Bursting the Bubble
I a n W at k i n s o n
Photos: Ian Watkinson
Hysteresis of History The anthropological interconnection of ancient peoples across a wide cultural spectrum from India to Ireland remains indisputable – religiously, artistically and linguistically
28
culturama | october 2011
For Western outsiders, the history of India remained a huge enigma for many years, a vast landscape, without fixed dates and points of reference – those ‘pins in the map’ which form the backbone of the idea of history in the Western world were unnecessary and unknown within the Indian traditions of continuity, essentially a sequence of moments. Here in India the past was never “catalogued” but encapsulated in folklore, the Puranas, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, then transmitted from generation to generation by oral traditions of storytelling and by the recording of events in paint or stone or wood; many times within these traditions we see variations of the archetypes of Vishnu, Siva and Brahma underpinning time, existence and perception – pivotal in the Indian psyche in rationalising how we got to the present moment. There is no parallel ideology in Western history, which is a catalogued observation of dates, names, locations and certainties, much an externalised and disconnected process from the present. Indian history, at least until recently, was the precedent to an ongoing continuum leading to the present, one process, integrated not extrapolated. Thus from East to West the mindset of ‘history’ is almost juxtaposed.