PART I
There is a lot of green in India. Probably too much.
The artist Howard Hodgkin will be exhibiting a group of new paintings later this year. Some of the paintings connect with the part of his life which he spends in India each year. He stays mostly on the west coast for about two months, and he has made a studio to work in a Mumbai hotel.
A Tish-Tosh critic informs us of all this “In the Studio” (LRB: Vol 37, 2, P 37 24 January 2014). The critic describes three Indian paintings as follows:
Ganges – “a mostly green painting”. Tish-Tosh writes that Howard Hodgson has told him that he has never seen the river Ganges. “He imagines it as very dirty, but very beautiful. You can’t see the bottom”.
Summer Rain – “at the centre pinkish-brown… against a background of luxuriant green… a band of dirty yellow… blending into dark brown and sap green… behind… a bright cadmium red tongue”
The Sea, Goa – “barely a foot across” (Tish-Tosh has measured it). There is “red… blue…”, he continues (the rest of what he writes is of no interest to anybody).
What goes on in the name of green! I am no visual artist but I happen to be staying some weeks on the coast in Kerala in the south of India. I can confirm that:
1. it is true that you cannot see the bottom of the inland river waters (certainly not the vast inland river system of lakes and canals, which are called the Kerala Backwaters). I have peered into them and they are impenetrable. Everything looks and indeed smells mostly green. The water is not dirty but swimming is not advised.
2. on the beach looking west over the Arabian Sea I can say for sure that there is no green to be seen anywhere. There are red and blue horizontal bands of colour, as in Howard Hodgkin’s The Sea, Goa painting (reproduced in the LRB ‘opinion piece’), and of course sand. Some of the sand is formed into intricate patterns by the motion of the waves.
To be truthful, honest… : yes, the Arabian Sea is bright red and blue as in Howard Hodgkin’s painting. There is no red or blue really, and certainly not at the end of the day or at sunset when the red sky becomes muted and the blue disappears altogether from the sea. But red and blue are there if you look… and look. There is the wreck of a fishing boat I can see which is wedged on a rocky reef next to the sandy shoreline. The wrecked fishing boat is painted bright red and blue, although the continual battering of the waves smashing against the boat is beginning to destroy the brilliance of the painted colours.
Of course to show this, it would require me to hang Howard Hodgkin’s painting the other way up. ‘Ventrem Omnipotentem’ (Lord Guts Almighty) as Rabelais would have said in parody of the Latin of the ‘Patrem Omnipotentem’ (Heavenly Father at the opening of the Christian Creed). However, I’ve a feeling HH would be unbothered with this cheeky suggestion.
PART II
Verdant green is also the presiding colour of the deity Murugan In southern India , and devotees on pilgrimage this Son-of-God, strange mix of Shiva, Christ and Dionysus child, will always be seen dressed in this colour. In Kerala there are many temples to Murugan, but they are mostly off limits to those not born as Hindus, on the grounds that what goes on inside is not for our eyes.
What goes on in the name of green. Truthful, honest, and above all cheeky: Call it possession. Or call it madness.
“Madness is a childish thing” Barbara Taylor writes in the Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness in Our Times. Barabara Taylor’s times and those of LRB (6 Feb 2014) reviewer Jenni Diski
involved stays at Friern Mental Hospital in North London. There were part of the IN-Crowd, being sectioned from time to time as patients under the Mental Health Act. Like them I spent time at Friern too in the 1980’s, although as a medical student not as a patient, but still being enforced to regularly walk the half mile long central basement corridor to the canteen and back to the ward I was attached to.
I still recall the presence of the innumerable ghosts pressing around me along that long corridor, and their many murmuring ‘complaints’. They weren’t only in my head, I can also remember them tugging at my shirt sleeves and pulling at my legs.
Elsewhere in the same LRB (6 Feb 2014) there is a feuilleton by Richard Lloyd Parry, Asia editor of The Times: Ghosts of the Tsunami (the Japanese tsunami that struck 11th March 2011). There is a’ghost problem’ and thousands of the dead are also making ‘complaints’.
Ventrem Omnipotentem – COMPLAINTS! Whether it is the language of psychotherapy, signs, or faith – or simply more bare-faced cheek – you are all pulling my leg… aren’t you?.