Sidharth in conversation with Dr. Seema Bawa.


SB: The show focuses exclusively on the cow. So many images of cows: in all forms, moods, emotions and traditions. But why did you choose the cow as the subject of an entire series?

S: The cow is a metaphor; cow is the projection of human thought, cow is a symbol of human psyche, cow is earth- the nature out there which man seeks to bend to his will. Our behavior with the cow mirrors what we are doing to the mother earth. We have created heaps of garbage. We have disturbed the waters.

While on one hand Man talks about ecology, but in actuality the self-centered greedy human seeks to take more and more from the cow, the earth and nature to fulfill his selfish motives.

SB: How did you arrive at the cow as a thematic around which you have woven a web of images? Images that flow along time, history and culture.

S: While working on Barah-maha (The seasons) Outward differing temperatures in nature every month changing flowers the birds the sounds The Moon the light and the changing human behaviors time to time, I was bound to go in and out of my inner self as well and encountered many happenings around me and became a more open participator towards flora-fauna birds trees and animals.

SB: Nature is constituted by so many visions, so many memories, what were the visual stimuli for the cow?

S: I once saw a Nandi bull garlanded with corals and wearing a beautiful jewel like colorful stole accosted by many sad and fearful fellow sufferers and seekers offering prayers and fruits to learn about their uncertain future to this Nandi of the market.

I also saw flag waving multitudes shouting slogans to save the cow.

I saw a cow scurry at the first drops of a shower of rain

I saw a cow standing silently in the dense fog of the chilling winter; another bovine lame with a broken leg sitting in the middle of swirling traffic. A cow with flies buzzing incessantly around on a hot and filthy summer of June; then moving to heaps of garbage eating polyethylene along with sundry rubbish.

I saw the rag pickers, children, playing with their kin, stray cows.

SB: Even the Indian literary and visual tradition is full of images extolling nature and cows.

S: In fact traditions have always been part of my artistic oeuvre. In order to study and understand the form of cow and its permutations, combinations and even distortions to express varied moods of the cow I started to dwell on the subject and the form with did lots of drawings and wax idols of cows in many postures and angles. I explored literature from various sources from Vedic, Upanishadic, from Hindu literature and contemporary discourse on cow on Internet and from books available.

SB: But this ancient traditional pastoral weltanshuang seems to have been distorted, today…

S: That is true. I have seen in miniature paintings graceful, dignified cows grazing contentedly on the pastures in harmony with the flute playing Kanha and Radha and the Gopis dancing around. What do I see today; is this a new cosmic dram a new kind of Krishna-leela? Who is this new Krishna who plays with the cows? The rag picker children!

SB: So we have alternate urban mythologies and landscapes in the making.

S: The cow is the same. Man created green grasslands and man has also created the heaps of garbage. The look in the eye of the cow; the innocent black wet eyes, begs a question- “aren’t you humans the cows of the system”?

SB: You have used an interesting simile, given that the gavaksha, the cow’s eye, is one of the most enduring and abstract motifs recurring in Indian art and architecture. What do you see in the eye of the cow?

S: Dark, black eye; wet; with a shining spot like a black hole in the sky with a little shining star, a star of hope. A hope of something significant waiting to happen, something momentous to see. Deep melancholy and loneliness which is asking us- Are you also not mute witnesses waiting for something better to occur in your lives, in your universe?

SB: There is a constant reference to temporal and spatial transcendence in your creative consciousness. A loss of paradise, of innocence, of childhood, of the pastoral and of the countryside…

S: I recollect the gentle cow living with us in our village house.
Gou-mata gave birth to a tender pink baby calf. He took his first uncertain steps on his wobbly feet. My mother garlanded him with flowers and consecrated him with a tilak on its forehead. That evening we ate bahuli of the first milk of the cow and shared it with friends and neighbours and it was also offered to the Shivalaya and Gurudwara.

SB: Shivalaya and Gurudwara?

S: In every village in India, there is a Shivalaya, the house of Shiva. With the mighty Nandi sitting in front of it. It taught us to respect animals and nature and the idol housed in the shrines. In all other temples the object of devotion is human, only here is the animal so exalted. We can’t take the Shivalayas out the rural Indian psyche.

SB: Shiva with his eccentricities and impulses accompanied by the dancing ganas and joyful Nandi indeed seems to be an intimate god, very close to the lives and imagination of the people.

S: Especially of the children. The village children used to listen enraptured by the amazing legends and myths of the cow in the oft recited in the Shivalaya. In all these stories the devatas and asuras fought over one or the other issue. Once they were churning the ocean with help of great serpent Vasuki as a rope wound around the great mountain Sumeru which acted as a churning pole, resting on the Kurma- an avatara of Vishnu. From this churn emerged fourteen nidhis or treasures among which was the woman headed cow called Kamadhenu. She was white as coral, a graceful, delicate, feminine, maternal creature whom the devatas claimed as their own. Every devata wanted to own this wish-fulfilling and all endowing cow. Ultimately each devata claimed a place on different parts of her body and she was, as per her own wishes, given into the custody of Maharishi Vashishta.

SB: So even as a child you were interested in the form of the cow!

S: A wonderful visual world began to take shape in my imagination, which I wanted to translate into images through the medium of painting and drawings. This imagined world of cows and devatas sitting on her body was being reinforced in images from miniature paintings as well from some popular bazaar prints.

SB: Given that the setting is rural Punjab, the Gurudwara must have played a role on shaping your imagination.

S: More than just imagination, it shaped my understanding. To understand the Shivalaya I needed the enlightened vision of the gurus. The gurus are the greatest living force in Punjab village without them we can’t think of poetry to storytelling or harmonious community living.

I wanted to forge a link between fables of the cow, folklore, Puranic myths and legends, and guru ki sakhiyan and the socio-economic and psychic reality on one hand and the contemporary thinking and situation of cow in the society on the other.

SB: The stories reveal a deeper philosophic and metaphysical wellspring that children grow up, imbibing beliefs and customs along the way.

S: Well, faith is faith. Deeper you dig more profound becomes the faith through philosophy. How simple is the philosophy? As simple is life. And as simple is life, as easy is the understanding of science- the science of objects, of day to day living, of waters of good; the sense of giving and sense of living. And this faith comes from legends, poems, folksongs and surely from a little idol sitting under a tree, in a shrine, on the roadside –everywhere.

SB: All art emerges from an awareness of tradition and its interrelationship to material, philosophic or moral worlds. One can see this in your painting through the transformation of the discourse of the cow from Kamadhenu to something else.

S: Understanding the tradition probably will eventually give you a way to break it because all the great philosophies always give you clues to becoming new from moment to moment, living afresh – sahib mera nitnavan. However, mother remains mother and this is the universal truth just as water is water, sky is sky, earth is earth, fire is fire. They change their form and yet remain the same.

Like a cow is a living animal- you cannot treat her as an object. It is a human habit to treat everything other than human as a mere object, even the cow, the earth and the environment, trying to bend their essential nature to human will.

SB: That sounds very final; do you think human action against nature is irreversible? Is there no redemption?

S: There is a way, if the human will not change his behaviour, then the earth is certainly changing her cycle. If only the human understands this there is hope – how not to disturb the waters, how not to create heaps of waste. How to co-exist with fellow trees and animals. There is hope for the more sensitive humans. In the name of creating comforts, be it in more beautiful building, airplanes and such, man is taking more and more form the earth and the cow. If every person on earth reduces his desires to what he or she requires, forsakes this consumerist, acquisitive race that is denuding nature then we can solve our ecological problems.

The cow’s eye tells me earth is earth, cow is cow. I am here and here I will remain. The human may have to go.

SB: So, you think that cow will stand on four legs again?

S: Certainly. At the moment she is balanced on one leg where the body has become all important, creating material waste. This is a critical time, to stand on four legs of sat, dharma, dhyana and aryaman. By ascending into dhyana avastha, becoming aware and sentient beings we can achieve dharma, the path of righteousness. Only then can we glimpse sat or truth and fulfill our duty in its proper glory, aryaman.

SB: The cow has changed you, made you more aware, sentient of your surroundings…

S: I have realized that I too have participated in incorrect ways on earth. I do need to revert to lamahood/monkhood. I want to reduce the baggage of materiality on my conscience. I used to think I was an artist trying to retrieve things from the dark sea of my emotions. But it is the star in the cow’s eye that has made me realize the meaning of being an artist. That technique is only a medium that helps us go beyond art. To reveal something beyond art, kala that is beautiful – saundarya.

SB: So after this series you are moving towards saundarya and ananda, achieving the knowledge of life and death?

S: Yama, the god of death revealed the secret of higher life to the little boy Keta. He offered this boy a Kingdom and other worldly pleasures, but he refused saying after knowing the secret of higher life I do not want much. Now you tell me what is death and after death. Yama laughed aloud and laid open the same and then little keta started to dance in a trance and become Nachiketa, the possessor of sixteen intellectual properties and sixteen innate intelligences. And said I am Nachiketa- the Not Knower. I know that I do not know anything and only in this state can we dance with ananda. That is Saundarya.