Brush with war

Balvinder

Wars have always brought with them miseries and gloom. That is why — from a lethal nuclear war to that of seemingly harmless words — it makes it important to detest a war.

However, the simple sounding word  seems to have in it some strange kind of romance. No wonder the whole world of art, from literary to visual, is replete with renditions that refer to one or the other warring human conflicts.

Today the word ‘war’ seems to have acquired added connotations. Otherwise how come that in order to find ways and means to eradicate poverty and hunger, we need to ‘wage a war’ against these dreaded human miseries. And look at the battlefield-like jargon — ‘crushed’, ‘conquered’, ‘smashed’ — used to describe a losing hockey or cricket team. Games, once upon a time, used to be played only for recreation, physical fitness and to learn discipline and coordinated working. Today they are played like wars, where, as in love, everything — even the unethical use of foulest methodology — is considered absolutely fair. All this prompted me to look at the ways in which our past art masters have perceived wars.

While going through umpteen number of war visuals that have been chronicled in our art history books, I have observed that most of the artists have focused on the goriness of wary battles. And perhaps rightly so.

The ladies of Normandy, which is located on the northern coast of France, described invasion of England, (the Battle of Hastings, 1066 AD), in fine needlework known as the Bayeux Tapestry. Leonardo da Vinci made a fully charged cartoon of the battle of Anghiari, fought in 1440, between the forces of Milan and those of the Italian League. Titian painted faithfully the battle of Cadore that the Venetian army had won against the Holy Roman Empire in 1508. Antoine-Jean Gros, also known as Baron Gros, was both a French history and neoclassical painter and presented Napoleon’s military campaigns beautifully well.

The famous Guernica, painted by Pablo Picasso, refers to Guernica, the city, which was bombed by Nazi planes during the Spanish Civil War in 1937. The painting depicts the horrors of war and, as a result, has come to be an anti-war symbol and a reminder of the tragedies of war.

All these above-stated references being from the West alone does not mean that we don’t have anything to showcase in this regard. In fact, most of our past Indian paintings, miniatures in particular, tell the warring tales in a different and much better manner.

As most of our exquisitely rendered miniature paintings are woven around mythical manuscripts, Mahabharata and Ramayana in particular, there have been endless possibilities of presenting different warring episodes.

Some historical war stories, like the one showing Akbar’s attack on Ranthambore Fort in 1568, contained in Akbarnama, is a great work of art.

But what is it that distinguishes Indian war paintings from that of the West?

The most significant difference is that most western paintings portrayed the war only as a gory reminder of the war. Thus they look fixatedly disgusting. Albeit Guernica is highly placed in the annals of world art history, it would be difficult for one to live with such an unpleasant gory war image.

On the contrary, Indian war miniatures do not present horrible sights. They do not tell the half-truth of life. For, Indian artists looked at every human aspect even when depicting battles, without isolating them from the whole. That is probably because they knew pretty well that nothing exists in isolation. No wonder these paintings have in them the rare Homer-like quality of telling tragic tales as whole truths.

The battle scenes here in these mini delights are not bereft of enchanting surroundings. Lovely landscapes with rhythmically flowing brooks, mighty mountains, flora and fauna, remain integral to these paintings. And one can surely live with these war works, with no gory reflections, happily ever after.