Indian dolls reveal the pageant of life
JAKARTA (JP): Pained by present-day politics? Sick of counting stocks and shares? Stories of terrible terrorists becoming tiresome? Take a break then, and escape those streets of Jakarta that lead to financial pursuits alone for the sanctuary of the National Museum, where the vivid color of an exhibition of dolls from India is bound to return the smile to your soul.
Dolls inspired by Indian women and the deliriously colored clothes they wear. There are dolls in red, blue, yellow, some solar, some nocturnal, dark-haired, dancing, covered from head-to-toe in jewels and rings and yet another doll with her forehead smeared in vermilion, a pigment the color of blood. All these female dolls are accompanied at the exhibition by their male counterparts.
There are brides dressed to kill, in celebration of the sacred union, of the beginning of life itself, and tribal women squatting on the roadside, surrounded by their magical wares in a centuries-old scene, providing a stunning meditation on time itself.
The exhibition, which runs until Sept. 25, is a lavish pageant of the diversity and variety of life in India, a civilization at least five millennia old, if not more. India, one billion individual men and women each differing from one another, all living in a private universe of thought and feeling. Together they form a country that is baffling, complex, full of tragedy, but also of manifold opportunities.
In some ways it is just like Indonesia, where this world is looked upon by some merely as a woven warp and woof on water, where the present and future continue to reflect the past, but the complexity of modern life has thrown some into conflict and confusion. For both Indians and Indonesians, the concept of unity in diversity seems to have become a puzzle unto themselves in these conflicting times.
The 50 dolls on display are a microimpression of India's 130 languages and 1,600 dialects, a country where a multitude of sects and religions have resided sometimes in conflict, but more often in peace since the cosmos came to be, even before man's memory.
There is nothing negative to say about the fine craftsmanship of all those who so meticulously created and adorned the beautiful dolls on exhibit, but perhaps the organizers at the Indian Council of Cultural Relations could have included in the exhibition images of modern Indian. All those Indians who are not in the habit of dressing up like Christmas trees, like the farmer, teacher and the social worker, are conspicuous by their absence from the exhibition. For if India indeed is the river of time that has been flowing since the dawn of creation, gathering new streams, absorbing new thoughts, technologies and peoples, than surely it must include the pauper along with the prince in its sacred waters.
-- Mehru Jaffer