HOW TO SEE ART?

BN Goswamy's strategies of seeing

- PRATHYUSH PARASURAMAN

A GLISTENING GOLDEN EGG-the Hiranyagarbha, or primeval womb-leaps off the surface of the painting, its edges giving the impression of the egg's shadow falling on the surface below it. It is levitating; it is flat. The egg is floating on black waters drawn like concentric amoebae, white spaces between black lines slithering this way and that, like a snake consuming its tail. An eighteenth-century folio from the Bhagavata Purana series by Manaku of Guler, a Pahari painter, this image flashed on screen during a 2022 lecture at Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya by the art historian, public intellectual, and curator BN Goswamy.

Brushing past bare facts, Goswamy posed a question, a rhetorical one, but one whose very asking opens up avenues of thinking. The waters could be visualised differently. Goswamy flipped through various ways that Manaku had expressed water: as a gray wash of paint here, as the foaming Yamuna there. Why, then, did Manaku's brush trace this concentricity for this painting?

There was a humility in Goswamy's lecture, which was titled "The Things We Do Not See"-the sheer number of times he says "My guess is," "I have nothing to go on," "We have nothing to prove or disprove it," "I don't know." This was a way to make the audience comfortable and wired, to not intimi-date them with pedantic scholarship and stiff certainty and draw them in, instead. Vrinda Agarwal, a doctoral student of art history who worked with Goswamy, told me about his strategy for public speaking. "Start with a joke,' he would say, 'make people laugh so they are at ease.' He would always undermine his own knowledge, saying 'this is what I think, but you may disagree.""