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RTA-RITU - An Exhibition on Cosmic Order and Cycle of Seasons

RITU CHAKRA...

Overcast on all sides with dense rain clouds, the sky displays the deep glow of blue-lotus petals, dark in places like heaped-collyrium, smooth-blended, glowing elsewhere like the breasts of a woman with child.

Kalidasa's Ritusamhara 2.2

  It is impossible to conceive of Hindustani music, or the very existence of the Tabla, or the sad and ecstatic life of Kabir, or the curve of the Ganga, without the monsoon. This season of thunder-clouds, wet earth, destructive floods and lush green fields, strange and wonderful moisture-laden breezes, dancing peacocks and pesky mosquitoes, is unique to our sub-continent and parts of South Asia. Its centrality to our cultural ethos and annual life-style pattern cannot be described adequately.

The monsoon, of all the seasons, has been a source of inspiration to poets calls more for the Shahid Ali evokes a little of July’s resonance: Poet Kalidas evokes its heart rending resonance in his great work Ritusamhara.

Thereafter, He has been associated with water images in Indian art, literature, and music: playing the flute in Vrindavana amidst flower-laden trees on the riverbank; hiding the clothes of gopis as they bathed in  the river, protecting his village community from the downpour at Mount Govardhana; quelling the threat posed by the powerful water-serpent Kalia; becoming ensconsed as Jagannatha in Puri, on the shores of the Bay of Bengal; establishing his conchshell, which holds captive the murmur of the waves. Indeed, in the beautiful blue sinews of his body crowned by a single peacock feather hair-ornament, Krishna is inseparable from this land of the monsoon.

Towards the end of the rainy season, the teeming crowds of Ganesh Puja processions go to the beaches in Bombay and along the Maharashtra coastline. The surging masses of humanity mirror the richness of the monsoon-soaked soil, that oozes a profusion of vibrant new life from every pore. Images of Ganesha are made in thousands, in tandem with the proliferative spirit of the season. With the collective immersion ritual in the Arabian Sea, each clay Ganesha idol is consumed by the water like all else in the monsoon. Its dissolution symbolizes the washing away of ego-boundaries that separate us from the oneness of life.

Rivers swollen by a mass of turbid waters rush with impetuous haste towards the seas. felling trees all around on their banks like unchaste women driven by passion-tilted fancies.

Kalidasa Ritusamhara

The peacocks spread and shake the rising 

feathers of their tails, 

which rustle with the motion; 

then crying out with outstretched heads 

they raise their feet to the measure of the song; 

gazing at the mass of raincloud,

blue black as their throats, 

they bring the wheels of their necks and dance.

Yasovarman

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