The Auspicious Tree of Life

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A passion of folk artists, those from Madhubani in particular, as in every five-six paintings from Madhubani artists at least one portrays a tree, the painting represents a tree, its sole theme, discovering in it the forms of life, the principle of the nature’s unity with the universe, the cult of auspiciousness and the doctrine of non-duality or monism of existence. Often some loosely linked motifs and forms jotted together, a Madhubani painting is always strangely mystical revealing dimensions not expressly represented. The Madhubani Seema Kumarst, endowed with an inborn ability to give to routine forms symbolic dimensions, and to things, scattered around, status of art imagery, does not seek in ‘word’ but rather in the ‘form’ his diction for discourse. Though hardly schooled or scriptures-fed, he has in his blood the gist of entire tradition of thought and theology and strange ability not only to read it in any motif, not even apparently linked, but to communicate it through absolutely unlinked and unconventional motifs.

However diverse its forms, major philosophical beliefs world-over consider life – in every form and aspect, as the magnification of One Supreme Being, whatever name one gives it. As is usual with Madhubani folk, the painting discovers its universe : nature and life, into a mono-colour scheme – black into which all colours finally merge, and into a mono-form : the tree. Whatever the manifest forms representing life or nature, or whatever the life’s aspects manifest in it, the painting asserts that the basic colour of all them is the same. Apart, a tree that seems to be a simple constituent of the universe also contains the entire universe in it. It rises along the branches, but also independent of them, covering every centimeter of the space and vice verse the space : a blankness or vacuum, manifesting in it. It covers the entire space but also becomes the space, that is, it is in the tree : the nature or the material aspect of the cosmos, that space discovers its visible form.

The tree that the Seema Kumarst Seema Kumar, a known name among contemporary Madhubani painters, has conceived and drawn has three distinct aspects in which the painting’s main theme reveals : a long ceramic jar-like ornate trunk with a narrow mouth that a pair of elephants seems to hold, tree’s expanse – a profusion of unconnected bunches of innumerable leaves creepers like crawling into every direction and birds perching here and there, and a deep black linear net or structure, obviously denotative of its intricate wide-spread branches and shoots. This superimposed net, the tree’s basic structure : braches, stems, shoots etc, seems to have been rendered, besides delineating its branches and other parts, for portraying also some other forms, mostly auspicious, not a tree’s components, such as fish, birds and a Ganapati form. The Ganapati form enshrines its centre like the enshrining deity.

The painting portrays tree as symbolising the manifest universe that shelters all forms of life. The elephants that hold the trunk are considered traditionally as auspicious as a Ganapati image. Besides representing the supreme auspice and ultimate divinity a Ganapati image synthesizes human, animal and divine forms. The tree also has other forms of life : birds perching on its branches and those that the structure defining branches represent. Obviously, the tree has been portrayed in the painting as the manifest universe that shelters all forms of life. When the Seema Kumarst painted the tree enshrining a form of Ganapati and a pair of elephant figures to hold its base, she can be seen as aiming at packing into its form the ultimate divinity and the supreme auspiciousness. The painting has been contained within a floral border rendered in a single colour but visually very powerful and eye-catching. Visually, as also in its mystic connotations, the painting is one of the best examples of Madhubani idiom.

This description by Prof. P.C. Jain and Dr Daljeet. Prof. Jain specializes on the aesthetics of ancient Indian literature. Dr Daljeet is the chief curator of the Visual Arts Gallery at the National Museum of India, New Delhi. They have both collaborated on numerous books on Indian art and culture.