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| Samam Deviyo seen besides flowering palm in the foreground, golden orb of the sun seen behind the summit of Sri Pada, and life-like white elephant vahana epitomizing the wisdom, purity and majesty the presiding deity of Adam's Peak, who stands adorned in crown, nimbus and garments painted in gold leaf. |
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"An important factor in Rajput painting is the survival in it of features directly traceable to the older Buddhist art from which it is ultimately descended.' "Perhaps this possibility of assimilating foreign influences and creating a new art in which traditional elements still on the whole predominate may be taken as a hopeful sign for the future development of Indian painting. It is already along these lines that the latest movement tends." - Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy |
With India and Sri Lanka both celebrating their golden jubilees of political independence, the Cultural Survival Trust of Sri Lanka is ready to unveil one of the finest collections of Indian and Sri Lankan religious iconographic paintings ever commissioned. In the view of Hon. Minister for Cultural Affairs Lakshman Jayakody, the collection represents “the biggest contribution to Sri Lankan painting in over a hundred years.”
Established in 1989 as a local think tank, the Cultural Survival Trust of Sri Lanka has from its conception been drawing upon Ananda Coomaraswamy’s deep appreciation of traditional arts and crafts with an aim to create the basis of an iconographic image bank for generations present and future. In the emerging Information Age, local pundits argue, richly detailed images will play an even greater role in the national cultural life as education and the electronic and printed media all become increasingly colour image-based. And so too, they suggest, the value of each original iconographic image is bound to climb.
Ironically, Cultural Survival this year also marks the fiftieth death anniversary of Ananda Coomaraswamy in a most unsettling way - by ending its annual Ananda Coomaraswamy Memorial Oration Series. The reason, according to reliable sources, is that the entire pool of knowledgeable speakers has already been tapped. There is no one remaining in Sri Lanka, they say, who is truly qualified to speak about Coomaraswamy’s profound contribution to mankind’s understanding of traditional art
Rather than to host lectures, Cultural Survival activists are heeding the message of Ananda Coomaraswamy by returning to Sri Lanka’s surviving village culture to discover and restore wherever possible the basis upon which the island’s traditional arts and crafts once flourished.
With this in mind, Cultural Survival activists, led by flamboyant producer Manik Sandrasagra and renowned Sinhala folklorist Mudiyanse Tennekoon, have begun cataloging the subcontinent’s gods and goddesses (said to number 330,000,000), many of whom were long propitiated by ancestors who once tilled the fields of traditional Lanka’s 24,000 hamlets. Rituals and kavi-verses as well as iconographic representations were associated with each divinity -- a staggering body of information still waiting to be collected before it is irretrievably lost.
Ulpotha in the Galgiriya Range of hills was selected as the ideal setting begin this experiment. Ulpotha was one of the Wanni’s thousands of abandoned puranagamas, the traditional villages based on Sri Lanka’s ancient hydraulic culture that wove together water management practices and the cult of local deities responsible for the fertility and well-being of the community’s inhabitants, both human and non-human.
On behalf of a local private investor, Cultural Survival has restored Ulpotha to much of its former glory by adhering religiously to the original principles that governed Sri Lanka’s centuries-old ‘mud culture.’ The successful respiration of Ulpotha has even attracted international attention in trendy publications like Vogue magazine as well as locally in the National Development Bank’s Achievers magazine. Its proponents are optimistic that the success of Ulpotha can - and should - be duplicated elsewhere, not only in Sri Lanka but all across the Indian subcontinent.
“You could say that we are investing in an age-old vision of alternative Lanka’s mud culture,” says Sandrasagra. “The Ulpotha experiment’s success is good news for anyone who cherishes memories of old Ceylon and the satisfaction in life that traditional villages used to offer.”
But restoring a village together with its watershed proved to be a difficult task. Private investment alone was only part of the solution; artisans who still retained traditional knowledge and skills had to be found and employed, either locally or from afar.
“In the course of slowly restoring Ulpotha,” recalls Manik, “we came to realize that not only have our traditional village infrastructures almost completely collapsed, but mare essentially the skills that created and maintained them are fast disappearing from living memory. We decided to take direct action before the opportunity is lost forever.”
Ritual activities centred upon the local devale or deity’s residence and the kamatha or threshing floor had long been the mainstay of traditional cultural life in Sri Lanka. Then came the advent of radio, cinema and now television. A veteran in the industry himself, Manik felt that the easiest way to impart fresh impetus to Sri Lanka’s sagging cult of local gods would be to reinvigorate the art of portraying the gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines, who constitute the island’s pantheon. But the art had been in long decline already for generations, even centuries.
With the object of reviving traditional arts even while raising public appreciation of Sri Lanka’s cultural heritage, in 1996 Cultural Survival identified the finest traditional artistes it could find -- talented artistes of the Rajput school of miniature painting based in Jaipur. It then commissioned them to produce a comprehensive collection of finely-detailed original paintings depicting the mythic image of popular solar and lunar gods and goddesses known to fertility cultures ‘from Kailasa in the North to Kataragama in the South.” The resulting collection graphically brings to life an island pantheon whose glamour and glory had long been in slow decline.
In olden days before the period of colonial domination, artistes and craftsmen traveled from kingdom to kingdom between India and Sri Lanka, anonymously preserving centuries-old skills while executing faithfully the rigorous iconographic requirements of their royal patrons. Reversing the process, Cultural Survival in the person of Manik Sandrasagra turned to India and sought out the subcontinent’s finest traditional painters. He met with
Marc Baudin, a like-minded Australian who was directing a studio of miniature-style painters in Jaipur. Baudin’s studio consists of the finest disciples in pupilary succession of the Sangram Kala Sangham of Jaipur, a school started in 1980 by the late Kumar Sangram Singh of Nawalgarh, one of India’s acknowledged experts on Mughul and Rajput paintings. After Singh’s death, the studio has been run by his son Sunny and daughter-in-law Brigitte Singh and, since 1986, by Brigitte’s brother Marc Baudin.
Manik and Marc together decided to experiment by directing the artistes to paint exquisite depictions of Sri Lankan religious iconography which had earlier been drawn on the walls of Sri Lankan caves and temples, and depicting ancient bronzes and popular religious art of India as well. By process of trial and error, over a period of two years Sandrasagra and Baudin have sat at the side of the artistes, choosing colours and refining the iconographic details of images painted in natural pigments upon specially handmade paper.
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