issue 22: winter 2020
Crossing the Ganga
The rocks, the swollen waves of the river, the oars of the boat, the plants, are all tilted towards the foreground. Only the sky, far away, retains its horizontal plane. The river magnifies as it flows downwards. Rama, Sita and Lakshmana cross the Ganga on their way to exile. The boat is fragile, the river turbulent, untamed. Even a god is a small figure here, identifiable only by his blue body, overwhelmed by the river’s swell and fall.
If divided vertically into two equal halves, any life that is not water is on the right. The left, the direction in which the boat is moving, contains nothing but water, distant rocks and an even more distant gleam of sky. The very centre is wave just before it rises. In the foreground the plants are utterly frail.
The bows and arrows that Rama and Lakshmana hold are powerless, they cannot pierce the waves. Even a god cannot calm the river or make its waters shallow, even a god must submit sometimes to the natural world, must not control, must allow. And perhaps Rama is not yet a god, but a man, still fallible, perfecting himself.
The painter is one of the descendants of the master Nainsukh. Around 1780, when the painter, a master himself, made this, had he heard or read a version of the Ramayana that described the river and the crossing in this way?
In most miniature paintings of the Ramayana, human action forms the centre and the subject. In other paintings, always on land, was the land too firm for the painter to create what he himself may have felt about transformations? Here, in painting Rama crossing over from one life to another, did the painter consider more acutely how everyone must live what cannot be foreseen? Did water enable his vision? Did he know that if the swollen river formed the centre of the painting then each viewer would be able to reach through it and look at the dangerous crossings of his own life? Was this the only painting where the life of Nainsukh’s descendant enters the life of the painting?
This Ganga is grey, the colour of karuna rasa.
The green plants in the foreground increase the feeling of karuna: deep sadness, lament. There is a homelessness in the rocks that edge the river, a leaving of all that is secure and safe. Movement is the centre of this painting, its end unknown. But karuna in Sanskrit is not only lament and sorrow, it is also compassion, and it emerges here from the painter’s hands.
It is a compassion reversed, for a god who was present in the painter’s world, and to whom he may have prayed in his own life.
The painting reproduced above is Crossing the Ganges River on the Way Into Exile, c.1780, The First Generation of Masters After Nainsukh.
Courtesy the Museum Rietberg, Zurich.
Sharmistha Mohanty is the author of three works of prose, Book One, New Life, and Five Movements in Praise. Her most recent work is a book of poems, The Gods Came Afterwards. Her work has been published in several journals all over the world including Poetry, Granta, World Literature Today, and the Chinese journal Jintian. A chapbook made from a selection of poems from The Gods Came Afterwards appeared early 2020 from Ediciones Pen Presse in Spanish. The poems are translated by the acclaimed Argentinian poet, Mercedes Roffe. Mohanty is the founder-editor of Almost Island and the initiator of the Almost Island Dialogues, an annual international writers gathering held in New Delhi. She has taught for several years at the International Creative Writing MFA program at the City University of Hong Kong. She has also taught at the Creative Writing programme at Naropa University, set up by Allen Ginsberg. Mohanty has held fellowships at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany (2002), at Ledig House in New York (2004), had residencies at the La Napoule Foundation for the Arts in France (2004), and Yaddo, USA, 2009. She is a recipient of a Senior Fellowship from the Indian Ministry of Culture.