‘Challenges such as?’ I probed.
‘Respect for deadlines. Traditional craftsmen do not work around timelines! Moreover, one of the most frustrating situations is when you give them a very specific shade of a colour to embroider, and they do the embroidery in a completely different shade with the excuse “sahib ji, bas unnees-bees ka farak hai”.
‘The problem is that many buyers accept these discrepancies. They feel that this is craft and so it is all right for the aesthetics to vary,’ Ashdeen told me.
We live in a symbiotic environment, and a lot has come to Indian traditional aesthetics within this environment despite and because of the constraints of transferability between modernity and tradition. How a commodity is produced and where it is produced determines its look and feel. In all the traditional designs I had seen produced in different far-flung parts of India, and then promoted as high fashion in Delhi, I felt that the lack of connect between the producer and the wearer is what made the garment work. The producer of that garment had probably never stepped out of a village and did not know the context in which the craft would be consumed. If he knew, he would probably have made his wares differently.
In fact, everywhere in the world, I have found that our sense of aesthetics is shaped by financial, geographical and other constraints and our perception of the environment around us. It is not the immediate surroundings, but our observations, deductions and experiences over a lifetime that shape our idea of ‘beauty’.
Perceptions are influenced by the environment we surround ourselves with over considerable periods. Because of the environment I have been surrounded by for several years it is my perception of an object that results in my assessment of it as ‘utterly complex’. The complexity would lie in my interpretation of what I have seen. It is the judgement made by my senses. My brain has been conditioned by my experiences and surroundings over the years. As soon as I sight an object or organism, my brain contiguously assesses it in regard with mental notes taken from earlier observations and deductions, and gives a verdict on its utility, beauty, value and so on.
One evening, just as I was wrapping up a long working Saturday, I got a call. ‘We will be at your place tomorrow at 9 a.m. sharp,’ Sanjay told me on the phone.
‘What for?’ I asked, puzzled. I had not met or heard from him after my first visit to his remote abode.
‘I love your pictures on Facebook and how you drape your saris; I am shooting my look-book for the season and would like to have you on our cover,’ he said.
The sari is omnipresent, changing its form according to the times and personal tastes, and now through channels facilitated by modern technologies, I thought as I agreed to the proposition.
I have written on modernity in great detail in an earlier essay in this book. However, when it comes to aesthetics, I feel that modernity in India has had another effect—of facilitating the intermediation of the arts. Intermediate artists position their audience between the medium and the discipline. They remove the confines of traditional forms of art and instead expand art to other mediums such as body art, installation art, environmental art, textiles and crafts. They explicitly think in and communicate with their medium, such as bodies, brushes, cameras, language, space, digits and guitars. We can now interpret Danto’s argument that ‘art indeed is ended, because it is omnipresent’ differently, because we can affirm that art has not disappeared because of a lack of success, but it has penetrated—facilitated by the agents of modernity—many more aspects of our life. Thus, the staples of material culture—clothing, food, habitat—can be considered mediums of art. The uniqueness of motifs on saris, its textures and falls, can be assessed in the same way we would assess a work of art.
This I see as an immense change in our overall approach to aesthetics, especially because classical Indian and Western aesthetic theories have differed precisely on the issue of medium. While most Western aestheticians consider art to be enduring visible objects such as painting or sculpture, Indian aestheticians consider the natya performance—religious dance theatre—to be the paradigm work of art.7
Classical Indian aesthetic theory explores the art of nat.ya through the idea of rasa, a term that means taste or aesthetic emotion. There have been important debates concerning the number of rasas—the principal ones being delight, laughter, sorrow, anger, fear, disgust, heroism, and astonishment—and their relationship to more transient or subsidiary emotions called bhavas—erotic, comic, pathetic, furious, terrible, odious, marvellous, and many more. It also debates whether rasa is located in the work of art itself. Or, as Tagore and Gandhi later discussed, is it located within the audience of the art? Tagore, in fact, had a fascination for the self-contained life of a glow-worm. He felt that art too was like a glow-worm—capable of internalizing the light of the universe to emit a glow, not borrowed but created from within, with which it could transcend the universe. The rasas thus have an important influence on the link between aesthetics and the environment, which begs the question: Is it human feeling that irradiates the environment around us? Is it, after all, our own emotions that give aesthetic meaning to the objects surrounding us?
The earliest discussion of the rasas in India, in about 300 BC, was taking place at about the same time the Greek philosopher Plato, in his theory of mimesis, proposed that art imitated an idea, which makes art an imitation of reality. He writes that art of all kinds becomes things that are twice removed from reality (he calls poetry an imitation thrice removed from the truth!). In this way, Plato reconciles to linking—somewhat vaguely—aesthetics to reality or
