Most days, I walk in thrall to the stopwatch, in a valiant attempt to obey the dictates of an anxious heart. The teeming world of trees, birds, squirrels and disdainful cats that exists around the path is but a hazy backdrop to my measured tread.
But there are days when a brisk walk yields to a flight of imagination, transforming the sights before a curious gaze into layered associations with one’s sensory experience. Associations prompting me to see the world and its fraught ecological and political contexts through a different lens.
I have a vivid memory of the day I followed the trail of layered associations created by my leap of imagination. ‘Crossing over’ to a world suddenly made unknown was a liberating experience; there was no place for certitudes one had held on to as a given.
A semal (silk cotton) tree in a south Delhi neighbourhood or a regal Indus valley earth goddess? Photo: Chitra Padmanabhan
Exercising the freedom to see the world from a different perspective, a different realm almost, made me realise something significant: underlying every debate, from the ecological crisis to the politics of inequity girding the world, is the journey of the creative gaze, commonly referred to as humanity’s story of doing.
More importantly, the measure of creativity does not lie in the ‘heights’ of achievement; it is determined by the power of the creative gaze to shape a mutual, life-affirming connect between humans and nature. In that lies hope for an inclusive view of politics as well. Call it the ecology of the gaze.
This way of seeing had its beginning in an inadvertent glance during my walk. Inadvertant because we walkers keep our eyes glued to the path during specific stretches to steer clear of squirrels chaotically dashing around. That day, a bulbul’s whistle close by made me look up instinctively. That’s when I saw the semal (silk cotton) tree.
The thorny trunk’s graceful curve, two main branches extended like outstretched arms and the elaborate headdress-like cluster of tender leafy branches above made me stop dead in my tracks. That figure seemed uncannily familiar; I had come across it ever so often in books and in museums. The tree and its radiating branches reminded me of the iconic figurines of earth goddesses from the time of the Indus valley civilisation or earlier.
Evoking the form of an earth goddess in the contours of this stately tree was an epiphanic moment. It enabled me to intuit, in an almost tactile manner, the creative gaze that must have shaped the iconography of the earth goddess, its conceptual clarity. Her body, sprouting vine and leaf, was human and vegetal in form, as if part of a continuum – a profound visualisation of an entwined existence.
The same semal tree from a different angle. Photo: Chitra Padmanabhan
The visibly powerful figure of the earth goddess, symbolic of the female fertility principle, was an expression of fecundity — the secret knowledge of life and abundance that was necessary for survival. In this case, fecundity in both nature and humans.
The fact that the figurines were moulded from fertile clay, evoking the magic of earth and grain so central to the vitality of a river valley civilisation, completed the circle of creativity seeded by nature. Within this cycle of creativity lay the organic beginnings of art and mythology, a culture grounded in material existence.
Saying a silent thank you to the semal tree, which had transformed a familiar path into an unfamiliar world waiting to be discovered, I decided to spend some time looking at the trees in the squirrel-free zone. I was sure my green friends would prompt more instances of time travel.
Close by, I spotted a karanja tree with a well-rounded trunk, lush with leaves, curving above the walking path like a gateway. Something about the curve of the trunk jogged my memory. Then I remembered. Almost two decades ago, I had visited Sanchi, drawn by the powerful pull – in all its simplicity – of the Buddhist stupa. Later, wandering around I came face-to-face with the much-talked about detail on the eastern gateway – the motif of a tree spirit grasping a branch so that it formed a curved arch above her, just like the curve of the karanja tree trunk before me.
(Left to right) The bent bough of a karanja tree in the author’s neighbourhood evokes the memory of the famous salabhanjika motif on the eastern gateway of the Sanchi stupa. Photos: Chitra Padmanabhan, Wikimedia commons.
She was a salabhanjika, spirit of the sal tree, under which the Buddha was born, and was therefore celebrated as a symbol of fertility and auspiciousness. In the motif of the salabhanjika, depicted as a full-breasted woman holding a branch bent under the weight of abundant fruit, the connect the creative eye makes between humans and nature was clearly evident.
Now my imagination was in full flow. Near the spot where I usually conclude my walk, I came upon my third valuable ‘excavation’ of the day, one that pulled me back from 4000 years right into the 20th century. This semal tree could easily have been a Ramkinkar Baij figure of a strong and graceful Santhal woman or a sister sculpture of Baij’s Sujata, standing outdoors in the midst of a grove in Santiniketan, herself like a willowy tree.
One can be forgiven for thinking that the semal tree (right) is also a sculpture meant to be placed close to Ramkinkar Baij’s outdoor sculpture Sujata in Santiniketan (left). Photos: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sujata_-_1935_CE_-_Ramkinkar_Baij_-_Santiniketan_2014-06-29_5354.JPG, Chitra Padmanabhan.
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I had experienced the tug of a creative instinct birthed by the elemental relationship between nature and humans on an earlier occasion, more than a decade ago. In 12 hours, courtesy a train and cab journey, I had travelled back in time to about 10,000 years ago: from Delhi to Bhopal and 40 odd kms onward to a world heritage site with a name like an incantation – Bhimbetka.
For people irresistibly attracted to ‘beginnings’, it can’t get more dramatic than Bhimbetka’s massive sandstone rocks emerging from the warm clasp of the central Indian forest in the Vindhyan range. A terrain blessed with vegetation, water and animal life.
It was on these natural rock shelter surfaces that our ancestors inscribed themselves into the evolutionary timeline by painting their hunting and gathering lives with immediacy and spell-binding directness. They painted a landscape abounding with wild boar, neelgai, monkeys, elephants, peacocks, and tigers; bison and bulls caught in motion; hunting scenes and the heat of battle; communal dance and convivial moments. These images heralded the early cultures of hunting and food gathering humans.
The journey to Bhimbetka was like reading a script backwards. From the vantage point of the 21st century, one was bound for a site that was pre-historic and non-denominational, bearing the imprint of humankind’s beginnings. A time before script, before religion, but with the powerful, invocatory art of drawing that had the power to bring a world into being.
During the final stretch of our cab ride – I was travelling with my shutterbug niece, Kavita – we had our first glimpse of the sandstone rocks. From a distance, in silhouette, they looked like a procession of Jurassic behemoths.
The moment we set foot on the lush pathway leading to the rock shelters, we were enveloped in a sense of timelessness. A deep silence hung over the place. In the crisp sunlight each verdant leaf stood out sharply as if backlit. Strangely, we felt our vision becoming sharper, too.
The gigantic rocks seemed like works of art themselves, having been sculpted in time by sweeping winds. Some looked like natural fortifications, others like denizens of the animal world – giant turtle, lion, frog poised for a leap, and a beak-nosed bird. It was not difficult to imagine stories of the origin of the universe being inspired by them.
Seeing the patterns created by perforations in leaves, peeling bark, and weathering marks on sandstone surfaces, it was easy to imagine our ancestors wanting to paint their faces and bodies similarly, their search for colours leading them, but naturally, to the plants and rocks. The purpose: to be one with the environment, for camouflage, as clan identity or for ritualistic purposes.
Zoo rock at Bhimbetka. Photo: Kavita Iyer
The creative instinct to invoke an existence interwoven with nature was most clearly evident on the rock surfaces. In fact, the zoo rock and the boar rock seemed to indicate a spectrum. The former was named for the large number of animals painted on it – chital, lion, bison, deer, neelagi, elephant, and peacock. It portrayed a landscape significant for hunters. The latter, painted high above on an imposing surface, showed a boar-like animal of huge proportions charging at a puny stick-like human, watched by other members of the group. A combination of a boar and bull, it is surmised to be a mythical beast.
Mythical beast? Boar rock at Bhimbetka showing a huge animal, a combination of boar and bull, charging at humans. Photo: Kavita Iyer
Was this image an attempt to show the huge odds they had to surmount in order to survive? Or was it an act of propitiating a spirit which would give them the combined strength of a boar and bull to confront the unknown? Whatever the instinct, it sprang from a close interaction with the surroundings.
Where the visualising eye was breathtakingly evident was a rock that looked uncannily like a lion’s face, its mouth open, creating an ‘upper storey’, with a natural opening behind, like a window. In front of the rock was a large space closed from one side. On the other side, a gap between two rocks seemed a well-thought-out entrance for a finely delineated earth-to-sky courtyard.
The beginning of architecture, based on harmonising the inside and the outside and being conscious of light and shade, proof of the design eye, was right in front of us. So was the continuity of memory – from massive, pre-historic sandstone rock shelters to vast historic sandstone monuments, both never far from shades of nature’s green, both made luminous by the sunlight.
We, travellers from the 21st century, sat in the courtyard for a while. Bhimbetka was a charged space. It had witnessed the emerging shoots of human creativity born of the intertwined relationship between humans and nature. In the historical age, efflorescence after efflorescence of that creative instinct would be recorded as the history of doing.
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Today, however, the question we are asking ourselves is somewhat different – is the history of untrammelled doing poised to be our undoing? The question is important because the idea of creativity powering the history of doing in our times is marked by a disconnect between humans and nature. For a considerable time now, we have convinced ourselves that nature too, is a human creation. The idea that we exercise a hegemony over nature has spawned a creative instinct directed towards satisfying our ever-accelerating wants and seductive but unsustainable lifestyles by exploiting what we see as our natural resources.
The exploitation of natural ‘resources’ is actually a violent appropriation that underpins inequitous relations between the powerful and the disadvantaged – between nations or within societies. But this act is masked by a ‘creative’ one-size-fits-all narrative of development as the only panacea for the world.
Just as the inter-dependent relationship between nature and humans was clearly reflected in the iconography of the Indus valley earth goddesses and the rock art of Bhimbetka even earlier, the human hegemony over nature in our times shows up distinctly in an iconography of ecological imbalance. One that we are none too keen to acknowledge – mountains of toxic waste, scarred forests, bodies hollowing out due to air pollution, the imprint of accelerating climate change evinced in breaking polar ice shelves, melting permafrost, rising temperature levels, frequent wildfires, cyclones, flash floods, even changing localised patterns.
As mentioned earlier, these fault-lines of destruction crisscrossing our residence on Earth, impact the disadvantaged much more than the powerful, perpetuating inequities. Putting a question mark on the survival of both humans and nature, in the process.
During the first, stringent Covid lockdown, when Delhi’s skies turned the shade of Paul Newman’s eyes after decades, we were all cooped up inside our homes. When I ventured out after three weeks, our walking track was transformed. The crows, pigeons, mynahs, bulbuls, and the squirrels had got so used to the absence of humans that they did not scurry away as I closed the distance between us. The entire neighbourhood, including the swankiest vehicle, was drowning in a sea of dry crackling leaves shed by the trees. For a short time, nature had reclaimed its space, obliterating every sign of human presence, at least on the walking track.
During the first COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, when all activity had come to a standstill, the leaves shed by trees claimed, or reclaimed, much of the neighbourhood. Photo: Chitra Padmanabhan
Those images stayed in my mind. They made me wonder about the possibilities of re-learning a way of seeing that considers a reciprocal relationship between humans and nature, and among humans as the basic building block of our present-day existence – on an individual and societal level.
It means rethinking our framework of politics. It is no coincidence that the violent appropriation of nature is accompanied by a virulent discourse of politics as well, based on hatred of the ‘other’. It is also necessary to rethink our definitions of knowledge and creativity, for the basic question is: how do we want to live?
Since the day I saw a tree that reminded me of an earth goddess, I have had the feeling that such life-affirming explorations might become second nature to me.
Chitra Padmanabhan is a journalist and translator.