Indian Art and Culture through a Jungian Lens

by Dr. Minakshi Parikh, President, Ahmedabad Jun Centre, India

Words! Words are so limiting! No matter how much you write, you miss some aspect, some nuance, things remain unsaid. There’s a certain finiteness to the written word, just as there is a certain finiteness to the ego-conscious from which it arises.

Whereas art is a different matter altogether! Expression through art of any nature is a curious combination of conscious and unconscious at play. Art in any form is infinite. There is no limit to what the artist is expressing, his ego and Self shining through, and even more interestingly, there are no bounds to what the observer sees, their conscious and unconscious also fully at play. In any case, the Self, the divine in us shines through. It is the same for art across the world, but what is special to Indian art is that Indian art understood this in a very deep way; not only that, it has actually studied it, defined it and is there for the taking by any student of art.

Taking up the example of dance, it is not just a sense of rhythm, body moving to that rhythm, but an experience way beyond that. The ancient scripture that describes and defines dance, the Natya Shastra, describes nine different rasas – emotions -expressed through dance:
Shringar (love),
Hasya (laughter),
Karuna (compassion),
Raudra (anger),
Veer (bravery),
Bhayanak (fear),
Bibhats (disgust),
Adbhut (wonder),
and Shanta (tranquility).
Each of these rasas is such a beautiful depiction of how the dancer, the emotion and what is expressed becomes one. The depth, the theme of immersing oneself into it, being with it so consistently and persistently that the subject and the object become one, the experience and the experienced become one; this runs through all forms of classical dance, be it Kathak, or Bharatanatyam, or Kathakali, or Mohiniyattam, or Kuchipudi, Odissi, Manipuri, or Sattriya.

All Indian classical music forms, the ragas, also play through the same depth. They do not just express reality, they become reality itself. There is this story of the great music maestro, Tansen, being challenged to sing raga Deepak (fire) by King Akbar. He accepted that and sang so well that lamps lit up spontaneously and the surroundings became unbearably hot and then his daughter started singing the raga Megh Malhar (Rain), becoming so one with it that God sent the rains at that time when there was no possibility of rain. This is an example of the singer, the song, and the universe becoming one, going beyond the personal unconscious into the collective unconscious. This is an example of synchronicity personified. This acausal connection has been defined and described in Indian music!

And even today we have the 14-night-long Saptak Festival where music maestros from across India perform in our city, Ahmedabad, perform at a level where it’s not just that they become one with the music. The whole atmosphere becomes one, and the listeners have that synesthesia experience where they cannot just hear the music, they can see music, they can smell music, they can taste music, and the whole being is experiencing music with all the senses possible and beyond. A friend of mine says, “My mother was not exactly a music master, but in ‘Saptak’ she experienced a transpersonal divinity”.

And the same goes for Indian painting forms, be it Madhubani, Warli, Pattachitra, Kalamkari, Tantric, Miniature. Each creates a symbolic universe, probably like paintings across the globe, but mandala images have existed in Indian paintings for centuries as conscious representations of cosmic order and the centre. We in India say, Yatha pinde tatha brahmande, that whatever is happening in the universe, the same is happening in each individual life, body; and the most exquisite depiction of this is found in the ancient caves of Ajanta.

And what archetype or complex of the psyche is left out in Indian storytelling and mythology? The Ramayana, Mahabharata, Puranas, Buddhist, Jain stories, Bhakti poetry, and other forms of Indian literature, past and current, have brought to consciousness the immense varieties of human experience. They have studied them, defined them, and made them sciences that the world can draw from, be it the Vedas and the Upanishads, the Charaka Samhita, or the Kamasutra. And these are woven into our everyday expressions. When one says, “Here comes Radha Krishna”, an immediate image of love, eros, union, longing is created. We use language such as, “She took the form of Kali during that confrontation”, to describe the terrifying and the transformative feminine in one word. Or when we say, “He is your Hanuman”, it immediately suggests the picture of devoted strength and service. This archetypal legacy of literature survives in our Bollywood movies, theatre and television in a contemporary garb.

Art is woven into our everyday life through the creation (and use) of embroidery, rangoli, mehndi, jewellery, pottery, weaving, wood carving, and of course, sarees, a uniquely Indian dressing style which encompasses art and culture in such an embodied and present way.

The ultimate is the Indian sculpture and architecture, especially temple architecture. When we go to seek or meet the divine, it’s the same as when Jung talks about being aligned with or meeting the Self, the central organizing principle of the psyche. A mandala is at the core of both. There’s a centre, an ordered sacred space surrounded by progressively differentiated spaces. One fine example is the Somnath Temple in Gujarat:

The deity is not just a beautiful sculpture, which of course it is, but through “darshana”, bowing in its presence, it becomes a medium to take the devotee beyond the ego-conscious, making him experience the transpersonal. The image at the centre of the temple almost becomes an external representation of the image at the centre of the psyche!

And the images hold extreme paradoxes in an extraordinarily natural way. Brahma, the creator, sits beside Shiva, the destroyer! Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity, sits next to Kali, the goddess of wrath and vengeance! And we have Ardhanarishwar, the masculine and feminine, both in one. And all are worshipped with equal devotion.

In the end, I want to talk about art in the clinical hour, between the client and the therapist, with an Indian nuance. Marion Woodman enacting her dream in an embodied way, rolling across the floor and encouraging the participants of her Body Soul Rhythms retreats, along with Mary Hamilton, a dancer and Anne Skinner, a voice specialist; or Robert Johnson talking about being almost stupefied when a client insisted on dancing the dream … these are not new to the Western world. In fact, when there is no release in the words, when the conscious psyche is very defensive, it is art that comes to the rescue; the therapist can find a crack, just big enough to put a foot in the door and gently build the way to venture into the psyche.
For us Indians, symbolism is a way of life. There always is a meaning beyond the words. There always is a world beyond our world, and there is one beyond that as well. And although the eternal syzygy between client and therapist is always at play, it is natural to see the journey of a client’s individuation through her art. With the generous permission of my client, I present the first mandala painting that she presented to me: