Gurgaon Dreaming

by Ira Mukhoty

It's the last day of April. I look out of the window and it is enough to drive me to despair. The relentless sun has bleached the green from the trees and the shadows from the buildings – everything around is a shimmering shade of pale heat. The neighbouring desert has laid claim to my suburban city, like an invading army, and dust hangs chokingly on the hot breeze.

I decide to go and view the two-day Australian Aboriginal art show, showing at the Epicentre, the recently opened conference and cultural centre in Gurgaon. Built by the same group which owns the Habitat Centre in Delhi, it's an amazing state of the art venue for dance, music, films, workshops, recitals. In addition, it has a fully-appointed gallery which continuously hosts art exhibitions, with the aim to attract the best from both the Visual and Performing Arts worlds for the residents of Gurgaon.

I look around the Art gallery of Epicentre slowly, to get  an overall impression of the exhibition and am immediately smitten. I am surrounded by a pulsing, snaking stream of dots that pull me in. There are colours everywhere; fearless ochre’s, sienna’s, sour lemons and greens, endless blues. Every painting is shaped by a swirling mass of dots, interspersed by symbols and geometrical form.

This is Australian Aboriginal Art, from central Australia, and is an art form that dates back 50,000 yrs. It is painted using spears and sticks, which explains the dots and the symmetrical patterns, and the paintings contain within them all the history, knowledge and stories of the Aboriginal Australians. The aborigines don't have a written history, but have maintained through their oral tradition, an unbroken memory of  Dreamtime, or the Time before Time. This is the time that existed before the creation of all things, before the ancestral spirits came to earth to give all the animals and plants their form, and to establish their relationship to the land, to each other, and even to the things they could eat.

These paintings usually deal with the Dreaming, or the spiritual, natural and moral credo that the different people of Australia believe in. The paintings thus vary from the celestial to the mundane, with paintings depicting a line of ants carrying away ripe yellow berries,  or a squat stack of concentric women planting green bananas.

My favourite painting is an enormous deep blue canvas with  swirling ribbons of white dots and a few electrifying green and golden circles.  This is the primordial sky, the sky before the dawn of time with its icy constellations and spinning stars and embedded in this sky, an initiation ceremony for young men in which the women dance, gaze averted.  As I look at this canvas and read the story, the hair rises  on the back of my neck  and I marvel at timeless grace of the message; humanity and eternity.

The next morning when I look out of my window and the nuclear sky is temporarily hidden by storm clouds. I remember the painting and in my mind, I tumble out of my window and away from the dust, I am reaching for that deep blue sky, beyond the haze, the one that existed before Time began and which will  survive my suburban angst to exist still when Time ends.