(1) Bombay
GETTING THERE
The sun at noon at the equator cast the shadows of clouds below on the China Sea. They are small tufty clouds, like cotton balls, evenly distributed. The lack of angle of the shadows in relation to the clouds takes away a sense of time and location. Each shadow is in a perfectly vertical relation to its light source. The angle between a shadow and its form is a physical and psychic compass that we bring with us, a geometry of our location. The effect of these clouds and shadows is a disarming stillness seen from 35,000 feet, on the way from Hong Kong to Singapore to Mumbai. This was the first of many instances of seeing in a new light.
The ride from Mumbai International Airport into the city is beyond anticipation and comprehension. Arriving from the sanitized theme park of Singapore Airport into Mumbai Airport is to come from a thoroughly processed and mediated passage into a saturation of overwhelming surrealism and simultaneity. It was 11:30 pm. I was met by a driver from my hotel, a tiny boisterous man from Madras who held up a sign with my name on it. It seemed absurd. He escorted me into the muggy misty night of a dark parking lot filled with trash and knots of loitering men, furtively lit by the flare of matches and passing car headlights. It was hard not to attribute a calculated menace to such chaos, especially after 33 hours in transit, across 12 time zones.
The daytime trip back to the airport three days later confirmed the shadowy impressions on that first night. The mugginess at night was a suffocating mist which combined with the darkness to heighten various smells. The mist was replaced with a smoky abrasive particulate miasma in the day. Endless bricolage in a state of excruciating privation produced a raw topography, without relent. This urbanscape was inhabited by a range of activities, from feral opportunism to lethargy to resignation. At night people slept side by side under rags on the roadside. The sporadic paving of the "sidewalk" was continuously obstructed by piles of debris being sorted, sleeping bodies, knots of humanity, people cooking and bathing, excavations, refuse everywhere amid the will to go on and on.
The hotel I chose was at the end of a roadway along the harbor called the Strand. Across the street from the hotel was a long pier-like structure that didn't seem to be public. Two consecutive nights of my stay were filled with the sounds and sights of marriage festivals, both starting as processions down the Strand, both inching by with marching bands playing fluid melodies with lots of drumming, many celebrants in costumes carrying standards and complicated candelabras, guys on ornately adorned horses, colorful parasols, banners, dancing revelers, and finally a car covered in flowers containing the bride and groom. At dusk the processions arrived at the pier and the pier came alive with a million chaser lights, the wedding party entered and the band departed. The ceremony itself was audible because of a blaring public address system. After the ceremony the groups broke up into several reception lines and an enormous buffet, a fairly low-key resolution given the raucous buildup.
The following day, having breakfast on the rooftop cafe at the hotel I could see a "morning after" look to the pier, with the cleanup crew throwing the refuse of the celebration off the pier and into the harbor. Styrofoam plates and cups, garlands of flowers, bottles, all over the side to drift in the harbor. Early morning life along this part of the Strand was also the scene of the morning rituals of the indigents, brushing their teeth, scraping their tongues, tending to hygiene. There was a guy with one leg who got around on a weird tricycle that he propelled with one hand and steered and braked with a tiller He shaved with a plastic razor dipped in a cup of gray water by the curb.
On my third day in Mumbai after a brutal trip and a jet-lag induced day of continuous sleep, I was ready for one of my primary objectives in coming to India, at the top of a crowded list of things to see, the rock cut cave temple to Shiva on the island of Elephanta.
ELEPHANTA
I had come across Elephanta in pursuing an interest in yantras, the geometric patterns which are used to focus meditation on a particular deity in both Hindu and Buddhist devotional practice. These are non-iconic representations of deity, they are diagrams of the structure beneath appearance, an enchanting idea to me because the mastery of naturalistic or representational appearance was and is far beyond my capabilities. The visual language of these diagrams has evolved around numerical proportions based on the geometry of the square and circle and their natural divisions, with symbolic connections to seasons, cardinal directions, the heavens, time, and myth based on the number and configuration of the bricks in the altar of the original sacrificial victim who was immolated so the world could be. Going into the rock cut cave temple to Shiva on the island of Elephanta I knew the symbolism of the plan of the pillars inside, the numerically determined symbolism for the location of the shrine in relation to the image of Shiva, the iconography of the various reliefs and the orientation of all these components to the cardinal directions, all via the yantra that diagrammed this miraculous project, the cosmogram that was its blueprint, its elevation. The many manifestations of the yantra expressed in the organization of the Hindu Temple made it a great working demonstration to show how notation, an entity unto itself, is realized through material and practice in service of an idea. A big idea. And I was going there, inside it.
You get to Elephanta by launch, 65 rupees for economy or 85 rupees for deluxe. Tickets are purchased adjacent to the Gate of India, a giant triumphal monstrosity built to commemorate a visit by British Royalty, and the boarding point for the trip to the island of Elephanta. I purchase my ticket and was approached by a lad with a sinister looking monkey on his shoulder who asked if I would like to screw his sister. "She's tight", he assured me. The harbor has a sheen of oil everywhere. There is an oppressive presence of military and petroleum interests on the journey to Elephanta. There are long piers jutting into the harbor for the loading and unloading or oil from tankers, and a huge array of naval vessels tied up at a foreboding looking fortress. The vessels and the fort both needed paint. The launch was stopped by a patrol boat for some kind of dispute, an additional layer of anxiety to an already stressed environment.
The dock at Elephanta is a stone structure where the visitors disembark and go up a flight of steps onto a long jetty flanked by a few decaying hulks of boats. Some boats in only slightly better shape seem operational, with men in their underwear sleeping in hammocks strung across the decrepit decks. There is an impossible caricature of a train that runs the length of the jetty and makes a right turn onto the mainland of the island, a distance of perhaps half a kilometer. At the end of the track the train stops and the gauntlet of hawkers begins. Vendors of film, snacks, souvenirs, a perilous looking litter for hire to carry the infirm Pharaoh style up the 150 uneven steps to the temple, and literally dozens of women, from teenagers to grandmas, offering photo opportunities of themselves in their ethnic costumes with some kind of copper pot balanced on their heads. The vertical ascent to the caves is probably 250 feet, modest as a number but daunting in the form of uneven stairs punctuated by uneven inclines, nonstop sales pitches and withering heat above 85 muggy degrees, the opposite of the midwinter world I had left a few days before.
The scale of the caves is overwhelming. they are cut from solid rock in a way that mimics wooden temples from earlier times, basically rows of columns supporting a roof, with a shrine in the middle. The cave is open on three sides so that the darkest part of the day inside the temple is high noon, one of many reminders in the rock that this isn't a place of the everyday world. There are openings on the eastern and western side of the cave/temple, so that the feeling over time is that of being at the center of a giant sundial, with the highlights of the relief sculpture and columns shifting dramatically during the day. The effect is that the cave remains the still center of things and the world of change registers on that stillness as moving shadows. The enormity of the reliefs, especially the Sada Shiva, the three-headed representation of Shiva as male, androgyne and female, and the presence of guardian figures everywhere mirror the demanding passage to the island and the temple. It all says that to come face to face with cosmic players is not now and never will be a lark.
Inside this dynamic diagram of divinity in relation to the phenomenal world there is a layered symbolism of cosmic organization, the plan brought to life which I had expected and studied and had aspired to in my own production and which I had espoused in my teaching profession as a durable model upon which to inquire again and again as to how we have made sense of the complexity of being. The experience of being there was an affirmation of what I thought would be there, what I had in fact brought there. The other thing I brought there unaware was the sense I had been unable to articulate that I experienced while being in the room alone, with the door closed, with my father right after he died. There are different kinds of silences, states of great range and depth, Edgar Lee Masters wrote eloquently about them, and the silence in that room with my father was one that was outside of duration. It was the silence between "I'll never get there" and "I'll never be back". I knew everyone was mortal, that they would have to die sometime, but I somehow thought that moment with my father would never arrive, that I would never be there, and in finally being there I realized that when I left that room I could never go back to him. My arrival and departure were recast by a silence unexpectedly demarcated between them. I felt at the time of his death that my fathers final gift to me was a kind of silence, unexpectedly peaceful, and I recognized that silence in the presence of the Sada Shiva at Elephanta. I never thought I'd get there, and when I left I felt I'd never be back. I dispensed with my chores of documenting all that I had seen, trying to recreate the whole encounter sequentially in photos, and then sat, in my silence as cameras flashed and many tourists came and went in various stages of engagement and obligation. The shadows got longer, I lurched back down the many steps, past the rollicking monkeys and nattering vendors, back to the rickety launch, confronting the truth that there was no measure or meaning of duration in the presence of such silence.
© Richard A. Berger. All rights reserved.
The sun at noon at the equator cast the shadows of clouds below on the China Sea. They are small tufty clouds, like cotton balls, evenly distributed. The lack of angle of the shadows in relation to the clouds takes away a sense of time and location. Each shadow is in a perfectly vertical relation to its light source. The angle between a shadow and its form is a physical and psychic compass that we bring with us, a geometry of our location. The effect of these clouds and shadows is a disarming stillness seen from 35,000 feet, on the way from Hong Kong to Singapore to Mumbai. This was the first of many instances of seeing in a new light.
The ride from Mumbai International Airport into the city is beyond anticipation and comprehension. Arriving from the sanitized theme park of Singapore Airport into Mumbai Airport is to come from a thoroughly processed and mediated passage into a saturation of overwhelming surrealism and simultaneity. It was 11:30 pm. I was met by a driver from my hotel, a tiny boisterous man from Madras who held up a sign with my name on it. It seemed absurd. He escorted me into the muggy misty night of a dark parking lot filled with trash and knots of loitering men, furtively lit by the flare of matches and passing car headlights. It was hard not to attribute a calculated menace to such chaos, especially after 33 hours in transit, across 12 time zones.
The daytime trip back to the airport three days later confirmed the shadowy impressions on that first night. The mugginess at night was a suffocating mist which combined with the darkness to heighten various smells. The mist was replaced with a smoky abrasive particulate miasma in the day. Endless bricolage in a state of excruciating privation produced a raw topography, without relent. This urbanscape was inhabited by a range of activities, from feral opportunism to lethargy to resignation. At night people slept side by side under rags on the roadside. The sporadic paving of the "sidewalk" was continuously obstructed by piles of debris being sorted, sleeping bodies, knots of humanity, people cooking and bathing, excavations, refuse everywhere amid the will to go on and on.
The hotel I chose was at the end of a roadway along the harbor called the Strand. Across the street from the hotel was a long pier-like structure that didn't seem to be public. Two consecutive nights of my stay were filled with the sounds and sights of marriage festivals, both starting as processions down the Strand, both inching by with marching bands playing fluid melodies with lots of drumming, many celebrants in costumes carrying standards and complicated candelabras, guys on ornately adorned horses, colorful parasols, banners, dancing revelers, and finally a car covered in flowers containing the bride and groom. At dusk the processions arrived at the pier and the pier came alive with a million chaser lights, the wedding party entered and the band departed. The ceremony itself was audible because of a blaring public address system. After the ceremony the groups broke up into several reception lines and an enormous buffet, a fairly low-key resolution given the raucous buildup.
The following day, having breakfast on the rooftop cafe at the hotel I could see a "morning after" look to the pier, with the cleanup crew throwing the refuse of the celebration off the pier and into the harbor. Styrofoam plates and cups, garlands of flowers, bottles, all over the side to drift in the harbor. Early morning life along this part of the Strand was also the scene of the morning rituals of the indigents, brushing their teeth, scraping their tongues, tending to hygiene. There was a guy with one leg who got around on a weird tricycle that he propelled with one hand and steered and braked with a tiller He shaved with a plastic razor dipped in a cup of gray water by the curb.
On my third day in Mumbai after a brutal trip and a jet-lag induced day of continuous sleep, I was ready for one of my primary objectives in coming to India, at the top of a crowded list of things to see, the rock cut cave temple to Shiva on the island of Elephanta.
ELEPHANTA
I had come across Elephanta in pursuing an interest in yantras, the geometric patterns which are used to focus meditation on a particular deity in both Hindu and Buddhist devotional practice. These are non-iconic representations of deity, they are diagrams of the structure beneath appearance, an enchanting idea to me because the mastery of naturalistic or representational appearance was and is far beyond my capabilities. The visual language of these diagrams has evolved around numerical proportions based on the geometry of the square and circle and their natural divisions, with symbolic connections to seasons, cardinal directions, the heavens, time, and myth based on the number and configuration of the bricks in the altar of the original sacrificial victim who was immolated so the world could be. Going into the rock cut cave temple to Shiva on the island of Elephanta I knew the symbolism of the plan of the pillars inside, the numerically determined symbolism for the location of the shrine in relation to the image of Shiva, the iconography of the various reliefs and the orientation of all these components to the cardinal directions, all via the yantra that diagrammed this miraculous project, the cosmogram that was its blueprint, its elevation. The many manifestations of the yantra expressed in the organization of the Hindu Temple made it a great working demonstration to show how notation, an entity unto itself, is realized through material and practice in service of an idea. A big idea. And I was going there, inside it.
You get to Elephanta by launch, 65 rupees for economy or 85 rupees for deluxe. Tickets are purchased adjacent to the Gate of India, a giant triumphal monstrosity built to commemorate a visit by British Royalty, and the boarding point for the trip to the island of Elephanta. I purchase my ticket and was approached by a lad with a sinister looking monkey on his shoulder who asked if I would like to screw his sister. "She's tight", he assured me. The harbor has a sheen of oil everywhere. There is an oppressive presence of military and petroleum interests on the journey to Elephanta. There are long piers jutting into the harbor for the loading and unloading or oil from tankers, and a huge array of naval vessels tied up at a foreboding looking fortress. The vessels and the fort both needed paint. The launch was stopped by a patrol boat for some kind of dispute, an additional layer of anxiety to an already stressed environment.
The dock at Elephanta is a stone structure where the visitors disembark and go up a flight of steps onto a long jetty flanked by a few decaying hulks of boats. Some boats in only slightly better shape seem operational, with men in their underwear sleeping in hammocks strung across the decrepit decks. There is an impossible caricature of a train that runs the length of the jetty and makes a right turn onto the mainland of the island, a distance of perhaps half a kilometer. At the end of the track the train stops and the gauntlet of hawkers begins. Vendors of film, snacks, souvenirs, a perilous looking litter for hire to carry the infirm Pharaoh style up the 150 uneven steps to the temple, and literally dozens of women, from teenagers to grandmas, offering photo opportunities of themselves in their ethnic costumes with some kind of copper pot balanced on their heads. The vertical ascent to the caves is probably 250 feet, modest as a number but daunting in the form of uneven stairs punctuated by uneven inclines, nonstop sales pitches and withering heat above 85 muggy degrees, the opposite of the midwinter world I had left a few days before.
The scale of the caves is overwhelming. they are cut from solid rock in a way that mimics wooden temples from earlier times, basically rows of columns supporting a roof, with a shrine in the middle. The cave is open on three sides so that the darkest part of the day inside the temple is high noon, one of many reminders in the rock that this isn't a place of the everyday world. There are openings on the eastern and western side of the cave/temple, so that the feeling over time is that of being at the center of a giant sundial, with the highlights of the relief sculpture and columns shifting dramatically during the day. The effect is that the cave remains the still center of things and the world of change registers on that stillness as moving shadows. The enormity of the reliefs, especially the Sada Shiva, the three-headed representation of Shiva as male, androgyne and female, and the presence of guardian figures everywhere mirror the demanding passage to the island and the temple. It all says that to come face to face with cosmic players is not now and never will be a lark.
Inside this dynamic diagram of divinity in relation to the phenomenal world there is a layered symbolism of cosmic organization, the plan brought to life which I had expected and studied and had aspired to in my own production and which I had espoused in my teaching profession as a durable model upon which to inquire again and again as to how we have made sense of the complexity of being. The experience of being there was an affirmation of what I thought would be there, what I had in fact brought there. The other thing I brought there unaware was the sense I had been unable to articulate that I experienced while being in the room alone, with the door closed, with my father right after he died. There are different kinds of silences, states of great range and depth, Edgar Lee Masters wrote eloquently about them, and the silence in that room with my father was one that was outside of duration. It was the silence between "I'll never get there" and "I'll never be back". I knew everyone was mortal, that they would have to die sometime, but I somehow thought that moment with my father would never arrive, that I would never be there, and in finally being there I realized that when I left that room I could never go back to him. My arrival and departure were recast by a silence unexpectedly demarcated between them. I felt at the time of his death that my fathers final gift to me was a kind of silence, unexpectedly peaceful, and I recognized that silence in the presence of the Sada Shiva at Elephanta. I never thought I'd get there, and when I left I felt I'd never be back. I dispensed with my chores of documenting all that I had seen, trying to recreate the whole encounter sequentially in photos, and then sat, in my silence as cameras flashed and many tourists came and went in various stages of engagement and obligation. The shadows got longer, I lurched back down the many steps, past the rollicking monkeys and nattering vendors, back to the rickety launch, confronting the truth that there was no measure or meaning of duration in the presence of such silence.
© Richard A. Berger. All rights reserved.