Divine Flame

'Divine Flame' by Sawlaram Lakshman Haldankar (1882-1968). An interior, scaled down to a gesture. Never so settled in general by the patience and permanance of oil; a medium in which every mistake remains apparent and therefore every correction a refusal before it begins. The paper, vanished beneath pigment, returns no bare ground; the watercolour is lost in a darkness so deep and encircling it might have been evening or a darkened room or merely the dark spaces around a small fire. A woman, rather bent at the waist, a gentle sag of her body diagonalling across the page, sets a lit taper to a floating wick held long. She is wearing a maroon draped saffron sari, a string of pearls at her bare throat, gilt bangles doubled at each wrist, an unsteady white bud of jasmine in her hair and a crimson bindi on her brow, catching the warm light that gathers in her cheekbone and the bridge of her nose. This is Lilavati, Haldankar's second daughter, later married to the freedom fighter Govindrao Uplekar and the painting belongs to a position in the artist's domestic mythology that the family and chroniclers later called the "Glow of Hope" decalogue, a systematic return (failing only for a spasm of the liturgies that weeping their way up the scale to a top at noon) to the household that the artist wonders at the exact mental moment where the work for that day becomes a tiny prayer. This technical conquest is also a devotional one. Haldankar was trained at the Sir J. J. School of Art in Bombay, working under M.V. Dhurandhar and Cecil Burns, following a curriculum rooted unmistakably in the European academic tradition - anatomical precision, controlled modelling, the unobtrusive staging of light as the governing force of the composition and spent the rest of his life demonstrating that this tongue-foreign in its rigor to the world of the Indian evening could any longer remain untranslated. To the advocates of watercolour, and subsequently to those writing about the Bombay School, the challenge was to find a way to suggest the same freedom from the transparent applied paint as oil could revel in through copious opacity, and only then could it be argued that the medium deserved the notice paid to oil. Lilavati's face exposed to the lamp is such an argument in motion. Its focused glow sparkles not as a flat highlight but as a shuttle of warmth that peaks where the flame rests most confidently near her fingers, floats smoothly across the surface of her face, working downward through the plane of her face and nose and reaching toward her hair line, slowly fading into her deep hair. A spectacle of light and flame painted entirely in pigment that can only be built in series, starting from the top looking down until the magic 'click' comes. But the scene Haldankar chooses to demonstrate himself with is not a side of worship competing with the other aesthetics. The lighting of a lamp in the evening-that evergreen gesture of Hindu domestic liturgy, so often itself rehearsed on that brink of the secular and sacred-the bestowing of lamps to the holy of holies, at the ending of a mere day and in the getting-into of the year's seasonal ones, the great Feasts the Diwali most glaring among them, running on the very same idiom-is for a thousand years of archaic practice an elegy of illustration. Light is the simple account of the theology with a hundred variations they keep beating-instrumental of the promise towards falsehood, knowledge towards unknowing, the nameless passing expressed the Upanishads in facing adversity by a task object from within the consciousness of this vital goddess that had to be done, for herself, in her home and without at any moment either the assistance of her deity or her audience, only the single god that this flame would be willed to call forth-that. This is not a gesture performed before an examining crowd. This is performed before no one, not before relatives, not before deities, not even before the camera-only in the heart of her mundane mid-evening, recorded at the instant of the igniting, rather than in the instant of the completèd cry, so that in fact the pictorial public testify the no longer holy, but the holy still waiting to happen. It is the very same principle that flourishes within the whole group of awestruck realism experts at J. J. School-Pithawalla, Trindade, Dhurandhar, and now Haldankar-a belief that Western photographic grip and Indian worship-habits did not belomg to two different worlds of practice-that the device made for a European Renaissance painting was nevertheless one which the artist could repurpose back onto an Indian worshipper without a otherworldly pang. What ultimately returns is the narrowness of the frame Haldankar as an artist has chosen. No widest landscape, no crass crowd, no narrative besides just one hand reaching toward one wick, toward one flame - and in this unmissable transparency, the whole universe. And the brass lamp, dark, corseted, set off from the warm glare of the wall, is the picture's real architecture, the stem of its milk-white stemshot blunted against the woman's wing-modulated arms-the stay and the kindling in a single motion. Divine Flame doesn't show up devotion from the outside. It shows up the second when devotion can be seen at all-the revelatory pause in a household that turns around its unseeable, unpercipient act of asato m sad gamaya, from the nonbeing, to the being.