The broken hearted.

Dalit brokenness
a. (Near to the Broken and Crushed, Woodcut in The Holy Waters: Indian Psalm-Meditations, Martin Kaempchen & Jyoti Sahi, ATC, Bangalore 1984).

It seems to be especially through woodcuts that Jyoti has given most clear expression to his empathy with those broken by the oppression of the strong and the unjust ways of our human structures of power. In India the Dalit people are these ‘broken ones’, ‘those who struggle and are heavily burdened’, those with whom Christ both identified and whom he invited to become part of his liberating movement: ‘Come unto me, all .... My yoke is easy, my burden light’. In addition to the Psalm-series mentioned above, Jyoti did a series.....

The verse of the Psalm (34:18) to which this picture alludes, is a typical Hebrew poetic couplet that repeats a single theme:
The Lord is near to the broken-hearted, and saves the crushed in spirit.

They have been crushed by cruelly unfair poverty - and in the case of Dalits, by the even more cruel stigma of being treated (especially in rural regions) as ‘untouchables’, as impure by birth and way of life. These poor of the earth (the root ‘dal’ also relates to ‘earth’) have responded in strikingly differing ways. Hidden, maybe symbolic, forms of resistance have been devised, including their rhythmic drum-playing. Their own corporate cultic traditions too have given inner strength. Often, though, there has been little to do but resign themselves to God in hope that a better day will dawn. It was with these ‘poor of the earth’ that Jesus so often identified himself.

The ‘broken’ and ‘crushed’ man here shown sits in typical waiting pose - head down, knees drawn up, hands holding himself together, he waits in the shade of a tree. Pathos marks every part of his posture - and pathos, claimed the Dalit theologian Arvind Nirmal, is the starting point for Dalit God-talk. The leafy branch above him forms a watchful eye, with the crescent moon another sign of hope. Tears flow from this pitying eye, perhaps washing away any imagined impurity in this man seen by some as a tainted ‘untouchable’. This flow of cleansing water, God’s tears, even form a protective cover, like an upturned pot, over the man. He is not completely vulnerable, not utterly forgotten. ‘The Lord is near...to save (and set him free)’.

Claiming Jesus as a Dalit like themselves, as also broken and crushed, has been a powerfully liberating message for India’s Dalit people.

Jesus beating the drum.

b. Drum(mer) Oil on Canvas. Painting at St Andrew’s Church, Aylestone, Leicester, 1995;

The divine Drummer, who often dances too, is another common theme in wide-ranging Indian tradition. The drum and its rhythms have been powerfully reverberating in all manner of cultural life through the ages. The tribal leader’s potency often derives from the drum, for it is through the drum that divine beings speak most powerfully. Chief and drum, tribal totem and drum, may well be seen as one.

It is the drum’s rhythms that often enable an ecstatic state, visionary wisdom, the power to expel demons, to heal, to be a rain-maker. A Shaman empowered in this way is even thought to travel between earth and heaven - because of the drum’s beating. Among India’s primal peoples it is especially the Mizos – the great majority now Christian – who have seen such ‘shamanic’ potency in their great drum.

India’s ‘classical’ Vedic tradition too attributes mysterious powers to the drum. Its divine voice resounds throughout earth and heaven, in vigorous joy and triumph. The drum is said to be a victorious lion, a mighty bull, thundering, roaring, dancing, subduing evil enemy powers. The drum’s thunderous beat – reverberating between heaven and earth – protects from evil and ensures the rain earth is so thirsty for. The actual form of the drum can be symbolic: sometimes it represents earth’s roundness, or (like Siva’s small hand-drum, with its hour-glass shape) show heaven and earth joined together in the divine Dancer’s hand.

Here, too, hopes that earth and heaven may dance together remain a tragic dream. For the ‘Drummer People’ (paraiyars) among Dalits, their drum (parai) has been a symbol of the polluted state ‘higher’ castes have believed them to be cursed with. In part because their drum is made from the skin of the cow – handling which is taboo for the dominant castes – the ‘Drummers’ are looked down on as a ‘polluted’ people.

Yet, their drum-beating is thought essential to all manner of events in the wider community - marriages, funerals, public announcements and suchlike. And some of these are times when demonic powers may especially threaten. It is these Drum-people who either ward off the evil others fear, or are expected to absorb it into themselves.

In this way their drum also becomes a source of internal resistance to utter brokenness and humiliation. In exploring its varied and ambiguous role in their life, Sathi Clarke (Dalits and Christianity, OUP India 1998) has also reflected on ways in which the Parai (drum) suggests the presence of Christ with the Paraiyar Drum-people.

Jyoti’s drummers here carry the deep-bodied drums of wider pan-Indian as well as tribal culture – where the drum’s membranes are often made from monkey-skin. One drummer – burning in the ecstasy of his rhythm - seems to brood over his drum. The other lifts his face in ecstasy, with three devotees and even nature too transported by the drum’s rhythms. The effect is similar to that of the divine Word reverberating inescapably through the Hebrew prophets, both in critical judgement and to comfort, to ‘tear down’ and to ‘build up’ (as Jeremiah put it).
Jyoti himself writes:

The drum is a symbol of the whole creation, emerging out of fire. The two faces of the drum, covered by a taut membrane, represent heaven and earth. The drum’s resonant sounds – the divine Word - emerge from this tension. It is the fire’s heat that increases this tension (Indian drummers using this heat to make their instrument taut).

Jesus living with people.

c. Healer (Oil on board. Painting at Ecumenical Centre, Whitefield, Bangalore, 1980)
Variously symbolised, it is self-giving compassion that dominates in this picture. A Sadhu-like Jesus seems to burn with intense feelings of pity and perhaps indignation too: the poor must hear the good news that God’s new world is breaking in; the blind need to be given sight; lepers needs to be made clean and accepted; prisoners have to be set free. These were the words of his first sermon (Luke 4:14, taken from the prophetic outbursts of Isaiah).

Flames of fire again almost engulf the scene, even a burning bush. The presence of Jesus provoked crisis as well as the calming of fevered spirits. His flowing hair suggests a person agitatedly on the move, compelled by a sense of urgency - precisely the picture painted in parts of the Gospels. His eyes and face express a steely determination to travel the road set before him.

A different sort of prefiguring was also found in the ‘great compassion’ of the Buddha, the ‘Enlightened One’ - from more or less the time of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah. The Buddha was also a healer, signs perhaps of the potent equanimity that resulted from the challenging wisdom of his new Way. The hands of Jesus here are in the form of the ‘wheel of the right way’, indicating the imparting of new insight. This is the same mudra as found in images of the Buddha.

Note too the watchful eye in two places (another Buddhist symbol), here flowing with tears of compassion: ‘Jesus saw the large crowd (that had come into the desert wilderness to see him, hear him and receive healing), had compassion on them and began to teach them many things (about the new life of God’s kingdom)’ (Mark 6:34). The tears encompass two of those seeking healing from the touch of Jesus.

Then there are the feet, with their memorial-stone covering. Perhaps they are like the feet of the Buddha, symbols reminding his followers of the presence of One who walked our earthly path and felt its pain? Or are they the feet of a dead person, already engulfed in the flames of cremation? It was foretold that the Great Healer to come was even to raise the dead from their sleep.

"I will gather you under my wings"

d. Bird gathering creatures under its wings. (Chinese ink and pastels on hand made paper. 1997. Collection of the artist.)

Jesus wept as he declared his fierce longing to gather together the people of the ‘City of God’s Peace’, as a ‘mother-hen gathers her brood under her wings’ (Luke 13:34, cp.19:41-2). Jyoti imagines this bird as the fabulous heavenly Hamsa (usually translated ‘Swan’) of Indian literature - the Hamsa that heals, that brings light and wholeness. In Healing Wings, sixteen healing acts of Jesus (‘acts for human wholeness’) had been reflected on, a verse in the Prophet Malachi (4:2) being the basis for this striking image: ‘The sun of justice shall arise with healing in his wings’. In Indian tradition, too, the Hamsa is at times likened to the sun whose rays heal and give life.

Jyoti imaginatively portrayed Jesus as a Hamsa in these many different healing contexts. The pictures were in the unusual medium of charcoal and crayon, drawn on Chinese paper, and were shown in an Exhibition in the Catholic Hospital and Institute of Missions, Wuerzburg

Healing of the Paralytic.

WINGED DANCE (Chinese ink and pastels on handmade paper. 1997. Collection of the artist.)

‘Winged Dance’ is the picture that - of the whole series - shows the Hamsa most overtly as sun-like, as springing out of heaven’s golden globe. The healed man - for long a beggar outside the temple gates - in joyful ecstasy joins in a dance with this life-giving golden orb. Both bird and beggar are poised on one leg, like the ‘Lord of Dance’ and other icons of dancing gods.

In dance, humans too aim to be lifted above their normal earth-bound life. They are poised, as it were, between earth and heaven - though only birds truly become ‘lords of the air’. Here, the healing bird from heaven and the healed beggar who’d been lifted from the dust, share together in the ecstatic playfulness, the divine lila, that is the new creation of God.

In a literal sense this was not a healing act by Jesus. Yet, this is just what Peter claims for it. In lifting up this crippled man from the dusty roadside, we were to see the continuing healing work of the risen Jesus. It was done ‘in his name’ and through his healing power. Again, delighting in a divine Name, finding potency and healing in such a Name, has long been very typical of popular religious life in India. For the Apostles of Jesus, his is just such a
powerfully healing Name.

Bird of Healing

SERPENT CHAINED. (Chinese Ink and pastel on handmade paper. 1997. Collection of the artist.)

‘Serpent Chained’, a third picture in this series,
suggests that the healing of the self-mutilating violence, the self-exclusion in wild places, and related traumas of Mob calls for a burning up, a rising from the old ashes, Phoenix-like, into flames of new life. (The Hamsa is sometimes identified with the Pheonix-like Flamingo found in India). And it is the Healer who is aflame, aflame with passion, holding close to his heart the struggling figure of the ‘demon-possessed’, a figure entwined with a writhing snake, the ancient deadly enemy of the bird. Death, then, as well as the distress of our life, is overcome in the heavenly Bird’s fire of love

Jesus the Divine Drummer

Tribal Jesus. Part of a tryptich on "Tribal Spirituality". Oil on Canvas. Collection of the artist.

Theme IV: The Transfiguring Vision
The transfiguring of a beloved, revered person, with that divine glory spreading out to transfigure the world and its life, is a wonderfully uplifting theme in a number of religious faiths. It is certainly crucial to the Christ-story, with the transfiguration of Jesus on the mountain prefiguring the mysterious glory of his resurrection. Each healing act was also something of a foretaste of the greater transfiguring to come, a ‘sign’ of Christ’s glory, to use John’s language. But John saw even the coming of Jesus in human form as an epiphany of the Light: ‘He made his home among us, and we saw his glory….. full of grace and truth’ (1:14)
The climax of the Song (Gita), that re-interprets the ancient tribal figure of Krishna, is similarly a glorious transfiguring. Ten spiralling chapters lead up to the moment when the dejected and then confused warrior Arjuna pleads with Krishna that he might have the inner eyes with which to see Krishna’s true being. Up to that point, Krishna had seemingly been just a charioteer skilful in controlling the war-horses – though also clearly skilful in guiding the soul so that it can control the reins of the senses that threaten to lead us astray.

Then in the Gita, as a prelude to the transfiguring, comes a chapter in which Krishna describes just the ‘most fundamental’ of his countless ‘glories’. He is the potent, shining essence within all beings. At Arjuna’s request, Krishna is then wonderfully transfigured, so that the whole universe and all its creatures are seen to be vibrant within his now glorious form (the famous ‘visva-rupa-darsana’).

Transfigurable he may be, but in this scripture generally Krishna is a rather restrained figure. There are long sections of metaphysical and moral teaching right there on the battlefield, just as the opposing armies are to go into action.
A Dancing God
Not so in the songs, dramas and texts that reflect actual folk-worship of Krishna: there are the huge number of devotional (bhakti) love-poems about or to Krishna in the various vernaculars of India, especially Tamil; then too there is the text that is a classic for Hare Krishna disciples, the Bhagavad-Purana. There, this dark-faced folk-hero is portrayed again and again as a dancing God - sometimes rather mischievous too - and always as a great Lover. More usually, of course, it is Siva, as Nataraj (Lord/King of dance) who is the great Dancer – creating and destroying through his fierce Tandava dance, but then moving into his elegantly serene lasya dance.

A visit to Belur and Halebid, and so to the Hoysala temples (11th century CE) not far from Jyoti’s home in South India, makes very clear the central place of dance in Indian religious faith. The outer walls of the temple are alive with the many exuberantly dancing figures carved deep in stone. Though a temple primarily of Vishnu/Krishna-faith, Siva is there dancing within the skin of an elephant sent to destroy him. The vigour of the dance flayed the great beast’s skin from his body. Krishna holds up the top of mount Meru, lifted high to protect all the animals threatened by excessive rain and flooding. He sways gently in dance-mode. Elsewhere the child Krishna dances on the head of the destructive serpent he had conquered – and this is the subject of Jyoti’s cover-painting for his early book, The Child and the Serpent.

Dance is at the heart of almost all culture in India - folk, tribal, classical, Hindu, Buddhist (Tibetan), Sufi. And some classical forms of Indian dance very clearly have their origins in simpler folk and tribal forms. There may be differing themes and aims, dance may be performed in differing contexts, and be of very different styles – line, circle, solo. It may imitate divine beings, animals and nature. If may have a magical intent. It may be an offering to the Divine Lover. But a common factor is the dancer’s sense of moving between this world and the other world, poised between earth and the higher realm, aspiring to move into that other, higher, transfigured realm of being.

In the more reflective spiritualities of India, this transfiguration is described as a dawning inner awareness, a blossoming of new discernment, an enhanced consciousness. Illumination within is the most frequently used metaphor. The Guru, who leads the seeker into this new realm of understanding, this new visioning, is ‘the remover of darkness’ (the meaning often given of gu-ru). A veil is often said to hide the true nature of things from those not yet enlightened. The Guru is to remove the obscuring veil and reveal the Light.

No wonder Indian Christians have often spoken of Jesus as their illuminating ‘Guru’. Some have given great stress to an inner illumining, a new consciousness. Their key texts make it clear, however, that the healing, saving, but painfully strenuous acts of Jesus, are essential to that process of illumining. The longed-for transfiguring is by way of a sharing in these strenuously heroic acts. The suffering of Passion and Cross – even though tinged with resurrection glory – remains central for Indian Christian art, including that of Jyoti Sahi.
Images
Dance in Indian - & Sufi - tradition
a. Light (The Illuminating Guru)
b. Trinity/Trimurti
c. Door
d. Dance
e. Resurrection /Life