Shining Legacy From the East

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Tigers and temples and the Taj Mahal. Maharajahs and turbaned warriors and old men ritually wandering penniless in order to purify themselves and become holy. Snake charmers and bear tamers and wizened artisans using the simplest of tools to chisel out tiny, intricate talismans of beauty. Images of India, crossroads of the exotic East, have lingered in the Western imagination. During the past decade or so, they have been, more than ever, images from India's subjugated past, particularly from the British Raj of The Man Who Would Be King, Heat and Dust and Gandhi, of The Far Pavilions, A Passage to India and The Jewel in the Crown. These are echoes of an era when Third World nations did not proclaim their right to be like their colonizers but were romantically, reassuringly different.

When India has broken through the legacy of its storybook history, it has emerged in Western consciousness as the land of assassination and religious riots, of chemical disaster in Bhopal and the nuclear-arms race with Pakistan. Or, more trivially, as the land of tandoori chicken and the Nehru jacket. India's reputation has also suffered, at least among Americans, from the country's professed detachment in conflicts between the U.S. and the Soviets, and the frequent appearance of a political entente between New Delhi and Moscow. Says Festival Coordinator Niranjan Desai of India's embassy in Washington: "We are a developing country, but the already developed aspects of our nation are not fully understood. We have historic reasons for neutrality."

To combat the political disaffection, and to capitalize on the profusion of TV programs and films about its past, India's government has spent almost three years organizing a festival in the U.S. Proposed on a less ambitious scale by the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi during her 1982 state visit, the festival, like Topsy, has just grown. From a planned year's duration, it has stretched to two, with the last events now scheduled in late 1987. Beginning with cultural institutions, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, it has spread to trend-spotting stores (New York City's Bergdorf Goodman and Bloomingdale's). Then it mushroomed as smaller institutions around the nation clamored to join in.

The first highlights were a living tableau of village handicrafts, combined with an exhibition of high-grade Indian painting and sculpture, at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington and a fair on Washington's mall. By the end, the festival will have involved some 500 events in 90 cities in 36 states and ranged from displays of sculpture in Cleveland and calligraphy in Iowa City, Iowa, to a demonstration of ancient and modern Indian science in Charlotte, N.C. Some events touch directly on politics: California State University at Long Beach will hold a seminar on the centenary of India's National Congress, forerunner of India's ruling Congress (I) Party. The estimated total cost: $15 million, $5 million from the Indian government, the remainder from U.S. institutions.

Given the festival's loose, long-term political aspirations, some Americans have questioned whether the money might be better spent on charitable causes in the subcontinent. In India too, concedes Festival Director General S.K. Misra, "there was a campaign to oppose it." A further cause for discontent, according to Desai: "From U.S. companies that do business in India, the response in terms of donations has not been as good as we would have anticipated."

Aesthetically, the festival has so far proved inspiriting, although some elements fall short of their aims. At once the most impressive and the most frustrating event is the 300-piece exhibit "India!" at New York City's Metropolitan Museum. For visitors unfamiliar with Indian art, the riches and their antiquity are beguiling. The collection is most complete in painting, reflecting Exhibition Curator Stuart Cary Welch's scholarly specialization in Mogul miniatures. They range from court assemblies to bloody scenes of hunting, from frolicsome glimpses of improbably colored animals and gods to sober, documentary official portraits. Among the more memorable: a kittenish lion sensually rolling his back paws in apparent pursuit of his swishing tail; a stampede of combative horses, whose armed riders look dwarfed and almost incidental; a 17th century Deccan woman, jeweled and draped for display rather than mobility, feeding a bird in an imaginary hillside landscape suggestive of the Italian Renaissance; a painfully detailed sketch, Leonardo- like in its medical curiosity, of a shriveled courtier on his deathbed.

"India!" does far less well by the decorative arts. The occasional jeweled jade cup or fragment of ancient carpet does little to bespeak the Indian sense of design. Sculpture is scantily represented, although the first object the visitor sees is a ravishingly full-breasted, round-hipped bronze of the goddess Parvati. Thereafter, however, the erotic in Indian art is discreetly underplayed. Of India's greatest glories, its large-scale sculpture and monumental architecture, there is scarcely even a photographic hint. In all the exhibition, the only room that comes close to conveying a sense of the objects in context is a display of a 17th century royal tent, its rich, red silk velvet embracing more than 600 sq. ft. of space, its seven arches per side at once defining and opening an intimate chamber of carpets and pillows.

Welch seems to believe that contact with the West, or at least with Britain, vitiated India's arts, and he proves the point all too insistently with a final roomful of tatty 19th century artifacts. The one exception is the Baroda carpet, a lavish if gaudy confection of pearls, rubies, emeralds, diamonds and glass beads sewn onto deerskin and silk. From its shimmering surface, the exotic images of the legendary India seem to glint anew.

The performing arts offered thus far, especially a dance and music potpourri that has played New York City and Washington, similarly lumped the classically exquisite with the merely splashy. The New York Philharmonic featured the venerable sitarist Ravi Shankar, 65, and two compositions that linked traditional Indian and Western music: an orchestral piece by Indian Violinist Lakshminarayana Subramaniam and a song cycle by Naresh Sohal. Subramaniam's work was the liveliest offering, a blend of simple South Indian melodies that sometimes recalled American hillbilly wailing, heavily bowed symphonic passages, and an improvisational interchange of short, rhythmic riffs between Subramaniam on his instrument and Subash Chandran, a sort of Indian scat singer.

The dance and music performances in New York and Washington were the foremost among dozens that will be sponsored around the U.S. The high point was a bravura display by Birju Maharaj, a master of the North Indian form kathak. His virtual one-man show involved narrative dance, pure movement, a playing of the gourd-shaped tabla, and a percussive improvisation while wearing clusters of ankle bells weighing about 2 lbs. per leg. Maharaj can tinkle them all at will, or control his movement so that the only sound is the faint < jingling of a single tiny clapper. Raja and Radha Reddy, a husband-and-wife team, played up the slinky flirtation in the Kuchipudi dance, and Malavika Sarukkai demonstrated exquisite form, if not much emotion, in the solo Bharata Natyam. The showiest dance genre was kathakali, a highly stylized and often violent dance-drama involving mythic stories typically drawn from the ancient Hindu epic the Mahabharata. Its players paint their faces and wear bustle- like, outsize costumes.

Western audiences may find much of Indian art hard to assimilate, except as a display of intense hue and rousing spectacle. But as Beate Gordon, performing arts director at New York City's Asia Society, notes, "In India the audiences often do not know much about the techniques of what they are seeing either. People may be familiar with the language and culture of their region, but they are just starting to learn about even the major art forms in places beyond where they originated." Like the Indians, Americans may find pleasure enough in the festival's panoply of splendor. The East is more than that, of course, but it is still romantic and exotic.