The Cosmic Cow

‘CONSORT’

The myth of Krishna as cowherd represents a pastoral society wherein the cow was the consort of Krishna. This was a society that preceded the city based civilization of Mahabharata when Krishna was transformed from a cowherd into a divine diplomat. After the human evolution had gone beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, the pastoral society represented a stage of civilization that least interfered with the inherent balance of nature. This is why, in most modern societies that retain some collective memory of the ancient times, the pastoral society still remains an ideal. In India, the cow was at the centre of this pastoral ideal. Sidharth’s current work celebrates this ideal and also mourns its defilement.

Oscar Wilde once remarked that all art is ‘surface and symbol’ and those who delve beneath the surface do so at their own peril. Sidharth’s Consort is very seductive on the surface, a surface that he has created painstakingly with natural pigments and subtle lines. But in his case, delving beneath the surface does not attract any peril. In fact, it is extremely rewarding. When we first look at this painting, we see a divinely lit cow in the centre of the canvas that has been marinated in innocence for a long time. This image is surrounded by a host of cows. The cow’s mythical consort that is Krishna is represented by only a peacock plume. When we look closer, we find that this cow-image is beautifully and thoughtfully layered by a variety of other images that represent cow-leela or the whole mythical world of the cow including Krishna playing on the lute.

Sidharth is one of those contemporary artists of India who approach the abstract via the figurative. His sources of inspiration are essentially rooted in the rural-pastoral environment in which he grew up as a child. This rootedness is what gives Sidharth’s imagery a heartfelt emotional charge, a very different expression from the current fashion of showing concern for the environment. But as Krishen Khanna has noted, all great art transcends the immediate moment and strikes a note in eternity. In case of Sidharth, the search for eternity through art has been a lifelong passion and yet he never forgets the immediate. This dual concern enables him to link the myth of the cow to the reality of the threat to the very existence of life on earth.

Around 1972, the British scientist James Lovelock had advanced the hypothesis that the earth and its biosphere are like a living organism with a built-in system of self-regulation. He named this living organism as Gaia after the Greek Goddess of Earth. Starting from this hypothesis, he later advocated that Gaia is now facing a serious threat because of human depredations and soon Gaia would transform itself into a different state. In that state the earth would survive but not necessarily human life on earth.

Surprisingly, the word Gaia and the Hindi name for cow that is Gai, phonetically sound very close. I am not sure whether this phonetic proximity is linguistically valid. However, there is a definite convergence in the concerns expressed by Sidharth in his Cow-Sutra and those of James Lovelock enshrined in his Gaia hypothesis. Both seem to be pleading for a simpler and humane life that is not governed by the eternal hunger of consumption.

Mr. K. Bikram Singh