art and Indian life paragraph writing
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WHEN I WENT TO India for the first time, not quite six months ago, I had in my hand the schedule of the Festival of India that will be inaugurated in Washington on June 13 by the Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi. It is a remarkable, nationwide roll call of events, in which seasoned professionals will do all that can be done to import the importable India. (A selected list of Festival of India activities and their whereabouts appears on page 29.) In any other country, I should have knocked myself out getting ready for it. I should have gone to as many museums, as many churches and as many houses and gardens, great and small, as could be fitted into the day. I should have gone to the theater, to the opera, to the ballet. I should have pestered eminent writers for their opinion on this question or that. I should have ''taken the pulse of the country,'' the way people take the pulse of Italy by going to the horse race in Siena or of England by going to the Henley regatta.
I did none of those things. Three days into the journey, something showed me that, in India, art and life are one. Sometimes Indian art is in a museum, as it is elsewhere. Sometimes it is a great monument that has been preserved and guarded, and to which admittance may be procured for pennies. But most often it is just there, in the air, on the ground, all over the place, for the taking, and no name is attached to it.
That is what I - that art is everywhere in India, if we know how to look, and not only in famous places. It is in the costume (as spectacular as anything in Russian ballets) of a woman working on the road. It is in the fragments of lapis-lazuli mosaic that lie on the ground beside a temple long left for dead. It is in the bracelets (canary yellow, it may be, or emerald green) that we see on the horns of white oxen by the roadside. It is in the ferocious color of the spices in every small-town bazaar, and it is in the celestial spacing of one building after another in the abandoned city of Fatehpur Sikri, near Agra.
The epiphany that I have in mind occurred at midday, somewhere in nowhere, on one of the long straight roads that were built by the engineers of the Indian Civil Service in the 19th century. We had pulled off the road. Sitting on finespun blankets in the shade of a king-size acacia tree, we counted the 23 green parakeets that had flown out of its branches to take a look at us. From a whole battery of cardboard boxes there appeared Indian vegetarian dishes, each more delicious than the last. With them came long draughts of fresh lime and soda.
There were fields of mustard to give us a new notion of yellow, and in the distance the pink hills of Rajasthan. Indian talk went on all around us, and as the locals walked past us on their way home to lunch, they moved like gods, but un-self-consciously. From the other side of the hedge, a solitary flutist blew a cool spiral of sound into the clear pale air. The road was lightly trafficked, and we could not fail to notice that every truck that passed had been painted - front, sides and back - in ways that were fanciful, euphoric and wildly superstitious.