Volumes 62-63 for 1987-88 (Combined) [New Series] 1 JOURNAL OF THE ASIATIC SOCIETY OF BOMBAY Editors K. P. JOG KAMALA GANESH SHANTA TUMKUR Published by the Asiatic Society of Bombay Town Hall, Bombay - 400 023 Maharashtra State (India) 1992 London Agents : ARTHUR PROBSTHAIN 41, Great Russell Street, London, WCIB 3PH.
The Visual in South Asian Culture Michael W. Meister (The following essay was prepared first for presentation as part of a symposium sponsored by the Social Science Research Council, New York, on the Humanities in South Asia. I offer it here in order to bring South Asian friends and colleagues into the discussion.) In Back Bay he revisited Marlborough Street, comparing it to Wimpole and Harley. ... He looked closely at the florentine palace that was the new Public Library in Copley Square (and found) that the majesty of such a palace was diminished by the absence of "penetralia." One failed to get a feeling in these American buildings that there was an innermost shrine, some sacred center. ... America could scatter emblems of things far and wide; it seemed to pay no attention to their meaning. [Leon Edel, Henry James, a Life, New York : Harper & Row, 1985, p. 596] I use this Americah passage as an introduction in order to emphasize that the problems we wish to discuss - of cultural legibility and intercultural communication - are not applicable only to Asia. How we see and what we make establishes an inner vision according to how we are trained. The individual, as well as what he is taught, emerges from a cultural matrix that accumulates richness and form from a history longer and more complex than any lifetime. The individual, however, still moves within this matrix with some semblance of free will. How he experiences and defines the visual world - whether as part of the culture or as a scholar approaching a new one - results both from his embeddedness and his free movement.Increasingly in this jet-age, free movement between cultures has become a fact of scholarly experience; the rapidity and frequency of travel at times (as in the past) encapsules us, but also has offered unusual opportunities to live within and between our chosen second culture and our first; to live in new ways and to find new insights. In reference specifically to South Asia, we should recognize that the "visual" is often essentially non-verbal. Varanasi's sacred scarf with "Ram-Ram-Ram" written a thousand times turns words into a pattern. Where visual and verbal meet - as in narrative - both often remain non-literary : that is, words may remain vocal rather than textual. Drama, ritual, and recitation have verbal and visual roots for which texts may only be records or reminders. The Mahabharata of Peter Brooks may represent as much a sifting through many oral, aural, and visual dramatic traditions as it does a condensation of a textual source. (In this, it perhaps successfully becomes a "parody" of South Asia's own accumulating tradition.)