One of the little known arts of old Allahabad was the making of clay toys, fruits and figurines. If you zoom up this little pic youll identify Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Ambedkar, Maulana Azad, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Bhagat Singh, Tilak, Chandrashekhar Azad - all these iconic personalities. The figurines are just an inch and a half tall but the facial characteristics of each one are clearly distinguishable. This is one of my treasures - made by someone whose name I could not discover but who was awarded for his skill and who carries on the lineage of the celebrated Ali Hussain, the clay toy artist, of the early years of the 20th century. Ali Hussain brilliantly created Vrindavan with its gopis, its huts, its river, its cows and naughty children for the famous merchant prince Babu Dwarkanaths popular Janmashtami jhankis each year. Crowds thronged to view the spectacle and each year it was different. Im sure we all remember playing with clay fruits - pomegranates, apples, mangoes,custard apples fashioned and painted to look just like the real. This was an Allahabad art - now a dying art. Our Ganga Jamuni culture draws upon the collective aesthetic of various communities and we would be so much the poorer if these things went. And incidentally the very idea of Ganga-Jamuni, the mingling of cultures, can be traced to Dara Shikoh, the intellectual prince who translated the Geeta and the Upanisads into Persian and carried on a lengthy correspondence with Sheikh Muhibullah Shah, the well known Sufi master whose Bahadurganj daira is one of the three remaining ones in Allahabad. The title of Dara Shikohs book Majma-ul-Bahrain means The Confluence of the Two Seas. Our idea of two rivers blending their waters derives from this title. Our Daraganj is named after Dara Shikoh and we go on using his phrase to describe our citys culture. I have written at length about Allahabads Ganga Jamuni culture and today I am pleased to officially inform my friends that my novel Invisible Ink which addresses this subject has been taken on by Harper Collins. I just learnt this.
Posted on: Sun, 08 Jun 2014 11:58:05 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015