But what I find particularly fascinating about Warhol is the way he experiments with time and space. These experiments kind of lead to a visionary plan, if you know what I mean. Take two of my films, Khandahar and Akaler Sandhane (In Search of Famine), where I've done away with the conventional plot logic. Yet there's the same kind of visionary planning that you find in Warhol and Cassavetes. I certainly owe to these filmmakers a good deal of my inspiration to avoid the cliches of commercial cinema; and it's these cliches that prevent commercial filmmakers from letting actors improvise, to be realistic."

Of all the new American filmmakers, it's about John Cassavetes that Mrinal Sen feels most enthusiastic. He has his reasons. "John Cassavetes is not an American by birth, as you know. But I can't think of the beginning of the New American Cinema without going back to the screening of Cassavetes' Shadows in Paris in 1958. It's a film about a black family. But it is especially unique in its treatment of characters and dialogue. You don't think that you are listening to scripted dialogue at all. And you feel you are not merely hearing a conversation, but also watching a conversation.

I think that's a very important achievement for a filmmaker. Shortly after what I'd call the explosion

of Shadows, there was yet another explosion; Cassavetes wrote in Film Culture an article about what was wrong with Hollywood. He wrote, 'Hollywood is not failing.

It has failed.' It has failed because it has always made men of new ideas compromise too much.

"Ten years later I was surprised to meet Cassavetes at the New York Film Festival.

He was there with his very controversial film Faces. It wasn't of course his first Hollywood film, but certainly the first film that Cassavetes made on his ow~, terms. Here was something that inspired me, since as a filmmaker I was also functioning within a commercial setup. Well, Cassavetes has acted in movies like The Dirty Dozen or The Fury to make money. But at the same time he has made Hollywood films like Husbands, Minnie and Moskowitz and Woman Under the Influence. If you asked me how Cassavetes earned his freedom from Hollywood cliches, I'd say mostly by not working with stars and by giving a lot of freedom to his actors. The relationship between Cassavetes and his actors is something I took special note of. As a filmmaker, one of the biggest challenges I've faced is that of organizing thf' characters, plot and acting into an organic whole. Cassavetes does it in his own way, but with superb skill and effortlessness.

I've tackled the problem my way, but Cassavetes has always been a

Shabana Azmi in Khandahar.

A scene from Chorus.

Basu Devan Rao in Oka Oorie Katha.

Smita Patil in Akaler Sandhane.

Anjan Dutt and Mamata Shankar in Kharij.

Mamata Shankar and Mithun Chakraborty in Mrigaya.

Geeta Sen (left) in Ekdin Pratidin.

source of inspiration and ideas. I also basically believe in giving my actors as much freedom as possible. That's a sure way of bypassing commercial cliches."

And finally, what does Sen hate most about Hollywood? "Too much of checking and double-checking and too much of planning," he replies unequivocally. "This is the hallmark of every big-budget Hollywood production and this is what I absolutely abhor. I believe in instant shooting, going beyond the script as often as I can usefully. I find the instant reality much stronger than the recorded type. In that sense, my scripts are always incomplete. One could possibly trace it back to the influence of yet another American director, Maya Deren. She emigrated to America in the Twenties with her parents from Kiev. As you probably know, her first husband was a psychiatrist. Later she married Alexander Hackenschmied, a Czechoslovakian filmmaker who worked in Hollywood and became famous as Hammid.

Deren and Hammid together made Meshes of the Afternoon. It's a remarkable film both in theme and style. It concerns itself with an individual's dreams and subconscious experiences. There isn't a single event in the film that doesn't assume a symbolic significance within a specific psychic context.

Now, you can't make a film like that if you are limited by a script. Even as you maintain the structural components of the narrative,

you eschew the rational by violating the time-space sequence, by disrupting the continuity of action and by skillful manipulation of surrealistic imagery.

One can't help learning from this and Deren's subsequent films. Also, one might see a touch of Deren here and there in my treatment of time and space, and the basic ambiguity that exists between conventional actuality and psychic reality. Take, for instance, my most recent film, Khandahar, which seeks to relate the mechanics of cinema to the interior experiences of two individuals. The film is structurally so difficult because I have simultaneously maintained a linear continuity of action and a fluidity of time and space without which I couldn't have evoked the state of dream and the final suggestion of the protagonist's self-realization.

Now, the basic search of the American avant-garde cinema is for our psychic realities and their relevance in the context of our shifting perspectives.

And I for one have always tried to be very close to this central tradition of the American avant-garde, just as much as I have adhered to the Hollywood dreammachine that seeks to entertain us by offering us a surrogate reality."

0 About the Author: Ranjan Banerjee is an assistant editor with Aajkaal, the Bengali daily from Calcutta. He is currently working on a book about Mrinal Sen.

Sen's ~Kharij' Mrinal Sen, the Bengali director, is 61 and has made at least 23 films. Acclaimed in India as the only peer of Satyajit Ray, Sen has been widely shown in many countries but is hardly known in the United States. This ignorance is apparently now to be dented. His newest film, The Ruins [Khandahar], won first prize at this year's Chicago International Film Festival, and his 22nd, The Case Is Closed [Kharij-1982]-my first Sen filmhas just had its American premiere at the Film Forum in New York.

Inarguably this delay in Sen's reception here has been an ill wind, but it may have blown a little good. Sen is a fervent Marxist, and 'his previous work is said to be polemic. It's also described as parochial. In the Autumn 1981 issue of the British journal Sight and Sound, Derek Malcolm wrote: What comes over from a study of his work is [that] he has traced the social and political ferment of India with greater resilience and audacity than any other contemporary Indian director. That may be whi a knowledge of India is almost mandatory before his work can be appreciated to the full.

But recent writers have said that Sen's latest works are less polemic and less remote to foreigners. These statements are confirmed by The Case Is Closed. It is not overtly political, and it certainly doesn't require an extraordinary knowledge of India (or I couldn't have responded to it). I hope I may some time see a half dozen of Sen's earlier films that I've read about, but I'm glad I saw The Case Is Closed first.

The temper of the film is reticent, watchful, implicative. Sen wrote his own screenplay from a story by Ramapada Chowdury; the pivotal event, which happens early, is an accidental death. We then follow the effect of that death on the people concerned, and it is like following a laboratory dye as it filters through tissues, staining them differently.

Calcutta, during a cold spell in 1981, is the setting. Anjan and Mamata are a modestly comfortable couple with a small son. (The first names are the actors' own; Sen gives the family his last name.) Because the parents are busy and their child needs care, they do what many of their friends do: they engage a boy of 12 or so, a country boy from a poor family, to live with them as servant and babysitter. The boy's father turns him over to the couple reluctantly, tenderly.

The Calcutta winter lasts only two months, so the couple don't buy the boy warmer clothes. He is meant to sleep under the stairs, but because of the cold, he sleeps in the kitchen. One night there's a mishap with the small stove, and the boy asphyxiates.

No one is criminally to blame for the boy's death, but different sorts of blame, of guilt, are underscored by it. The film touches the conditions that made it necessary for the father to lease out his son (contrasted with the pampering-and probable future-of the couple's small boy) and the way the police treat the bereaved family, with more regulations than sympathy. But the focus is on Anjan and Mamata: how their initial shock and pain change, under the pressure of secret guilt, to self-protection, tinged with aggressive defense. The real closing of the case is the closing of the family circle, the clan against the world.

Only once does Sen let a blatancy obtrude: when the dead

boy's father and other relatives huddle around a fire in the street, waiting for morning and the chance to claim the body, the flames light up revolutionary graffiti on the wall behind them. Only a few ti~es does Sen let cinema-consciousness obtrude: he uses a few freeze-frames, and occasionally he lets the sound of the next scene begin under the current scene. For the most part, he achieves one sort of film purity: we are simply present, with no sense of manipulation by angles or editing or novel composition. The style is "no style," a via negativa, no pressure to admire the director. To make a film this way requires a lot of experience, and not just of filmmaking.

Sen gives his film an added twinge with another teenage boy from the apartment upstairs, who has the same job as the boy who died and who hovers outside doors and windows, watching and listening to what might have been his fate. The principal actors, guided by Sen of course, heighten our own feeling of espionage into interiors with the confidentiality of their performance. It's a kind of acting that precludes display and is thus easily underrated as mere "behaving," which it is not.

There's a close parallel between the acting here and the look of the film itself: the actor needs skill-enough skill to ignore skill, to concentrate on congruence with the character, on permitting us to peep and eavesdrop rather than to project at us.

Mamata is Mamata Shankar, daughter of the dancer Uday Shankar and niece of the sitarist Ravi Shankar. She has played in three previous Sen films, but she is primarily a dancer; and her consummate grace is an irony added to the woman's change from silly householder hauteur to clawed defense of the home.

Anjan is Anjan Dutt. I'm told reliably that he is not related to the renowned radical Bengali theater figure, Utpal Dutt; a point worth making because Utpal Dutt has himself worked with Sen. Anjan Dutt has had theater experience-has in fact performed in West Berlin-and he played the lead in the film that Sen made just before this one. Here it's fascinating to see how Dutt uses his continuing presence on the screen as a quiet journey into the interior, just as longer acquaintance with a person in life not only tells us more about him but often alters what we thought we knew about him.

The cinematography by K.K. Mahajan, a graduate of the Film Institute of India in Pune, and one who has also worked with Sen before, is perfectly keyed to the film. Mahajan's palette is controlled to make every unquestionably real object before our eyes-a chair, a table, a bed-look almost as if it were a cutout, as if we were watching a realistic morality play.

The cinematography helps this quiet film to linger in the mind; to return.

Thanks, once again, to the Film Forum, Sen at last begins to be visible in America.

It is noteworthy that this Bengali work is dedicated to the memory of Gene Moskowitz, the New Yorker who graduated from the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques in Paris in 1948, who spent his life as a Variety correspondent based in Paris, who died in 1983, and who was a partisan of Sen's films.

D About the Author: Stanley Kauffmann is the film reviewer of The New Republic. His books include Before My Eyes: Film Criticism & Comment and A World on Films.

ONTHE LIGHTER SIDE

~ tv\R 8UC K~

"Is there a place around here where we can get a bite to eat while we're waiting?"

JlJ\\ WWrl "I realize that you've been here 10 years without a raise.

That's the only reason why you've been here 10 years."

©

1984 by National Review, Inc., 150 E. 35th Street, New York, New York 10016.

Reprinted with permission.

Reprinted

by permission from The Saturday Evening Post Society, division of BFL and MS Inc. © 1984.

a

The many splendors of the Festival are revealing India to Americans in myriad ways. On Jurie 4, a photographic exhibition of 19th-century India opened at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Titled "Images of India," the exhibition, which will be on view till August 31, displays 21 rare photographsvintage albumen prints from the collections of the Smithsonian National Anthropological Archives-taken by Lala Deen Dayal, India's most famous photographer of the last centu ry.

Dayal's work brings back to life the sights of a bygone era-Indian princes and ordinary people, street scenes and architectural monuments.

Born in 1844, Lala Deen Dayal was trained as a draftsman. However in 1874 he took to photography and began to record architectural monuments for posterity. Impressed by his work, Sir Mahbub Ali Khan, the sixth Nizam of Hyderabad, appointed Dayal as his court photographer in 1885. The Nizam conferred upon him the title of Raja Mussavir Jung.

Encouraged by this patronage, Dayal set up two studios at Bombay and Indore, which were run by his sons, Gyan Chand and Dharam Chand. Dayal also received a royal warrant from Queen Victoria, making him the only photographer to enjoy both Indian and English, royal patronage.

Dayal's pre-eminent position in photography lasted till about the turn of the century. In 1904 Dharam Chand died and the Bombay and Indore studios were closed. Six years later, Raja Deen Dayal himself died. The firm went into tragic decline when Dayal's second son died a few years after, the family being obliged to sell some 50,000 invaluable glass negatives as mere scrap.

However, the photographer's <' grandson, Ami Chand Deen Dayal, J. revived the studio a few years later. He ~ also managed to obtain royal patronage once again. The studio, which still operates, is now under the care of Hemlata Jain, Deen Dayal's greatgranddaughter.

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The Festival is introducing Americans to the mystery, artistry and beauty of classical Indian dance. On June 4 Indrani Rahman and her daughter, Sukanya, gave scintillating performances of various Indian dance forms such as Kuchipudi, Bharatanatyam and Odissi at the Gershwin Theater in New York in aid of the Brooklyn Dance Theater scholarship fund.

Their graceful arm gestures, subtle finger movements, flirting eyes, rich silk costumes and dangling gold bracelets and necklaces kept the viewers enthralled. In one dance number, Indrani drew chuckles from the crowd with her enactment of the story of Mandodari, the frog princess, as she expertly slid from the mischievous evil personality into the flirtatious princess and back again.

Commenting on the performance, Dorothy Klotzman, director of the Brooklyn College Conservatory of Music, said, "I loved the rhythm, I loved the dancers and their gestures and the expressions and their music and the costumes and everything that is a part of it."

Professor June Lewis, artistic director of the Brooklyn Dance Theater, said of Indrani, "It is overwhelming to see an artist of such maturity and depth perform, and then see the heritage passed on to the daughter and know it will continue."

Indrani herself is the daughter of the famous dancer Ragini Devi. An American who married an Indian, Ragini Devi became an accomplished exponent of Kathakali, and wrote a book Nrityanjali, An Introduction to Indian Dancing. After her performance at Shantiniketan in 1934, Rabindranath Tagore said, "Those of us belonging to northern India who have lost the memory of the pure Indian classical dance have experienced a thrill of delight at the exhibition of dancing given by Ragini Devi."

Four days after Indrani's and Sukanya's performances, another young Indian dancer, Ritha Devi, impressed New Yorkers with her mastery of dance traditions from the eastern regions of India. A striking aspect of her performances was her lucid explanations of what she was portraying.

"For many of us Americans who are not very familiar with Indian dance, her explanations in the midst of her dances added an important dimension," remarked one young woman. "You instantly understood what she was trying to bring out by various movements and gestures."

Ritha Devi, who taught Indian dance at New York University for 10 years, runs her own dance school, The Ritha-Chhanda Dance Academy, in New York. She has choreographed biblical stories using Indian techniques to semi-Western music. Her June 8 recital, for example, included the story of David and Bathsheba, with music by Pandit Ravi Shankar and Jean-Pierre Rampal, the French flutist.

Indian painting is not as well known in the United States as Indian music and dance. To bridge this gap, the Festival is presenting numerous showings of contemporary Indian art. One such exhibition, featuring the work of Kaiko Moti, opened June 18 at the Meridian House, a museum on the national register of historic houses, in Washington.

The exhibition includes exquisite etchings, paintings and watercolors, done by the artist

between 1966 and 1985; it has received raves from both viewers and critics.

Wrote an art critic, "Moti's work is metaphysical. It transcends the real and, through its presence, we are made to perceive the fundamental unity of the universe. All is vibration and the pure spirit is encountered in a windswept landscape as well as in the affrightened gallop of a bolting horse or a misty sunrise over the ocean."

India's strides in science and technology is the subject of "India: A Festival of Science," which opened June 12 at 9hicago's Museum of Sciences and Industry. The exhibition, which has as its theme "5,000 Years of Scientific Tradition," encapsulates through various media-audiovisual shows, interactive games, live demonstrations, computers, panels, artifacts-ancient India's excellence in astronomy, mathematics, metallurgy, medicine and surgery, as well as the country's achievements in nuclear science, electronics, energy, rocketry since Independence in 1947.

The primary aim of the exhibition, according to Dr. Saroj Ghose, director of the National Council of Science Museums, is to make Americans aware that science and technology are not new to India, "but have firm roots in our ancient civilization."

"We have much to learn from this exotic land, that already has so many contributions to our science and technology, as well as to our literature and aesthetics," said Dr. Victor J. Danilov, president and director of the Chicago museum. "India is justly famous," he added, "for its magnificent temples and statues-the Taj Mahal is universally acclaimed for its perfect symmetry and architectural splendor-for giving to the world the concept of zero, the Pythagorean theorem, the considerable body of early astronomical research, the value of Pi, much of its metallurgy, and a great deal more."

The exhibition, which will remain in Chicago until September, will travel subsequently to Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Charlotte and Boston. .

At a ceremony at the White House on June 21, President Ronald Reagan presented Mother Teresa with the Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian decoration.

Hailing her as a "citizen of the world," the President said that Mother Teresa was a month late for her White House date-she was to receive the award on May 23. '~But," he added, "Mother Teresa was busy, as usual, saving the world-and I mean that quite literally."

Bilateral bonds between India and the United States will be strenghtened further as a result of the decisions taken by the Indo-U.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture at its two-day annual meeting in Washington, D.C., on June 21-22.

The meeting was cochaired by G. Parthasarathy and John Hubbard.

Under the program drawn by the Subcommission, the two countries will .cooperate for the first time in sports. To begin with, American coaches in swimming and track and field events will train young, promising Indian athletes and Indian hockey coaches will train U.S. players.

The Subcommission also decided to establish an artist exchange program under which artists from the two countries will spend four to eight weeks at art schools or colleges to discuss techniques with their counterparts.

A textbook on India has been produced by the Asia Society in New York under the auspices of the Subcommission; 200,000 copies of the textbook will be distributed to U.S. schools.

The Subcommission also decided to exchange journalists and announced two seminars-one ()n the working of the press in India and the United States and another on the, role of committees in the Indian Parliament and U.S. Congress-in the coming year.

The Subcommission also approved plans for sending three American exhibitions to India. in 1985-86: a video exhibition, which shows how television is being used in the United States not only by artists but also to teach medicine, surgery, law and management; an exhibition of ancient and modern American Indian arts and crafts; and a collection of American art.

"This is just the beginning," said Ted Tanen, the American executive director of the Subcommission. "The events that the Subcommission hopes will occur will be much broader than the Festival of India, and not tied to any fixed period of time."

The Indian delegation to the meeting included M.C. Bhandari, M.P.; Anand Swarup, Secretary (education); Y.S. Das, Secretary (culture); Girish Karnad, film producer and chairman of the joint news media committee; Jayant Narlikar, astrophysicist; Nikhil Chakravarty, Editor, Mainstream; and P.A. Nazareth, Secretary, Indian Council for Cultural Relations.

Scholars View India'sFuture Considering itself first in most things, the University of Texas planned to fire the opening salvo in the Festival of India. In February it held the first of a series of seminars on India that are scheduled. at American universities around the country. Indian and American participants gathered in Austin, Texas, prepared to discuss India 2000: The Next Fifteen Years. I joined them with a paper on "Indian Cinema: The Dynamics of Old and New" on a cold February evening.

"Come with me," she said, and broke into a run. I followed, hard put to keep up with her, down a corridor of New York's La Guardia airport. After what seemed to be my first Olympic hundred-yard sprint, the ground hostess of Continental Airlines opened a door with a passkey and we rushed down a staircase and spotted a car on the tarmac. At a shout from her, a driver materialized. She gave him a piece of paper and barked: "Take him to Delta 435!"; to me, as we drove off with a jerk: "Your baggage will come by Continental!" I made it to the Delta plane with two minutes to spare, and we were off by the time I had my seat belt on.

This was the explosive scenario that resulted when I learned my Continental flight to Austin was delayed and explained to the airline's ground hostess that I had to be at the seminar that night. I had come all the way from India for it.

The young man who picked me up from the airport was a volunteer; he spoke an English I could understand. When I asked him if he came from New England, he said no, and, guessing my curiosity about his accent, he said: "Texas IS about the only state in the United States where they teach you how to speak-in school." Fortunate, I thought, because otherwise I wouldn't know what came out from under those ten-gallon hats.

Perhaps the rest of America wouldn't either and the Texan schools know that. In any case, I saw no one wearing a typical Texan hat during my week in Austin. It's a university town, after all.

All seminars tend to look alike. It would be amusing to make silent films of them, producing a study in looks, clothes, gestures, expressions of boredom or interest, flashes of (genteel) anger, charm, disdain, petulance, what have you. But seminars are not silent, and this one certainly was not. No discussion on India 2000 A.D. could be. Six participants had come from India; of the ten others, three were Indians living in the United States, and the rest were Americans. With one exception (if I may be modest about myself, having much to be modest about), the participants were famous, and articulate enough to be so.

The subjects ranged from culture to society, politics and the economy. Jim Roach, Professor of Government, and Tom Jannuzzi, Director of the Center for Asian Studies, both of the University of Texas (UT), had worked at it for a year. Nothing had been left to chance.

If there was a consensus emerging from the tone of the

papers and the discussions, it was that India has, and will continue to have, serious problems, and yet its future should not be considered in terms of doomsday. The phrase "cautious optimism" occurred often, and where it did not, it was implied.

Behind the discussions of the country's problems, there was a realization of the extent of its achievements in industrial and agricultural production, and of the strength and continuity of its democratic institutions. Many of the problems could in fact be seen as the result of change, of the churning up of age-old patterns.

The noted sociologist M.N. Srinivas struck this balance between the awareness of problem and achievement. He saw the conflict between dominant land-own.ing castes and the backward classes and scheduled castes as a growing one, with a potential for increasing violence. But that itself, he said, is part of "living in a revolution" (the title of his address): a novel revolution whose symbol is not the gun but the ballot box. Too much population and too little food are the main conditions that threaten to disrupt this revolution-or even turn it into one of the orthodox variety. By 2000 A.D. India's population since Independence will have trebled, but, as the economists pointed out, food production will have quadrupled. (I wondered: Isn't there a point at which 'economic growth itself begins to restrict population growth? In other words, does economic growth reach the degree at which it attracts educational development and thereby influence population expansion despite problems of distribution of wealth?)

his balancing act in the face of India's many dile~mas was no tactful maneuver; it was a direct product of the facts themselves, evident in virtually all the papers presented in the many spheres of discourse. Dean Robert King of the host university made a foray into India's bewildering forest of languages and did not lose his way. Leave it alone and it will take care of itself, was his view. No democracy can force a language upon unwilling people; they gravitate toward what their inclination dictates, what works.

In the difficult area of center-state relations, Paul Wallace, Professor of Political Science from the University of Missouri, . thought India could cope with the problem "by a redirection toward an enhanced role for the states in a manner which also enhances the effectiveness of the Union Government. This is not necessarily a zero-sum game."

Swadesh M. Mahajan and E.C.G. Sudarshan, both highly regarded scientists at UT, argued that expatriate Indian scientists should increase involvement with their own country to raise the level of independence and creativity in scientific pursuits. They themselves function at a high level in both countries: Mahajan is Senior Research Scientist at UT's Institute of Fusion Studies as well as Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Plasma Physics in Ahmedabad; Sudarshan is Co-Director and Professor of

T

Physics of the Center for Particle Theory as well as Director of the Institute of Mathematical Science in Madras.

"The only way Indian scientists could hope to have scientifically free, exciting and creative lives is to become their own masters. This is possible if the current scientists start building institutions which will secure and guarantee these privileges for them .... They must build schools, their own schools, so that there will emerge from this vast body of dedicated professionals a proportionate number of trendsetters, extraordinary thinkers and original creators."One gloomy scenario was drawn skillfully, but also with some sadness, by Professor Raj Krishna of the Delhi School of Economics. He predicted a rate of growth so slow that, given the probable increase in population, the proportion of people below the poverty line would not be reduced by 2000 A.D. (We note with regret that Professor Raj Krishna died in May at the age of 59. -Editor.)

This was the most dramatic moment of the seminar, for after Raj Krishna's ruthless logic had silenced all, Raja Rao rose to his feet. The aged philosopher-novelist let out a cry of pain. He demanded to know how happiness was to be quantified; what indeed was the measure of need? Did the quality of life rest solely on possessions or did it include the state of the spirit? It was like a voice from another century, almost from another planet. No one could have ignored Raj Krishna's logic so completely and yet raised an extremely sincere and acute question of value. The famous economist's reply was as effective as his original exposition; he gave a horribly concrete account of what poverty means to the poor in India. Yet something of Raja Rao's anguished cry reverberated in the minds of the audience. It was a confrontation of two mighty, perhaps irreconcilable forces, both prof{mnd in their implications.

would t be easy to dismiss Raja Rao's anguish, to simplify his statement to materialist- West-versus-spiritual-East bunkum. Behind the apparent materialism of the West there are signs of dissatisfaction and of a spiritual search; behind the "spirituality" of the East, it is possible to discern the face of a new greed and ruthlessness. It is the philosopher's rightto look beyond the compulsions of the present, and the immediate future, into a world of values.

I followed up on the argument with Raja Rao, visiting him in the small apartment where he lives like a hermit. He has retired from teaching philosophy at UT but continues to live in Austin. When he lectured on Buddhism there some years ago, his class, normally 20 or 30 students, would grow to over 300, and the university had to shift the venue to an auditorium. He always declined to teach more than one semester, saying that the money from one semester was enough to keep him going for the rest of the year at his standard of living "below the

I

Sixteen Indian and U.S. scholars, some of whom are shown here, took part in the University of Texas' seminar, "India 2000: The Next Fifteen Years." Above (from left): Myron Weiner, Professor of Political Science, MIT; Paul Wallace, Professor of Political Science, University of Missouri; Robert King, Dean, UT; and Rajeev Dhavan of Brunei University. Left, above: M. N. Srinivas, Fellow, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. Left, below: Swadesh Mahajan, Senior Research Scientist, UT, and Visiting Professor, Indian Institute of Plasma Physics, Ahmedabad.

Right, above: Philosophernovelist RajaRao. Right, below: The late Raj Krishna, economist.

American poverty line." (Some of this I learned from R. Parthasarathy, a friend and admirer of his who teaches English literature and researches in Sanskrit aesthetics at UT.) Raja is old and cannot drive. When he is sick, as he was when I visited him after the seminar was over, he cannot cook or clean the apartment. What astonished me is the way his ex-students look after their guru. They arrange among themselves to drive him anywhere he wishes to go, do his shopping for him, cook his

meals, clean his apartment. When he has any difficulty, all he of poor women in India is in some measure also their strength." has to do is to telephone one of them-Tom or Susan, Jack or Examples she picked were of SEWA (Self-Employed Women's Jill. Many have tried to persuade Raja to move to a better Association) in Ahmedabad, Shramik Sangathana among Bhil apartment, but he says there are two trees in front of the house tribals of Dhule district in Maharashtra and the antidowry and who tell him not to leave. What can Raj Krishna's logic do to antirape movements and the new laws promulgated. She linked "the liberation of women with greater justice for other dispossuch a man?

But to get back to the "Old Music Building" where the sessed and weaker elements in Indian society: "There is no seminar took place-. Three of India's myriad religious groups purdah in the quest for justice." seemed to Lawrence Baab, Professor of _Anthropology at Amherst College, Massachusetts, to be examples of modernity in contemporary Hinduism. If, as Clifford Geertz said, anthroter all this, is there a place for culture in thoughts pologists are miniaturists of the social sciences, then, Baab for 2000 A.D.? The answer came in Narayana suggested, a miniaturist's futurology is "more illustrative than Menon's statement, so close in a way to Raja Rao's: predictive." The triad of recent faiths he focused on are the ~ "We often tend to overlook the role of the arts in the Radhaswami movement with its idea of inner detachment in the developmental process. The arts do have political and ideologmidst of necessary worldly pursuits, the Brahmakumaris advo- ical i-inplications.... Our most significant painters, sculptors, cating absolute celibacy for all, and the cult of Sathya Sai Baba, architects, poets, dramatists realize this, that art and life are not the nativistic tone of whose teaching "probably has special things apart." Indeed in a country where two states-Tamil resonance with those whose sense of cultural and perhaps Nadu and Andhra Pradesh-are led by figures from the national identity has been undermined by cosmopolitan back- cinema, who can dispute the power of illusion? Narayana grounds." Of these perhaps the most unusual is the Brahma- Menon, for one, does not underrate the power of the popular kumaris, the latter-day Lysistratas launched on their path in the arts. Talking of film lJlusic, he said: "This new genre of Indian music is becoming a mirror of social problems, emerging as a 1930s by a man by the nameofLekhrajinHyderabad,Sind(now in Pakistan). They believe that the world is destroyed every power to reckon with." He drew satisfaction from the fact that 5,000 years, in the first half of which human reproduction takes it has not affected serious music to any extent. But¡ "it place by yogic powers, in the second by sexual union which dominates the recording industry, it has Indian youth in its grip, brings on the end of the world. Behind this apocalyptic vision, and we have to be on our guard."

Baab sees the sheer fact of women's insistence on celibacy as a In my paper, I noted that it is into culture that all social, feminist assertion. It caused a savage backlash in the Sindhi political, religious, economic issues flow and in turn take their community in which the movement was born. Its members were birth. A holistic, anthropological view of culture as the i!1sulted in the streets; in 1938 a movement building was burnt sum-total of attitudes sees in it the main determinant of social by an angry mob, and the movement itself shifted to Karachi. and political behavior. It is the engine within which the internal After Independence, it moved to its present headquarters in combustion of ideas, attitudes, beliefs, traditions, conscious Mount Abu, Rajasthan. efforts, unconscious pulls find their mix and powers the drive of I don't know if Gail Minault (pronounced minnow) agreed a society. To equate culture merely with performances of high with this view. Associate Professor of South Asian History at art is to ignore the primacy of culture dangerously. In the UT, she has spent a good deal of time in the subcontinent and Indian cinema today, for example, one finds in both the "New studied, among other things, contemporary women's move- Cinema," with its conscious partisanship of progress, and in the ments. (Most recently, she was at the American Studies popular cinema, behind the glitter of its tinsel, deep anxieties Research Center-ASRC-in Hyderabad.) She saw on the one over problems of tradition and modernity. The two may pull in hand a decline in the employment of women due to the increase different directions, but both are vitally concerned and affect in in landless labor, trade union apathy toward women and the their different ways the new mix of attitudes they generate. As preference given to men in training for modernization; on the Menon pointed out, "There is more classical music being heard other, she found hope in the increasing organization of poor today and performed publicly than perhaps at any other time in women and middle- and lower-middle-class women subjected to our history." Yet the Hindi cinema influences language as it is accepted and used by people, and also represents a vast rape and dowry murder. "The very desperation of the situation laboratory in which popular ideas are being confirmed, About the Author: -Chidananda Das reshaped and recharged. In other wo;ds, cultural combustion Gupta, former managing editor of takes place at different levels, creating fresh spiritual energies SPAN, is currently completing a both for social groups that provide intellectual leadership and book on cinema and social change the others that follow, protest, retreat, regroup, move "forwhich he started last year as a Fellow ward" in some respects and "backward" in others. at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D. C. His published Seminars serve a real purpose. Whether they are held h~re books are The Cinema of Satyajit or abroad, wherever people-Indians or foreigners-seriously Ray and Talking About Films. concerned with the course of events in India and armed with knowledge of it, gather for discussion, the issues that emerge often acquire new perspectives, meaning and urgency-as they 0 did in Austin, Texas.

Seeing a pot as a lump of clay, Or see it turning in the wheel or being beaten into shape or getting fired in the kiln, At each different stage, it evokes a different response, In its various forms it acquires a different appearance.

Time passes.

Mellowed with time, a pot endures, the more depth it acquires the more experience it gathers, the graver it appears.

When you stop to think about it, there is something intrinsically beautiful about the clay pot. It is molded from the material most accessible to us: from moist clay, from maati, or mother earth.

Notwithstanding the onslaughts of modernity, objects made of clay are still indispensable adjuncts of Indian life.

Over the generations, simple village folk have fashioned exquisite creations in clay. Now the myriad forms that clay takes at the hands of the potters have been assembled into an exhibition appropriately titled "Form and Forms of Mother Clay."

Conceived by Haku Shah for the Crafts Museum in New Delhi, the exhibition will now be seen in the United States as part of the Festival of India. A fascinating, compelling exhibition, it focuses attention, for the first time in decades perhaps, on clay objects and on the artisans of clay. A clay pot is not merely a vessel for the storage of water or grain, but something to be admired for its shape, efficiency, and the adornment of its patterns.

In rural India the pot is an indispensable feature, used to store grain or oil, or deliciously cool water; to offer pickles or sweets or dahi; to cook vegetables and rice, offering its own earthy flavor. Sometimes it just sits in a corner of the room or courtyard, its presence that of an old friend.

For Haku Shah designing the exhibition was a challenge. It was a formidable task to assemble a show that would truly reflect the rich variety and div<?rsity of clay objects from all over the country.

Characteristically, one of his first acquisitions was a giant unbaked jar from Sabarkantha in Gujarat, which he placed in the center of the vast spaces of the museum galleries. He observed, "When I put the jar in one of the squares, it looked , =""'"

like sculpture and I felt that the display was complete. It was an interesting piece and just by placing it right, it became monumental in its impact!"

The response of most museum experts, technicians and architects to the use of unbaked clay is negative. Objects of clay are regarded as fragile, perishable items, and most certainly impractical forpermanent display. Yet the wonder of clay is that when everything else is gone, the pots and potsherds remain as the vestiges of a vanished civilization. The fact is that when the jar from Sabarkantha is placed in the center of the house, and the home is built around it, grain can be stored within it for decades. There is no impermanence. Indeed, the jar becomes symbolic of stability, assuring us a kind of immortality. Unbaked though it is, it endures, dominating the home; it inculcates a system of values, perpetuating the rituals of day to day existence.

Standing beside the large jar, Haku Shah appears rather like a Lilliputian.

His dark eyes flash intensely and his

A family in Gujarat makes a ritual offering of prasad to terra-cotta figure.

words carry a sense of urgency. Yet they retain a simplicity and directness of purpose. In an article written for UNESCO he observed, "Simply because an object is common in the social sense, it does not mean that it is ordinary, not worthy -of placing in an exhibition or a museum. A pot is made in an extremely scientific manner, and I wanted to exhibit hundreds of pots created by various potters."

The exhibition at the Crafts Museum at Pragati Maidan did exactly that. Thirtyfive potters-men, women and a few children-were assembled on the premises, working outdoors with the clay, with the wheel and with the furnace to make the objects come alive for visitors to the exhibition. The women from Kutch in Gujarat created entire walls from mud and earth, studded with colorful mica to brighten their homes, carving out shelves for jars and pots of buttermilk. The women from Madhubani in Bihar

fashioned wall murals of their deities: of In terms of sheer technique and mas- Gujarat. The handwork of Ismail Siddique Durga, Ravana, Rama, Sita, Bahubali; tery, Purushottam Ram, the old potter Buzurg and his wife Aisha Ismail, they enacting the myths with which they are from Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh, steals include ghee pots (varoti), milk pots associated. And the tribal women from the show. Bespectacled and solemn, he (lotadi), water pots (chakri, matla and Chhota Udaipur created vessels that were views the world philosophically and mat/o), vegetable cookers (tapeli), flour lacquered with resin, so they could be writes down his entire life story on a clay pots (jakra), big pots (mann), small pots placed directly on the fire. tablet. In this he lists his genealogy of (chakri), frying pans (tarlo) and water A man and wife from Kutch make a artisans and his range of products, which pitchers (surahi). splendid team: he "throws" the pots, on a include debri for the lighting of oil lamps, Furthermore, Aisha Ismail gives exwooden potter's wheel, and she paints dastari for marriage sweets, malva for pression to her own creative talent by each exquisite shape with patterns in massaging babies with oil, nadiya for fashioning sweet dish trays for feast days, black and white. The process is painstak- setting curds and kalasa for placing on the toys and miniature cooking vessels for even a miniature of a ing and slow. She begins by dipping a rag root. A simple, shy man, he confides that chIldren-and in brick-red, to stain and color the pots. he has created nothing new that was not Kutch interior, replete with the decorated walls of mica, the open air stove Next, she dries it out and smoothens the produced earlier by his father-except surface. Then, balancing the new pot on for the magic lota and the magic surahi. with chapattis (or rotlas) on the fire and another upturned pot, she turns it slowly Indeed, his work is magical, with a large water pots in the courtyard! On the as she paints the lip with hatched lines in paan box that is exquisitely shaped in the birth of a male child in any home, the black. She now takes a fine brush, makes form of a scaled fish, and surahis that are ritual gesture is to present a clay a thin black definition at the base of the incised with the floral patterns of Mughal elephant; and this once again affords neck, and repeats this with two concen- brocades. The special clay that he uses Aisha Ismail with opportunities for rich tric circles that define the contours of the turns from a mango-green to pitch black, patterning.

The anthropomorphic form of the pot. Rotating the object, she picks out by being fired within a closed pot by the white dots at the base of the hatched smoked fumes of cowdung cakes used in kothi at the exhibition, personified as Sri lines. And so, the pot grows and acquires the casting. Patterns are etched out and Krishna, is more than a poetic evocation. inlaid with aluminum and silver foil to It suggests a relationship between clay character. simulate the finesse and the sophistica- and the human figure. Very often, we The resources are few; the patterns discover this essential link: a reminder of that keep growing almost intuitively, are tion of the finest bidriware of Andhra. rich and imaginative, endless in their The exhibition demonstrates vividly the anthropomorphic form in the shape variations. And yet, they are already the actual techniques of making pots, that of terra-cotta j~rs, and in the giant familiar to us. The combination of hatch- vary distinctly from region to region. The unbaked pots from Sabarkantha. Or ed patterns, wavy lines, dots and concen- color and quality of clay also differ take, for instance, a remarkable granary tric circles are related to designs on radically from tan to mango-green to gray jar from Uttar Pradesh. Headless (the polychrome pottery from the Indus Val- to black. Some pots are "thrown" on a grain is poured in via the short, squat ley. The resemblance in contours and in wooden wheel, others still on a clay neck), it simulates man's torso down to patterning between these pots from the wheel; some are still fashioned by hand, the navel-from where the grain can be Kutch region and the ancient pottery others molded against the shape of retrieved.

Clay can be substituted for mankind. from Mohenjo-Daro is so uncanny that, . another bowl, a technique used by Sarala placed side by side in the galleries, they Dev:i. Still others are chased and patted For the human flesh, and for animal flesh and, jndeed, it is used as a substitute in are at times indistinguishable. Not merely into shape with a baton. The implements, the designs etched in black, but the the wheel, the raw materials and the . votive figurines that are ritually offered to generous swelling shape of the pot, full- firing techniques are placed on display. the deity. Speaking about this, Haku blown with a thin lip, point to the The exhibition has also a whole Shah writes in his notes to a Japanese inherent continuity of tradition. "range" and variety of mud choolahs on calendar on Indian terra cottas, "But Another remarkable example of con- display-rather like the wide choice of equally, you offer to the gods a clay eye tinuity is found in the figurines of the contemporary cooking ranges! The clay to heal your own eye of flesh and blood, a mother goddess, from the Indo-Gangetic from Chhota Udaipur is coated with resin hand to set your hand right, and an entire 'human' figure to make yourself physicalPlain. A figurine from the Mauryan from the kesura tree, and the lacquered period of the 3rd century B.C. is defined vessels are then used for frying, baking ly whole again. Clay and flesh have been with facial features, an elaborate head- and cooking. A time-honored method of closely linked since time immemorial, dress, armlets and anklets built up of air-conditioning has been developed by and this idea is deeply ingrained in the small pellets of clay. We discover an storing pots of milk and curd within the minds of tribal people, who also offer to their powerful deities a cow for a cow, a cool interiors of the Kutch kothiidentical process being used today-right down to the enigmatic detail of the bird serving functionally as a refrigerator, but buffalo for a buffalo and a calf for a calf."

In the Sabarkantha district of Poshina, face. Sarala Devi, a frail little woman fashioned by poetic fancy into the figure from Goalpara in Assam, looking very of Sri Krishna, who, of course, is evoked Gujarat, literally hundreds of votive much like the primitive birdwoman her- and recalled as the son whose fondness horses in terra cotta are assembled under self, has created a range of these pro- for butter led him to pinch it from his the shadow of an ancient banyan tree. ducts, from 15 centimeters in height to mother's doli and who was often in- The earlier votive offerings are never removed, and they lie broken, while new 180 centimeters. There are however a few dulgently scolded for it.

Another fascinating facet of the exhibi- horses are made each year by the local significant changes; the goddess today sometimes rides a bicycle! tion is a complete "range" of pots from potters. Haku Shah reminds us, "Tribal

people take great care while carrying them because a figure to be offered should not be broken or damaged in any way. And one should remember that tribal people often climb mountains, cross rivers or go through thick forests; they walk miles to reach the gods' sanctuary which is always in a removed place, with a mystical atmosphere and a special environment. There are no idols there but a 'dark cave like thing near which tigers live.' The gods' and the tigers' abodes are always side by side, so tribal people say."

To give some idea of the native ambience from which the pottery comes, the sanctuary at Poshina has been recreated at the Crafts Museum. Replete with tattered, fluttering flags that mark the ceremonial ground, with photographs in sepia that enact the sacrifice of goats at the spot, with blood that is then smeared on the horses, it is indeed an impressive assembly.

Over 200 horses in terra cotta also suggest the generosity of spirit, in the act of giving-and of the significant role of the potter in all such transactions between the tribals and their deity in a state such as Gujarat, which is populated with over 5 million tribals. In one recent instance, quoted by Haku Shah, "Dev Guru Dev, the supreme being of the village, was offered 60 to 70 small horses, 18 large horses, 4 elephants, 60 to 70 dhabu [small domed houses], 100 kudiva [lamps] as well as kundi for keeping milk ... he [presumably the potter] was given 1% maunds of grain, a cock, a bottle of alcohol and Rs. 450 in cash."

The deity supreme is not merely appeased by offerings in terra cotta; it can be fashioned out of clay as much as from stone or bronze. The primeval instances of these are the mother goddess figurines, which persist in a continuous tradition from the Indus Valley to similar figures today. The river goddesses, Ganga and Yamuna, from a terra cotta temple at Ahichchatra are built to lifesize from the 5th century. There are Clockwise from left, below: Manasa-ghata (representing the Serpent Mother), terra cotta, 24-Parganas district, West Bengal; votive horses, terra cotta, Chhota Udaipur, Gujarat; Dhola-maru, terra cotta, Rajasthan; grain container, papier ml1che, Madhubani, Bihar; clay chullas (ovens) from different regions of India; assortment of clay and terra-cotta artifacts, Kutch and Bhuj, Gujarat.

several such examples of classical images; but the exhibition focuses attention on the popular and folk images fashioned in clay. Among these are the cult images of Jagannath from Orissa; Manasa, the goddess of snakes from Bengal; and Dharmaraja, the folk deity of Rajasthan, riding upon his horse and decked out in saffron and silver.

Particularly interesting is an ancient Manasa-ghata or painted pot, in which the curves and the very shape of the pot are used to suggest the female form.

There, as a final tribute to clay, we see the goddess conceived in the very shape of an earthen pot.

The exhibition presents not only the finished product, but the stages of molding, assembling and decorating images such as the Dharmaraja from Molela in Rajasthan, or the goddess Hatiputul from Assam, 'or the giant horses of Aiyyanar from the sanctuary in Tamil Nadu.

There, in progressive stages, the visitor begins to understand the separate, elaborate stages of construction-the hollow four legs of the giant horse, the torso, the head, the ears-and of the technical feat accomplished when the image towers over him. The structural stages would seem to be a necessary and obvious part of any exhibition; but few designers would give it the consideration or space required, or have the courage to introduce the unfinished product.

Also characteristic of Haku Shah's design for the exhibition is the meticulous care about every detail-from the walls which are sometimes composed of mud, to the textual information which is inscribed on terra-cotta tablets, to the use of poems by Kabir which refer in the most graphic fashion to the use of clay.

With a restrained use of colors of ochers, browns, burnt sienna, and an occasional white, against the mud walls, a specific mood is created for an exhibition on clay.

As a final touch, Haku Shah searched for a potter's wheel to place in the first gallery. He came across a rare find in Bihar-of the wheel itself being made of clay! This, along with the imprints of the potter's hands, were placed as an initiation into the process.

When the exhibition was ready, Haku Shah insisted that the potters, who had created the monumental show, must be the central characters in the inaugural ceremonies. And for him there was no better way of their involvement than to get imprints of their hands on the mud

Above: Kothi in the form of a human figure, clay, Poshina, Gujarat. Top: Toy bicycle, terra cotta, Asarikandi,' district Goalpara, Assam.

wall. Hailing from all over India-Tamil Nadu, Assam, Bihar, Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan-one by one they dipped their hands in white paste and registered it on the wall, as is often playfully done by village children throughout India, for posterity. What could be a more befitting tribute to the potter?

For the next few months, these pots and potters will tell their story of India to America.

D

About the Author: Geeti Sen is the editor of India International Center's magazine, The Quarterly.

Paul Lingren Evangelist of Printmaking In the work of Paul Lingren, rich-hued colors mingle, merge and melt to create prints that glow with a many-textured beauty. While in India late last year, Lingren divided time between holding workshops, selecting

contemporary prints by Indian artists for the Festival of India (some of which are shown on these pages) and organizing an exhibition of his own prints, which was held as part of the Festival of America in India last year.

1.

2.

3.

4.

Paul Lingren; From India; viscosity intaglio.

Paul Lingren;4999 Years; emboss intaglio.

Tapan Mitra; Self-Portrait 4; 1984; serigraph.

Paul Lingren holds a workshop at the

Garhi artists' studio in New Delhi.

5. Vilas Shinde; Oxymoron; 1983; intaglio-viscosity.

6. Amitabha Banerjee; An Obituary; 1984; intaglio.

7. Jai Krishna Agarwal; 1985; aquatint.

T

he firs.tthing ~ne notices about Paul Arthur Lingren, the Amencan pnntmaker and preceptor of art, is the effortless rapport he establishes with people.

As he enters the Garhi artists' studio in New Delhi on a winter morning carrying in both hands a.large and somewhat heavy hardboard carton containing his tools for a printmaking workshop, he pauses, looks at a group of artists in the central quadrangle, notices a familiar face among them, and instantly, goodhumoredly, hollers his name. The man turns, sees Lingren, and, with a broad grin spreading on his face, comes toward him. Lingren puts down his burden, extends his hand, the two shake hands firmly, then follow up with a quick, warm hug.

The two men are from two continents thousands of kilometers apart and have a wide gap in age, yet as they stand there beaming at each other the differences in years and background seem to dissolve amazingly.

The scene was repeated over and over again that morning late last year as Lingren set about preparing for his five-day workshop for Indian artists in a large barnlike studio, as the participants strolled in. "Nice to meet you," he kept saying, his eyes radiating deep friendliness. For the women in the group, he had a "Namaste," with palms brought together and held up.

Quite a few were friends made during Lingren's earlier visits to India or had been participants in a previous workshop. For them, he had a special hug and an extended, sometimes excited, greeting.

Even as he greeted them, Lingren was briskly opening his carton, taking out his tools, and spreading them on a long table, in what appeared to be a new mezzanine. "It is new, isn't it?" he asked Devraj, who supervised the setting up of the Lalit Kala Akademi's Garhi studio, in a quick aside. Devraj nodded, smiling. Lingren had one more aside-"This whole shop looks like my own, back in the United States"-before he went down the stairs to examine the zinc sheets to be used for etching. He cut them to pieces of the required size with startling energy on an ancient machine.

Up on the mezzanine again, a little later, Lingren commenced his workshop with an informal chat, as 15 artists, four of them women, cluster around him. "You decide whether you want to use these tools or not," he began, holding an engraver in one hand. "If you feel good, use them, otherwise don't. And as soon as you are ready, you can go down, take out a zinc plate and start on anything you have in mind." He paused, eyes twinkling, then said, "I hope you have something in mind by now." His listeners nodded, smiling. Switching on the electric engraver, adjusting the speed of its vibration and pointing to the other tools spread out on the table, he said, "You can try heavy lines, light lines, deep lines, shallow lines, double lines, triple lines .... " Lingren then took a roulette in one hand, and said, "It is a beautiful tool. Those who work with mechanical tools will love it." He pointed to some other tools: "I thinI\ you know what these are." That gentle patter had a compelling intensity making the participants listen intently.

Little wonder, since Lingren has been a professor of art for 27 years at the San Diego State University in California. He was, besides, the director of the USIS-Smithsonian International Art Program during 1968-70 when he traveled to several countries including Iran, Lebanon, Turkey and India, conducting printmaking workshops for local artists.

Watching him explain, softly and with a look of delighted

absorption on his face, one felt he was an evangelist of art, who was hugely enjoying himself. "All right then," Lingren said at one point. "If you are ready to start, I am ready, too." He stopped, looked around and pointing to his wife, Virginia, said, "We are not smokers, and neither are you!" The group laughed as they absorbed the message, then sauntered toward the stairs.

Are all great artists good teachers as well? I asked Lingren during the tea break. He laughed, and said, "I try to be a good teacher."

A little later, he elaborated, "In a workshop of this kind, I work as a kind of catalyst, helping the artists to get to know each other, to appreciate each other. That mutual interaction is really important. These are a dozen or more individuals. They always operate as individuals. They need to question each other, probe each other. I urge them to do so. I urge them also to do something better than what they have done, something that suits their personality."

He stopped, smiled, and added, "That is not conscious teaching, I am sure." True, for, as I saw, he was perhaps more of a participant than the director of that workshop. A most unusual quality in a preceptor. .

The five-day workshop at the Garhi studio was the eighth Lingren conducted during this visit to India. His other workshops were in Trivandrum, Madras, Shantiniketan, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Bombay and Baroda.

Lingren's earlier workshop in the Indian capital, from September 1970 to January 1971, was something of a watershed in Indian printmaking. Some 100 artists from all over the country took part to learn or refine printing processes of relief, intaglio, viscosity, colograph and embossing. Although these processes were not unknown in India then, only a few artists were using them. Also, few art institutions offered courses in printmaking at that time.

"The college where I studied had facilities for printmaking but no instructor," said Jai Krishna, a teacher at the College of Art in Lucknow who had attended Lingren's 1970 workshop.

"Nobody really was willing to impart the technical knowhow.

Then came Paul and organized his workshop. He invited almost every artist from the country. It was a huge workshop. But they were not all printmakers. Many were painters and sculptors. In a nutshell, this Smithsonian-sponsored workshop was the start of a new era for printmaking in this country. For the first time, a great many people here had a proper exposure to this medium.

Since then, printmaking has become an important medium."

Devraj echoed similar sentiments. "Paul's 1970 workshop was an important landmark for Indian art. Printmaking was not very popular before. After the workshop, however, the situation changed. Now printmaking is being introduced in graduate and postgraduate colleges. At Baroda, at Shantiniketan, at Chandigarh. Possibly also at Lucknow and Varanasi.

Thanks to Paul, every artist is aware of the possibilities of printmaking. Now we have simultaneous exhibitions outside. If I make five prints, I can send them to five different places."

At Garhi, I met two other artists who had been in Lingren's celebrated 1970 workshop-Mohammed Yasin, who was then in the Delhi College of Art, and is now with the Jamia Millia in New Delhi, and Himmat Shah, sculptor, painter and graphic artist.

"It was one of the most memorable workshops that I ever attended, lasting as long as 18 weeks," Yasin said. "We

completed four large plates each. It was most beneficial, inspirational and result-oriented."

According to Shah, "Paul is a wonderful teacher. A very fine person. Patient, affectionate, cooperative, serious." Printmaking, he added, "is an indirect medium, so what one learns in a workshop is the technical side."

That is noteworthy. For Lingren was himself anxious that he should in .no way influence the aesthetic concepts and symbols of the participants. In an interview two years ago on that workshop, he had said, "One of my fears was that they would pick up the way I worked, use my trees and my symbols, and I didn't want that. There was a little bit of it at first, because they were learning how to do it. They saw me making certain movements, so they'd make the same movements. I'd say, 'Well, this tree exists in America. It's not your tree. Go out and draw your tree and come back.' Once we talked about that, there was very little problem."

Which of his workshops did he find the most productive?

"The next one," was Lingren's instant, laughing reply.

Besides sharing his printmaking expertise with Indian artists, Lingren's visit to India late last year had an important mission. He was here to assemble examples of the best contemporary Indian prints for exhibiting in the Festival of India in the United States. "To complement other exhibitions of Indian art at the Festival, we decided to put together an exhibition of contemporary Indian prints." By "we" Lingren included his wife, Virginia, who is an active, enthusiastic partner in whatever he does.

"We have collected a large number of very fine prints, the best work being done in India today. The finest contemporary prints will represent this country at the Festival," he said with quiet excitement. And he has assembled enough prints for the "several simultaneous and similar shows" being organized in different parts of the United States. "We have also complete documentation on each artist whose prints have been chosen.

There are pictures of the artist, color slides of his other work, environmental photographs to explain the background from which the print came and several other things besides. There will also be an audiovisual show."

An aspect of the collection that seemed to surprise and please Lingren was that it happened to be a very balanced selection from different regions of India. "I did not really expect this," he kept saying in some wonderment.

"We had laid certain ground rules for the selection of prints.

One was that they had to be works completed after 1982. A second was to obtain wholesome representation of what we discovered is available in printmaking in India. By 'wholesome' I mean a body of work that has fine roots, that has touches of really good personality, that is equal to the best available all over the country."

Having visited India a number of times before, Lingren knew what he was loo!{ing for. "You may say that I don't know printmaking in any other country as well as I do that of India. I know a lot about Americanprintmakers, of course. I see their prints every day. And I did know what was going on in printmaking in Iran, Lebanon and Turkey, but I can't say what

"All the major cities have outstanding printmakers. They could, of course, do with some fine European tools. Also, the local handmade paper is often uneven in quality. If only they could import quality etching material and paper, there would be no end to what they could do. For they have excellent ability."

One reason for the high quality could be, he suggested, the extraordinary diversity of subjects available to the Indian printmaker. "You have 4,000 to 5,000 years of history to draw upon, which we in America don't have."

Has this heritage been used well? "Let us face it, some of them overuse that heritage, some underuse it, but many make proper use of it, with sensitivity to their total heritage."

Was it true that professional artists, such as painters and sculptors, took to printmaking as another means of creative expression? "Some painters and sculptors do get hooked on it.

But printmaking is no less an art than painting or sculpture. It embodies the same qualities as the rest. I haven't seen all the printmaking in India. But from the work I have seenlithographs, screenprints and woodcuts-I would say I have seen as much quality as I would expect to see in painting." He paused, then added firmly, "Printmakers are not second class citizens. They are first class citizens, and first class artists."

By a happy coincidence, Lingren, who was assembling the works of Indian printmakers for the Festival of India in the United States, was himself featured in the Festival of America in India during his winter visit to the capital, with an exhibition of his prints done since 1970. The 22 examples included lithographs, a wide variety of intaglio, and imbedded metal.

"They represent my own personal experiment and exploration," he said during a brief moment between his greeting the artists and fellow printmakers arriving for his exhibition.

Looking at his prints in that exhibition, one could discern the Indian influence on his work. Was that the image of Shiva which one saw in three of them? The figure had a trident in one hand and a flower in another. In two prints, one saw what looked like gryphons. One. print had several small symbols resembling those on Mohenjo-Daro seals.

Halfway through this conversation, Lingren referred to India's impact on him. "There is an incredible amount of source material here. It is not something you can learn in a lifetime.

You can't really touch them." But it did have some impact on his work, didn't it? "The impact is one of confusion," he answered, then elaborated: "In the sense that much of it you directions printmaking has taken in those countries since I last can't separate. You have to separate some of it and put it in a visited them about 14 years ago. But as fOr India, I know very readable context. And you have to fill it out." After a long much. That is because I have had closer ties with India than pause, he added: "The impact is only what you see in my work, with any other country." but it is not consciously intended."

In his selection of Indian prints, Lingren said he looked for The exhibition of prints was accompanied by the screening "a balance of the person and the work. It is the work of art that of a film about him, which confirmed my feeling that Lingren must be personally, fastidiously involved in the complete makes the aesthetic, it is not the subject."

Did he look for any particular aspect of "Indianness" in the process of printmaking. And with pleasant surprise I recognized works to be exhibited at the Festival of India? "The question that a print he began working on and completed in that film was does not arise," Lingren answered firmly. "Besides, I am not an being displayed in the current exhibition, a print bearing India's unmistakable imprint on him.

Indian to be able to judge such Indianness."

That led him to talk of the state of printmaking in India. "It "India," Lingren later confirmed, "will always be a part of is a very, very high state of the art, with new developments all my interest. I have made Indian symbols part of my own the time, new content, new feeling, new sensitivity toward the information, my own feeling."

0 media they are using. And new ideas coming in all the time from outside, which they use. Most important are the ideas that come from within the country, from within the artists, from About the Author: V.S. Maniam is in the New Delhi bureau of The Statesman. He reports on Parliament and also writes on art. within their own sensibilities.

Prime Minister Gandhi at a reception given by the Indian community in Washington.

Above and below: At a meeting organized by the Indian National Congress in Washington.

He views an exhibition in his honor at the State Department.

With former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at the White House banquet.

Prime Minister Gandhi greets journalist Charles Krauthammer.

A robot performs brain surgery at a meeting with American scientists.